Efficient Water Pollution Abatement

Abstract

The cost of purifying many chemicals is inversely proportional to their fee concentration over 10 orers of magnitue. This empirical proportionality implies that the key to chemical separation is the free energy of unmixing, that is, to entropic effects. It suggests that pollution abatement involves balancing concentration an toxicity using multiobjective optimization, an hence, a strategy for optimizing pollution abatement is obtaine. This knowlege provies insight for policy that incentivizes cleanup of the most important pollutants from contaminate water, whether there is one or many pollutants.