By Sasha Chavkin, ICIJ
A new report released yesterday by the nonprofit Blacksmith Institute shines a spotlight on ten of the most toxic places in the world,
highlighting environmental hazards from Indonesia to Russia to Nigeria.
The report found that the greatest threats to human health are
increasingly coming from thousands of impoverished workers conducting
small-scale production in dangerous conditions, rather than massive
volumes of waste from single companies or factories.
The majority of the new entries to this dubious top ten – which was
updated from a similar list issued by the Blacksmith Institute in 2007 –
are large river basins and artisanal production sites where tens of
thousands live and work in proximity to toxic chemicals.
In Kalimantan, Indonesia, some 43,000 artisanal gold miners scratch
out a living by burning mercury to extract gold concentrate from earth,
exposing themselves and their communities to poisonous mercury vapors.
Along the Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
about 15,000 small-scale industrial sites dump chromium, lead and copper
into the river, placing most of the roughly 20,000 people who live near
its banks in danger. A cluster of more than 200 tanneries in
Hazaribagh, Bangladesh, releases more than 22,000 cubic liters of
chemicals each day into the Buriganga River, which is a crucial source
of water for the megacity of Dhaka.
Bret Ericson, the program director for Blacksmith’s Global Toxic
Sites Identification Program, said the newest additions to the list of
leading toxic threats reflect changing patterns of global production.
“It’s not from the major industrial global players, it’s from the
mom-and-pop shops that provide the raw materials that we use,” Ericson
said, noting that demand from the West still fuels many of the dirtiest
industries. “Our consumption pattern also drives the pollution problem
in other parts of the world.”
Other sites where clusters of small-scale production provided
large-scale health risks to the population include the Citarum River
Basin in Indonesia, which provides 80 percent of the water supply for
the city of Jakarta, and Agbobloshie, a massive eWaste dump scavenged by
large numbers of recyclers in Accra, Ghana.
The key criteria for the sites included on the list were the severity
of the health risk they posed, the level of toxic contamination, and
the degree to which they were prototypical of broader global threats.
While the standards were not scientific, Blacksmith staff members said
that the selections reflected wider sampling and an improved
understanding of toxic health hazards than the 2007 list.
The Blacksmith Institute
is an international non-profit group that works with governments, NGOs
and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations to assess and
remediate pollution in low and middle income countries. Its funders
include foundations, development banks and major corporations. As of
now, Blacksmith has conducted risk assessments at more than 2,000
contaminated sites in 49 different countries.
In addition to the new sites on the list, there are four holdovers
from the 2007 compilation. Three of these are in the former Soviet
Union, and reflect the consequence of large-scale industrial pollution
that has yet to be remedied.
The city of Dzerzhinsk, Russia, is a longtime center of chemical
manufacturing, including the production of chemical weapons. Norilsk,
also in Russia and located north of the Arctic Circle, was for the
decades the site of the world’s largest heavy metal smelting complex. In
both cities, life expectancy for workers is more than ten years below
the Russian average.
The final site in the former Soviet Union is Chernobyl, Ukraine,
where the lingering contamination from the infamous nuclear meltdown
continues to place large populations at risk.
Ericson said these sites remained on the list because of the ongoing
public health risk they presented, as a result of both the scale of the
initial contamination and a lack of progress in reducing the threat to
the population.
“If there’s been an inadequate effort at sites, then they will remain on the site,” Ericson said.
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