: How do you clean up a polluted river/large bodes of water?

Question

I just went through this big project with my wife, where we produced a podcast for Spokane, WA. We learnt of the big river cleanup in 1974. But I didn’t quite understand the process of how they did it. In general, how does this process work?

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

You don’t clean up the water already in the river, you stop new pollution from coming in, and let the river and its ecosystem recover naturally.

It takes time, especially because it’s usually impractical to stop all sources of pollution.