RSS feedThe Most Polluted Places on Planet Earth
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Dzerzhinsk, RUSSIA
Affected Population: 300,000.
Pollutants: Chemicals and by-products of manufacturing of Sarin, VX gas, lewisite, yperite (mustard gas), prussic acid, phosgene, dioxins, lead.
“The World’s Most Chemically Polluted Town,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Dzerzhinsk was one of the principal manufacturing sites of the former Soviet Union’s chemical weapons program. Negligent disposal of almost 300,000 tons of chemical waste between 1930 and 1998 has resulted in highly toxic groundwater containing levels of industrial chemicals reportedly 17 million times the safe limit. Though many of the city’s industries are now out of operation, as much as a quarter of Dzerzhinsk’s population still work in factories that produce toxic chemicals.
Affected Population: 300,000.
Pollutants: Chemicals and by-products of manufacturing of Sarin, VX gas, lewisite, yperite (mustard gas), prussic acid, phosgene, dioxins, lead.
“The World’s Most Chemically Polluted Town,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Dzerzhinsk was one of the principal manufacturing sites of the former Soviet Union’s chemical weapons program. Negligent disposal of almost 300,000 tons of chemical waste between 1930 and 1998 has resulted in highly toxic groundwater containing levels of industrial chemicals reportedly 17 million times the safe limit. Though many of the city’s industries are now out of operation, as much as a quarter of Dzerzhinsk’s population still work in factories that produce toxic chemicals.
Linfen, Shanxi Province, CHINA
Affected Population: 200,000.
Pollutants: Fly-ash, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, PM-2.5, PM-10, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, lead.
The epicenter of China’s expanding coal-industry, Shanxi province has “the worst water in China” and annual sulphur dioxide emissions of 1.5 million tons, according to the China Internet Information Center. According to China’s State Environmental Protection Agency, Linfen is the city with the worst air pollution in China, a country which, according to the World Bank, is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. Linfen’s economic dependence on the coal, steel and tar industries has led to rising cases of bronchitis, pneumonia, lung cancer and an epidemic of arsenicosis.
Affected Population: 200,000.
Pollutants: Fly-ash, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, PM-2.5, PM-10, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, lead.
The epicenter of China’s expanding coal-industry, Shanxi province has “the worst water in China” and annual sulphur dioxide emissions of 1.5 million tons, according to the China Internet Information Center. According to China’s State Environmental Protection Agency, Linfen is the city with the worst air pollution in China, a country which, according to the World Bank, is home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. Linfen’s economic dependence on the coal, steel and tar industries has led to rising cases of bronchitis, pneumonia, lung cancer and an epidemic of arsenicosis.
Kabwe, ZAMBIA
Affected Population: 250,000.
Pollutants: Lead, cadmium.
Victim of its once thriving lead-mining industry, Zambia’s second largest city suffers from poisonous levels of lead in its soil and water. While symptoms of acute lead-poisioning occur at blood levels of 20 micrograms per deciliter (causing vomiting, diarrhea, and leading to muscle spasms and kidney damage), levels of over 200 mcg/dl have been found in the bloodstreams of Kabwe’s children. A 2002 BBC report quoted Kapumpe Valentine Musakanya, the head of the Kabwe Environmental and Rehabilitation Foundation, saying: “I have been unable to find similar blood-lead levels to those in Kabwe anywhere else in the world.”
Affected Population: 250,000.
Pollutants: Lead, cadmium.
Victim of its once thriving lead-mining industry, Zambia’s second largest city suffers from poisonous levels of lead in its soil and water. While symptoms of acute lead-poisioning occur at blood levels of 20 micrograms per deciliter (causing vomiting, diarrhea, and leading to muscle spasms and kidney damage), levels of over 200 mcg/dl have been found in the bloodstreams of Kabwe’s children. A 2002 BBC report quoted Kapumpe Valentine Musakanya, the head of the Kabwe Environmental and Rehabilitation Foundation, saying: “I have been unable to find similar blood-lead levels to those in Kabwe anywhere else in the world.”
Norilsk, RUSSIA
Affected Population: 134,000
Pollutants: Strontium-90, caesium-137, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals (nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium), particulates, nitrogen and carbon oxides, phenols, hydrogen sulfide.
