The 10 most polluted places on earth
Shanghai earned some unwanted media coverage recently when photos of the smog-ridden air went viral on the Internet. People were stunned by images of the alarmingly opaque air, and rightfully so.
So would you believe that Shanghai doesn’t even crack the top ten on a list of the most polluted places in the world?
The New York-based Blacksmith Institute and a nonprofit in Switzerland called the Green Cross collaborated on a recent report highlighting the planet’s pollution losers.
The list received fairly widespread coverage, including a feature in Fast Company. Here are the top 10, along with the primary pollution culprit(s) and the number of people affected:
Number 1
From Blacksmith Institute.
Where: Agbogbloshie, Ghana
Culprit: Lead
People affected: Up to 40,000
Number 2
From Blacksmith Institute.
Where: Chernobyl, Ukraine
Culprit: Radioactive dust including uranium, plutonium, cesium-137, strontium-90, and other metals
People affected: Up to 10 million
Number 3
From Scientific American.
Where: Citarum River, Indonesia
Culprit: Lead, cadmium, chromium, pesticides, and other chemicals
People affected: 500,000+ directly; up to 5 million indirectly
Number 4
From elzadj.
Where: Dzerzhinsk, Russia
Culprit: Chemicals and toxic byproducts from chemical manufacturing processes
People affected: 300,000
Number 5
From Blacksmith Institute.
Where: Hazaribagh, Bangladesh
Culprit: Chromium
People affected: 160,000
Number 6
From DON PUGH.
Where: Kabwe, Zambia
Culprit: Lead
People affected: More than 300,000
Number 7
From Earth Day Network.
Where: Kalimantan, Indonesia
Culprit: Mercury and cadmium
People affected: More than 225,000
Number 8
From News Agency.
Where: Matanza Riachuelo, Argentina
Culprit: Volatile Organic Compounds, including toluene
People affected: More than 200,000
Number 9
From Terry Whalebone.
Where: Niger River Delta, Nigeria
Culprit: Petroleum
People affected: “No one agrees on how many people are affected,” reports Fast Company
Number 10
From dustyclub.
Where: Norilsk, Russa
Culprit: Copper, nickel oxide, and other heavy metals
People affected: 135,000
A lot of people will read this list and breathe an unpolluted sigh of relief because perhaps none of these places were high on their “Must Visit” list.
Here’s the thing: that may be true, but even if you never set foot in Norilsk or Agbogbloshie or any of the other places on the list, there are still upwards of 17 million people who live with this threat every day and don’t have the luxury of heading home to a safer place.
That’s why this matters to all of us.
We might pay more attention to smog in Shanghai than cadmium in Kalimantan, but our attention might be misdirected. As Fast Company reports, “Blacksmith/Green Cross says it chose the top 10 for ‘severity of their risk to health.'”
In other words, these threats are real, and they are acute. The report notes that while more press inches and funding are given to “highly publicized health problems such as malaria and tuberculosis,” they find toxic pollution to be an “equivalent” threat due to the “strikingly high number of people at risk.”
The next time you’re annoyed that your cubicle-mate didn’t properly sort his recycling, you can: a) educate him, and b) feel fortunate that you aren’t facing more imminently lethal environmental issues in your cubicle, such as radioactive dust.
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