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Black snow. Coal dust. Sulfuric air. Welcome to life in the world's most polluted places.
Chockablock with heavy metals, chemical waste, air pollutants and, in the case of infamous Chernobyl, Ukraine, deadly radiation, these are the worst industrial cesspools on earth--and they rarely make headlines. Nothing in the West compares.
"In some towns, life expectancy approaches medieval rates, and birth defects are the norm, not the exception," according to the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute, which compiled the list earlier this fall. "In others, children's asthma rates are measured above 90%, and mental retardation is endemic."
In Pictures: The 10 Most Polluted Places On Earth
China, India and Russia landed six cities on this list of 10. Fast-track economic growth and years of unregulated mining and chemical production have laid waste to the homes of millions.
Take Norilsk, Russia. A Siberian industrial city founded in 1935 as a slave labor camp, Norilsk contains the world's largest heavy-metals smelting complex, owned by Norilsk Nickel. It releases nearly 500 tons each of copper and nickel oxides and 2 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the air. Reports say the snow is black, the air tastes of sulfur and the life expectancy for factory workers is 10 years below the Russian average. The company has pledged to work with Blacksmith to improve conditions.
Others on the list include:
--Sumgayit, Azerbaijan, a former Soviet industrial center where cancer rates are more than 22% higher than in the rest of the country.
--Linfen, China, home to 3 million people and the center of the country's booming coal industry. Residents claim they often choke on the dust in the air in the evenings.
--Tianying, China, known for being the center of the country's lead processing industry is also known for having the worst air pollution in China.
--Sukinda, India, is home to 97% of India's chromite ore deposits (used in the production of chromium, an industrial metal with many uses), and it has one of the largest open-cast chromite ore mines in the world. Here, some 70% of the surface water and 60% of the drinking water contains hexavalent chromium, a powerful, cancer-causing carcinogen, at more than double national and international standards.
--Dzerzhinsk, Russia, once the center of Soviet chemical weapon production and home to a leaded gasoline plant, had nearly 300,000 tons of chemical waste improperly disposed between 1930 and 1998. Seeping into the groundwater: around 190 identified chemicals.
In 2006, Blacksmith started cataloging hyper-polluted hot spots around the world to draw attention to their poisonous effects. Blacksmith asks for nominations from around the world, assembling a database of 400 candidates. They're scored using criteria emphasizing human health (especially the young), developed by researchers from Johns Hopkins University; Hunter College; Harvard University; the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; the University of Idaho; Mount Sinai Hospital; and Green Cross Switzerland.
What to do about these hellholes? Blacksmith's founder and director, Richard Fuller, says for less than $1 billion you could significantly mitigate the unhealthy effects of all the worst places across the globe. Simple fixes like digging up the toxic materials and moving them to safer areas away from people can have huge benefits. Other solutions are more complex, but still cheap, such as injecting a sugary mixture into a water supply contaminated by hexavalent chromium to make it less toxic and less mobile underground.
"If you spend 10% of the money, you deal with 90% of the problem," he says. "The fact of the matter is that children are sick and dying in these polluted places. And it's not rocket science to fix them."
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