Closed to foreigners since November 2001, the Siberian city of Norilsk is the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer, home to the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex which discharges over 4 million tons of nickel, cadmium, copper, lead, arsenic, selenium and zinc annually. Built in 1935 by slave labor, the site of a former Soviet gulag, Norilsk, according to a 2003 exposé in The Guardian, “is the most polluted place in Russia — where the snow is black, the air tastes of sulphur and the life expectancy for factory workers is 10 years below the Russian average.”
Affected Population: 134,000
Pollutants: Strontium-90, caesium-137, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals (nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium), particulates, nitrogen and carbon oxides, phenols, hydrogen sulfide.
Closed to foreigners since November 2001, the Siberian city of Norilsk is the world’s largest nickel and palladium producer, home to the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex which discharges over 4 million tons of nickel, cadmium, copper, lead, arsenic, selenium and zinc annually. Built in 1935 by slave labor, the site of a former Soviet gulag, Norilsk, according to a 2003 exposé in The Guardian, “is the most polluted place in Russia — where the snow is black, the air tastes of sulphur and the life expectancy for factory workers is 10 years below the Russian average.”
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Haina, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Affected Population: 85,000.
Pollutants: Lead.
Before it moved elsewhere in March 1997, the Melatoxa car battery recycling company contaminated the local environs and populace of Bajos de Haina with hazardous levels of lead-poisoning. A 1997 study by Kaulson Laboratories of New Jersey, USA, found that 81 percent of Haina’s children showed blood-lead levels above the World Health Organization’s safety threshold of 10 micrograms per deciliter. Of these, 23 percent had between 10 and 19 mcg/dl, 40 percent had between 20 and 39 mcg/dl, 27 percent had between 40 and 99 mcg/dl, and the remainder had over 100 mcg/dl. According to the Blacksmith Institute, lead battery re-processing facilities can be found “in many major third world cities, and often leave a legacy of lead poisoning in their host communities.”
Affected Population: 85,000.
Pollutants: Lead.
Before it moved elsewhere in March 1997, the Melatoxa car battery recycling company contaminated the local environs and populace of Bajos de Haina with hazardous levels of lead-poisoning. A 1997 study by Kaulson Laboratories of New Jersey, USA, found that 81 percent of Haina’s children showed blood-lead levels above the World Health Organization’s safety threshold of 10 micrograms per deciliter. Of these, 23 percent had between 10 and 19 mcg/dl, 40 percent had between 20 and 39 mcg/dl, 27 percent had between 40 and 99 mcg/dl, and the remainder had over 100 mcg/dl. According to the Blacksmith Institute, lead battery re-processing facilities can be found “in many major third world cities, and often leave a legacy of lead poisoning in their host communities.”
Chernobyl, UKRAINE
Affected Population: 5,500,000 (initially).
Pollutants: Uranium, plutonium, radioactive iodine, cesium-137, strontium, and other metals.
The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant’s reactor on April 26, 1986, discharged over 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Twenty years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, a report by the Chernobyl Forum (made up of 8 UN agencies) concluded that over 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the accident which has thus far claimed over 40 lives. According to the Ukranian government agency Chernobyl Interinform, as much as 95 percent of the plant’s radioactive fuel may be trapped within the concrete sarcophagus in which the reactor was buried within seven months of the accident. While a program is underway to encase the leaking reactor in a second protective shell, it’s estimated that over 100 tons of uranium, among other radioactive materials, could be released in the wake of another accident. A 19 mile zone around the former Chernobyl nuclear plant remains uninhabitable to this day.
Affected Population: 5,500,000 (initially).
Pollutants: Uranium, plutonium, radioactive iodine, cesium-137, strontium, and other metals.
The meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant’s reactor on April 26, 1986, discharged over 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Twenty years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, a report by the Chernobyl Forum (made up of 8 UN agencies) concluded that over 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the accident which has thus far claimed over 40 lives. According to the Ukranian government agency Chernobyl Interinform, as much as 95 percent of the plant’s radioactive fuel may be trapped within the concrete sarcophagus in which the reactor was buried within seven months of the accident. While a program is underway to encase the leaking reactor in a second protective shell, it’s estimated that over 100 tons of uranium, among other radioactive materials, could be released in the wake of another accident. A 19 mile zone around the former Chernobyl nuclear plant remains uninhabitable to this day.
La Oroya, PERU
Affected Population: 35,000.
