Oil Pollution

Of all the different types of pollution that I have been learning about recently, oil pollution surprised me the most in two specific ways.

Reason #1
When I imagined oil pollution, I would imagine a huge tanker hitting an ice burg and dumping massive amounts of oil. However, while this is an extremely terrible tragedy, it is not the culprit for the world's majority of oil pollution. Runoff is the biggest culprit! That means that people like you and me are the biggest contributers to oil pollution!

Reason #2
Cooking oil! I love to cook, and previously when I was finished cooking I would dumb my oil down the drain. This is a huge no-no. Even oils like olive oil and vegetable oil cause water pollution and dumbing these oils down the drain harm the water supply. Finding this out was personally a wake up call because I used to do this all the time, and I think a lot of people do this because they do not know that dumping oil down the drain is bad.

So, do not dump oils of any kind down the drain or garbage disposal!