[List below]
If people are a product of their environment, then the citizens of Sumgayit, the third-largest city in the Central Asian republic of Azerbaijan, are in trouble. Thanks to the scores of ex-Soviet factories that produced heavy goods like rubber, aluminum and pesticides with virtually no environmental regulation they've been regularly exposed to dangerous levels of industrial chemicals.
Their drinking water is tainted with untreated sewage and mercury-contaminated sludge. Their chances of developing cancer are up to 50% higher than their fellow Azerbaijanis, and their chances of dying from it are higher still. But they're not alone. There are similar environmental hellholes throughout the world just as polluted, and for the most part, just as overlooked.
The Blacksmith Institute is trying to change that. The New York-based environmental NGO is focusing on these unknown pollution hotspots mostly in the developing world where the kind of heavy-duty industrial contamination that the U.S. has largely cleaned up is still taking a devastating toll on human health. On Wednesday morning the group released its second annual list of the world's 10 most polluted places, anonymous cities like Sumgayit or Sukinda in India, where 2.6 million people are potentially exposed to toxic heavy metals. "Here in the U.S. we forget that ordinary pollution is still something that destroys a lot of lives," says Richard Fuller, president of Blacksmith. "These cities aren't on the tourist trail, so there's not a lot of global activity, but we need to do something about it."
Unfortunately, little is being done right now. With global warming the dominant environmental topic of the day and not without reason worries over ordinary factory pollution seem almost old-fashioned. But look at pollution as a direct threat to human health alongside diseases like malaria or AIDS and the scope of the problem becomes daunting. Blacksmith estimates that more than 12 million people live in the cities on its top 10 list, and a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report showed that environmental factors like bad water and air pollution accounted for 20% of the global burden of disease. "People have to realize there is a critical link between the environment and health," says Dr. Maria Neira, director of public health and the environment for the WHO.
The good news is that solutions to pollution already exist the developed world cleaned itself up and the return on investment is excellent. A Blacksmith study estimates that industrial decontamination projects in the developing world cost $1 to $50 per year of life gained, compared to $35 to $200 for malaria control or clean water supplies. Fuller estimates that it might cost as little as $500 million to clean up the worst of the world's most polluted cities. Clean-ups are underway in some places, thanks in part to groups like Blacksmith, but in far too many nations there's little government money for environmental protection, and industrial pollution remains a low priority for international funding. "This is a moral issue," he says. "This is about the livability of the planet."
source: 12sep2007
Smog covers the city center of Linfen. Reinhard Krause / Reuters
Number of people potentially affected: 3,000,000 Type of pollutant: Coal and particulates Source of pollution: Automobile and industrial emissions
This soot-blackened city in China's inland Shanxi province makes Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park. Shanxi is the heart of China's coal belt, and the hills around Linfen are dotted with mines, legal and illegal, and the air is filled with burning coal. Don't bother hanging your laundry it'll turn black before it dries. China's State Environmental Protection Agency says that Linfen has the worst air in the country, which is saying something, considering that the World Bank has reported that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are Chinese. One Linfen native summed up the city's plight to a TIME reporter last year: "This place of ours is no good."
Tianjin, China Daniel H. Abbott
Number of people potentially affected: 140,000 Type of pollutant: Lead and other heavy metals Source of pollution: Mining and processing
An industrial city though China doesn't really have any other kind in the country's northeastern rust belt, Tianjin accounts for over half of China's lead production. Thanks to poor technology and worse regulation, much of that toxic metal ends up in Tianjin's soil and water, and then in the bloodstream of its children, where it can cause lowered IQ. Wheat has been found to contain lead levels up to 24 times Chinese standards, which are even more stringent that U.S. restrictions on lead. "China has a commitment to environmental protection, but it also has a commitment to industry," says Fuller. "It's a constant push that's mostly won by industry."
Women draw water from a well. Groundwater in Sukinda is believed to be contaminated with chromium. Chandra Bhushan / Centre for Science and Environment
Number of people potentially affected: 2,600,000 Type of pollutant: Hexavalent chromium and other metals Source of pollution: Chromite mines and processing
If you watched Erin Brockovich, then you know what hexavalent chromium is: a nasty heavy metal used for stainless steel production and leather tanning that is carcinogenic if inhaled or ingested. In Sukinda, which contains one of the largest open cast chromite ore mines in the world, 60% of the drinking water contains hexavalent chromium at levels more than double international standards. An Indian health group estimated that 84.75% of deaths in the mining areas where regulations are nonexistent are due to chromite-related diseases. There has been virtually no attempt to clean up the contamination.