Pollutants: Lead, copper, zinc, sulfur dioxide.
Owned and operated by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation since 1997, the polymetallic smelter in the rich mining area of La Oroya, Peru, has contaminated the town with toxic levels of lead, arsenic and cadmium and left the surrounding countryside devastated by acid rain due to high suflur dioxide emissions. Ninety-nice percent of children in La Oroya have dangeously high blood-lead levels according to a 1999 study by the Director General of Environmental Health in Peru. According to a survey that same year by the Peruvian Ministry of Health, La Oroya’s children average blood-lead levels of 33.6 micrograms per deciliter (over three times the World Health Organization’s safety threshold). Despite Oxfam America supporters and local activists submitting 16,000 letters to the Peruvian government to reject Doe Run’s application for a fourth extension of the deadline for its compliance with the Environmental Upgrade and Management Plan (PAMA) that it committed to implementing on acquiring the plant, the extension was granted this past June. According to the Movement of Health for La Oroya (MOSAO), a network of concerned NGOS, community and church groups, public pressure reduced the extension from Doe Run’s desired four years to two years and 10 months.
Affected Population: 35,000.
Pollutants: Lead, copper, zinc, sulfur dioxide.
Owned and operated by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation since 1997, the polymetallic smelter in the rich mining area of La Oroya, Peru, has contaminated the town with toxic levels of lead, arsenic and cadmium and left the surrounding countryside devastated by acid rain due to high suflur dioxide emissions. Ninety-nice percent of children in La Oroya have dangeously high blood-lead levels according to a 1999 study by the Director General of Environmental Health in Peru. According to a survey that same year by the Peruvian Ministry of Health, La Oroya’s children average blood-lead levels of 33.6 micrograms per deciliter (over three times the World Health Organization’s safety threshold). Despite Oxfam America supporters and local activists submitting 16,000 letters to the Peruvian government to reject Doe Run’s application for a fourth extension of the deadline for its compliance with the Environmental Upgrade and Management Plan (PAMA) that it committed to implementing on acquiring the plant, the extension was granted this past June. According to the Movement of Health for La Oroya (MOSAO), a network of concerned NGOS, community and church groups, public pressure reduced the extension from Doe Run’s desired four years to two years and 10 months.
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Ranipet, INDIA
Affected Population: 3,500,000.
Pollutants: Tannery waste, containing hexavelent chromium and azodyes.
According to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), 1,500,000 tons of solid waste chromate sludge remains untreated in the premises of Tamil Nadu Chromates & Chemicals LTD. in Ranipet, contaminating the soil and groundwater. Shut down by the government in 1996, the factory manufactured sodium chromate, chromium salts and chromium sulfate tanning powder for the local leather-tanning industry. While the TNPCB has instructed the National Geophysical Research (NGRI) and the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) to implement remediation and clean-up plans, in Ranipet “three open wells, a dozen bore wells and about 25 public hand pumps have been abandoned due to high chromium levels in the water”, according to the Blacksmith Institute. Their research quotes local farmers reporting that, invariably, four out of five of their crops fail, and that contact with the water “stings like an insect bite” and breeds skin ulcerations. More ominously, India’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) reported back in 2001 that, if left untreated, the run-off from the polluted groundwater could infect the Palar river and the Pulianthengal and Vaniampudi lakes, the main water-source of India’s fourth largest urban area, Chennai, just 100 miles downstream of Ranipet.
Affected Population: 3,500,000.
Pollutants: Tannery waste, containing hexavelent chromium and azodyes.
According to the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), 1,500,000 tons of solid waste chromate sludge remains untreated in the premises of Tamil Nadu Chromates & Chemicals LTD. in Ranipet, contaminating the soil and groundwater. Shut down by the government in 1996, the factory manufactured sodium chromate, chromium salts and chromium sulfate tanning powder for the local leather-tanning industry. While the TNPCB has instructed the National Geophysical Research (NGRI) and the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) to implement remediation and clean-up plans, in Ranipet “three open wells, a dozen bore wells and about 25 public hand pumps have been abandoned due to high chromium levels in the water”, according to the Blacksmith Institute. Their research quotes local farmers reporting that, invariably, four out of five of their crops fail, and that contact with the water “stings like an insect bite” and breeds skin ulcerations. More ominously, India’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) reported back in 2001 that, if left untreated, the run-off from the polluted groundwater could infect the Palar river and the Pulianthengal and Vaniampudi lakes, the main water-source of India’s fourth largest urban area, Chennai, just 100 miles downstream of Ranipet.
