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Pollutants can enter the water bodies from various sources and then get transported along the streamline. Legal and illegal discharges from factories, spills and leakages in underground oil pipelines or during transportation, hydraulic fracturing operations, and sewer overflows pollute various water discharge bodies. Other potential sources include radiation leaks from nuclear power plants and drinking water disinfection processes.

This can be broadly categorized under pointed and non‐pointed sources. Pointed sources refer to pollutants that enter the waterway through traceable sources like industrial outlet pipes, domestic sewage outlets, etc. It should be noted that most of these pointed sources are due to human intervention and untreated waste discharge. Non‐pointed sources refer to diffused contamination of water bodies through activities like leaching, littering garbage, etc., which cannot be monitored and controlled owing to the difficulty of tracing them. The sources of heavy metal pollution in water can also be categorized as natural as well as anthropogenic. These are discussed in brief in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1 Sources of heavy metal pollution in ground water and their effects on human health.