Greenpeace activists collecting samples of effluents being released into the Damanganga river from the Vapi Industrial area. Amit Shanker
Number of people potentially affected: 71,000 Type of pollutant: Chemicals and heavy metals Source of pollution: Industrial estates
If India's environment is on the whole healthier than its giant neighbor China's, that's because India is developing much more slowly. But that's changing, starting in towns like Vapi, which sits at the southern end of a 400-km-long belt of industrial estates. For the citizens of Vapi, the cost of growth has been severe: levels of mercury in the city's groundwater are reportedly 96 times higher than WHO safety levels, and heavy metals are present in the air and the local produce. "It's just a disaster," says Fuller.
Pollution from the mining and processing operations of Doe Run Peru has led to dangerously high concentrations of lead in children's blood in La Oroya. Mathew Burpee
Number of people potentially affected: 35,000 Type of pollutant: Lead, copper, zinc and sulfur dioxide Source of pollution: Heavy metal mining and processing
Lead is the contaminant that shows up most frequently on Blacksmith's list because the toll it takes on children can be so devastating. In La Oroya, a mining town in the Peruvian Andes, 99% of children have blood levels that exceed acceptable limits, thanks to an American-owned smelter that has been polluting the city since 1922. The average lead level, according to a 1999 survey, was triple the WHO limit. Even after active emissions from the smelter are reduced, the expended lead will remain in La Oroya's soil for centuries and there's currently no plan to clean it up.
The Kaprolaktam Plant of the Sibur-Neftekhim joint stock company in Dzerzhinsk, Russia. Vladimir Smirnov / Itar-Tass / Landov
Number of people potentially affected: 300,000 Type of pollutant: Chemicals and toxic byproducts, including sarin and VX gas Source of pollution: Cold War-era chemical weapons manufacturing
The legacy of Cold War weapons programs has left environmental blackspots throughout the former Soviet Union, but Dzerzhinsk is by far the worst. The city's own environmental agency estimates that almost 300,000 tons of chemical waste including some of the most dangerous neurotoxins known to man were improperly dumped in Dzerzhinsk between 1930 and 1998. Parts of the city's water are infected with dioxins and phenol at levels that are reportedly 17 million times the safe limit. The Guinness Book of World Records named Dzerzhinsk the most chemically polluted city on Earth, and in 2003 its death rate exceeded its birth rate by 260%.
The Nadezhda nickel smelter pumps smoke over a pool of industrial water near Norilsk. Sergey Ponomarev / AP
Number of people potentially affected: 134,000 Type of pollutant: Air pollution particulates, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals, phenols Source of pollution: Major nickel and metal mining and processing
Norilsk was founded in 1935 as a Siberian slave labor camp, and life there has pretty much gone downhill since. Home to the world's largest heavy metal smelting complex, more than 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc are released into the air every year. Air samples exceed the maximum allowance for both copper and nickel, and mortality from respiratory diseases is much higher than in Russia as a whole. "Within 30 miles (48 km) of the nickel smelter there's not a single living tree," says Fuller. "It's just a wasteland."
An abandoned house in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Viktor Drachev / AFP / Getty
Number of people potentially affected: Initially estimated at 5.5 million, currently disputed Type of pollutant: Radiation Source of pollution: Nuclear meltdown
When Chernobyl melted down on Apr. 26, 1986, the ruined plant released 100 times more radiation into the air than the fallout from the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today the 19-mi (30-km) exclusion zone around the plant remains uninhabitable, and between 1992 and 2002 more than 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer cases were diagnosed among Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian children living in the fallout zone. "It's the largest industrial accident in the world," says Fuller. "It'll be contaminated for tens of thousands of years." Fortunately, work is being done to prevent further radiation spill from the ruined sarcophagus of the nuclear plant.
The industrial zone in Sumgayit, Azerbaijan. Andy Johnstone / Panos
Number of people potentially affected: 275,000 Type of pollutant: Organic chemicals, oil and heavy metals Source of pollution: Petrochemical and industrial complexes
Another legacy of the Soviet Union's utter disregard for the environment Stalin once boasted that he could correct nature's mistakes Sumgayit's many factories, while they were operational, released as much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions, including mercury, into the air every year. Most of the factories have been shut down, but the pollutants remain and no one is stepping up to take responsibility for them. "It's a huge, abandoned industrial wasteland," says Fuller.
Young men look for metal at the site of an abandoned lead mine in Kabwe, Zambia. Blacksmith Institute
Number of people potentially affected: 255,000 Type of pollutant: Lead and cadmium Source of pollution: Lead mining and processing
When rich deposits of lead were discovered near Kabwe in 1902, Zambia was a British colony called Northern Rhodesia, and little concern was given for the impact that the toxic metal might have on native Zambians. Sadly, there's been almost no improvement in the decades since, and though the mines and smelter are no longer operating, lead levels in Kabwe are astronomical. On average, lead concentrations in children are five to 10 times the permissible U.S. Environmental Protection Agency levels, and can even be high enough to kill. "We did blood tests on some of these kids, and they literally broke our machines," says Fuller. "There is a long, nasty history here." But there's also a bit of hope: the World Bank has recently allocated $40 million for a clean-up project.
source: 12sep2007
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