My wife was reading the Smithsonian magazine tonight, and told me that in the late ’60s the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burst into flames five stories high, fed by the pollution in the waterway. It became a major influence on the Clean Water Act. Amazing what people and companies can ignore if it isn’t their direct problem.
Robert Heinlein had a foolproof solution for waterway pollution: require every company to put their water intake downstream from their outflow.