Rudnaya Pristan & Dalnegorsk, RUSSIA
Affected Population: 90,000.
Pollutants: Lead, cadmium, mercury, antimony.
In the far east of Russia, near the sea of Japan, the towns of Rudnaya Pristan and Dalnegorsk, 30 kilometers apart, lie stricken by lead poisoning from an old operating smelter and the unsafe transportation of lead concentrate from the local mine. The smelter was shut down after the Blacksmith Institute presented the owner with evidence that the area’s pre-school children showed blood-lead levels of between 13 and 27 micrograms per deciliter. A further Blacksmith study recorded annual air emissions in the area containing “85 tons of particulate matter with lead and arsenic concentrations being 50 and 0.5 tons respectively.” Local NGO, the Far Eastern Health Fund, which works to prevent and raise awareness of lead poisoning in the Russian Far East, reports dangerously high blood-lead concentrations of over 80 mcg/dl in Dalnegorsk, Kavalerovo and Vladivostock.
Affected Population: 90,000.
Pollutants: Lead, cadmium, mercury, antimony.
In the far east of Russia, near the sea of Japan, the towns of Rudnaya Pristan and Dalnegorsk, 30 kilometers apart, lie stricken by lead poisoning from an old operating smelter and the unsafe transportation of lead concentrate from the local mine. The smelter was shut down after the Blacksmith Institute presented the owner with evidence that the area’s pre-school children showed blood-lead levels of between 13 and 27 micrograms per deciliter. A further Blacksmith study recorded annual air emissions in the area containing “85 tons of particulate matter with lead and arsenic concentrations being 50 and 0.5 tons respectively.” Local NGO, the Far Eastern Health Fund, which works to prevent and raise awareness of lead poisoning in the Russian Far East, reports dangerously high blood-lead concentrations of over 80 mcg/dl in Dalnegorsk, Kavalerovo and Vladivostock.
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Affected Population: 23,000 (immediate).
Pollutants: Radioactive uranium, heavy metals, cyanides.
A former Soviet uranium mining town, which processed more than 10,000 metric tons of uranium between 1946 and 1968, Mailuu-Suu is home to 23 tailing dumps and 13 waste rock dumps, which contain 1.96 million cubic meters of radioactive mining waste. In an area given to landslides, mudflows and seismic activity, Mailuu-Suu’s uncontained radioactive waste threatens the water-supply of the entire Ferghana Valley, home to hundreds of thousands across Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekhistan and Tajikistan. In 2004, in association with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (part of the US government’s National Nuclear Security Administration), the World Bank assigned a $6.9 million grant to the Kyrgyz Republic in support of a Disaster Hazard Mitigation Project in the Mailuu-Suu area. According to Asia Water Wire, Kyrgyz newspaper Obschestvenny Reiting reported that “about 300 thousand cubic metres of material fell into the Mailuu-Suu River” in April 2006.
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But selected, as they were, from a long-list of 35 ecologically ravaged locales, themselves chosen from over 300 documented over the last six years by Blacksmith, these contaminated environs — these weeping sores of our Earth — are symptomatic of a deeper distress, and not alone the legacy of a resource-rapacious and morally negligent industrial era. When particulate matter from Chinese coal-mines is sweeping across the Pacific to be collected by scientists in northern California, who can credibly doubt the words of the convenor of Clean Air Island, the great Shanta Chatterji?
“The time of competition is gone now. The time of cooperation has come.”
Ask yourself…
How should an economic system be devised that
isn’t in conflict with human, animal or planet rights?
isn’t in conflict with human, animal or planet rights?
While a Top 10 list of the world’s most polluted sites is a canny, even brilliant, way of engaging media attention, a Top 25 list of clean-up success-stories (including programs in Dzerzhinsk, Kabwe and Rudnaya Pristan & Dalnegorsk) is less attention-grabbing. You can nominate a site to bring it to Blacksmith’s attention here; you can make a donation to their site-specific remediation programs here; and you can resolve right now to pressure others to understand what a criminal act it is to desecrate “our sacred link” with nature, which we share not only with each other (and every other living thing) but with every child alive and all those still yet to be born on this Earth.