it's actually a little counterintuitive, if you don't know your current geography very well (and I don't). I mean, you expect bad pollution from the former Soviet Union, China, and India, but Peru? Zambia? The Dominican Republic?
The BBC reports on The Blacksmith Institute's map of the top ten pollution hotspots around the world. They include:
• Dzerzhinsk in Russia, a Cold War chemical weapons site • Linfen, heart of China's coal industry • Kabwe in Zambia, site for mining and smelting of metals including lead • Haina in the Dominican Republic, where battery recycling and smelting have left huge concentrations of lead in residents • Ranipet in India, where more than 3m people are affected by tannery waste
Go here for the interactive map, which gives you more info than you really wanted on how bad these sites are.
The Blacksmith Institute, an NGO, which concerns itself with the health issues brought by industrial pollutions and "brings resources and expertise to local groups and agencies in developing countries to solve sthese problems, one site at a time," in this map focused on
"the accumulating and long lasting burden building up in the environment and in the bodies of the people most directly affected," said the institute's director Richard Fuller."There are places where life expectancy approaches medieval rates, where birth defects are the norm not the exception, where children's asthma rates are measured above 90%, and where mental retardation is endemic," the report says.
It's an aspect of poverty that we don't much think about, a double bind in which populations depend upon whatever industry happens to arise locally, or be placed there, yet that industry so pollutes their environment that it becomes worse than a lack of industry would be.
Yes, you can do something! Go to this donor page and pick a cleanup site to send money to.
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