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A Long Way From Home—Industrial Chemicals in the Arctic That Really Should Not Be There

- Roxana Sühring and Miriam L. Diamond and Martin Scheringer and Liisa M. Jantunen

The chemicals humans make can be fantastic! We can make chemicals that produce any smell, taste, or color we want. Chemicals are what makes medicine help people, chemicals make our cars drive and our planes fly.
Scientists called chemists make many new types of chemicals all the time. Many of these new chemicals are useful, but some can also be a problem. Chemicals are especially a problem if they do not stay where they are supposed to be but leach out from the products to which they are added.
Imagine, for example, a bright red shirt. The red color is great in the shirt, but after you wash it together with a white shirt, you might find that you have a red shirt and a pink shirt instead of a white one (do not try that out at home—your parents might get upset!). What happened? Some of the chemical that makes the red color did not stay where it was supposed to be, in the red shirt, but instead leached out into the water and colored the white shirt.

License information: nan
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2020.00002

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