Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 18 2006 (IPS) – Russia tops the list of the 10 most polluted places on the planet, while more investigation into Latin American and African pollution sites is needed, according to a U.S. environmental group.
Lead and other heavy metals, along with buried chemical weapons and radiation hazards from sites like Chernobyl in Ukraine, are the main sources of pollution affecting the health of 10 million people in different locations around the world.
These extremely toxic areas are mostly unknown even in their own countries, said Richard Fuller, director of the New York-based Blacksmith Institute.
No one in the U.N. system is looking at pollution at specific sites. It is an issue that has fallen through the cracks, Fuller said in an interview.
Sites like Haina in the Dominican Republic have enormous impacts on local residents that trap them a cycle of poverty and illness, he said.
Children living in Haina, an outer suburb of Santo Domingo, suffer from acute lead poisoning because of an automobile battery recycling smelter. Although the Metaloxa battery plant has since moved, thousands of children in Hania have levels of lead in their blood measuring 71 microgrammes per decalitre on average well above the World Health Organisation s maximum level for children of nine microgrammes per decalitre.
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These high lead levels are causing brain damage and mental retardation, Fuller said. Children are exposed to the lead in the local soil and even the dust in their homes.
Haina is on the top 10 list because there many similar used battery recycling operations throughout the developing world, he added.
Although the Dominican government is working with the Blacksmith Institute to find ways to clean up the site, the Russian government is not interested in the 300,000 tonnes of waste from chemical weapons that were disposed of in the groundwater of Dzerzhinsk.
During the Cold War, Russia s chemical weapons manufacturing was centred in Dzerzhinsk, a city of 300,000 people. Sarin, VX gas, Mustard gas, prussic acid, phosgene and other deadly and dangerous chemical weapons were made here over a 50-year period. Not only is the groundwater contaminated, some of those chemicals have surfaced, forming toxic lagoons in the city.
Levels of some toxins such as phenols are reported to be millions of times over safe limits.
The rate of birth defects is said to be 70 percent, said Fuller.
Chemical manufacturing is still the major employer in this city, where the life span of the average male has dropped to age 42.
Fuller said that Blacksmith has built two small water treatment facilities and is working with the local government to develop a long-term plan to clean up this horror story .
Life expectancy at another Russian site, the Siberian city of Norilsk, is even less, perhaps just 38 years, due to air pollution and heavy metals from the world s largest metal smelting operations.
Russia has the dubious honour of leading the list of eight nations, with three of the 10 worst polluted sites, according to the Blacksmith Institute s Worst-Polluted Places report.
The report was compiled by a team of international environmental and health experts, including faculty members from Johns Hopkins, Mt. Sinai Medical Centre and the City University of New York who serve on Blacksmith Institute s Technical Advisory Board. They developed criteria to rate a list of 35 highly polluted sites derived from more than 300 that have been put forward to Blacksmith for support in clean-up.
The city of Linfen in Shanxi Province is the heart of China s enormous and expanding coal industry. As a direct consequence it has the worst air pollution levels in the country. More than half of the drinking wells in the region are polluted and unsafe to use, but the people have little option in a place where the rivers run black with soot and tar.
The fact that China, with the world s worst air pollution and a raft of industrial accidents and spills, has just one site on the list reflects the lack of access to the region, acknowledges Fuller.
We ve only recently opened up an office there, he explained.
As a small non-governmental organisation, Blacksmith acts to draw attention to specific pollution sites and help local groups find ways to address the problems. Most are old industrial sites that operated without any pollution controls and there was little attempt to clean them up before being abandoned.
Cleanup efforts that can take a decade appear too big and too complicated for local governments, said Dave Hanrahan, Blacksmith Institute s chief of global operations.
The most important thing is to achieve some practical progress in dealing with these polluted places, Hanrahan said in an interview. Our goal is to instil a sense of urgency about tackling these priority sites.
A lead smelter and other mining activities operated without regulation for nearly a century in Zambia s second largest city, Kabwe. Blood lead levels in children are among the highest in the world and often prove fatal. Soil is contaminated with heavy metals for a 20-kilometre radius, studies have shown, but after highlighting the problem, the World Bank and Scandinavian countries donated up to 20 million dollars for clean-up, says Fuller.
Clean-up operations will include removing the contaminated soils and educating local people about the risks.
What shocks me is the lack of basic precautions such as fencing or signs indicating the danger at some sites, says Jack Caravanos, an environmental health expert at the City University of New York and a Blacksmith technical advisor.
We are learning about more and more toxic sites in Latin America and Africa, Hanrahan told IPS.
Waste processing and recycling, including electronics and shipbreaking, are expanding in developing countries. These can all be done without creating pollution problems, he said.
And despite much media attention, even the worst shipbreaking operations are not in fact bad enough to make Blacksmith s top 10 worst-polluted places list.
They might make the top 100, Hanrahan said.
The Ten Killer Communities for 2006, in alphabetical order by country, are Linfen, China; Haina, Dominican Republic; Ranipet, India; Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan; La Oroya, Peru; Dzerzinsk, Russia; Norilsk, Russia; Rudnaya Pristan, Russia; Chernobyl, Ukraine; and Kabwe, Zambia.