POLLUTION PROBLEM: Improperly used pesticides can lead to a host of health impacts, including those pictured, and lands such pollution at number three on a list of the world's worst pollution problems.
Image: Courtesy of the Blacksmith Institute
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The price of gold affects more than global finances; it also drives the world's most toxic pollution problem, according to new research from the Blacksmith Institute, an environmental health group based in New York City. Miners in countries from across Africa and Southeast Asia use mercury to separate the precious metal from the surrounding rock and silt. To then separate the resulting amalgam of gold and mercury, heat must be applied to vaporize the mercury. Typically, heating occurs over an open gas flame, releasing the potent neurotoxic element into the atmosphere. What's more, the estimated 10 million to 20 million workers who mine for gold this way will all too often inhale the mercury, putting their health at profound risk.
"Small-scale gold mining contributes to one third of the mercury released into the environment today," says physicist Stephan Robinson of Green Cross Switzerland—Blacksmith's partner in the research and ranking—or nearly as much as coal burning by power plants. "This is continuing to increase because of rising gold prices."
The researchers estimate that more than 3.5 million people suffer from mercury-related health effects as a result of such artisanal gold mining, making it the world's worst toxic pollution problem in terms of number of people affected.
The toxic top 10:
- Mercury pollution from gold mining (3.5 million people)
- Lead pollution from industrial parks (nearly 3 million)
- Pesticides from agriculture (more than 2.2. million)
- Lead smelting (just under 2 million)
- Chromium pollution from leather tanning (more than 1.8 million)
- Mercury residue from other mining (more than 1.5 million)
- Lead pollution from mining (more than 1.2 million)
- Lead pollution from improper battery recycling (nearly one million)
- Arsenic in groundwater (at least 750,000)
- Pesticide manufacturing and storage (more than 700,000).
Notably, groundwater arsenic is the only naturally occurring pollution problem—and it is in ninth place. Put together, arsenic, chromium, lead, mercury and pesticides are the leading causes of such toxic hot spots largely created by mining, metal smelting, chemical manufacture, agriculture, heavy industry, tanneries and waste disposal, among other activities.
View a slide show of the world's worst toxic pollution problems
"We find lead all over the world, we find arsenic all over the world, chromium from tanneries all over the world," says Blacksmith's Bret Ericson, who managed the three-year project. "These are not large-scale, multinational corporations that are responsible for this pollution. Typically, it's low income, small-scale industries who have no emissions controls," often because these outdated industries remain unregulated.
All told, an expanded list that also includes specialized activities such as chemical manufacturers and uranium mining finds that at least 100 million people worldwide suffer health effects or die from such pollution. "We anticipate that number growing as we continue the inventory work," Ericson says.
The list derives from Blacksmith's survey of more than 2,000 toxic sites in 47 different countries in the developing world. The researchers then ranked the sites and problems by "disability life-adjusted year," or DALY, which measures both early death and the impact of pollution-related disease. In essence, one DALY equals "one year of 'healthy' life lost," the researchers wrote in the report released on November 9.
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16 Comments
Add CommentDavid
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is stunning how under-reported the actual danger of mercury is, which matters of course since risk is not only likelihood, as in the paper you cite, but consequence. (e.g., Lots of people get food poisoning, but fortunately don't get very sick from it.) The major paper which identified the substance as a neurotoxin, on which most regs are based, is Philippe Grandjean et al., “Cognitive Deficit in 7-Year-Old Children with Prenatal Exposure to Methylmercury,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 19, no. 6 (1997), pp. 417–428.
It found a deficit of less than one IQ point in children whose moms ate high mercury diets during pregnancy, compared to the kids of pregnant moms who did not eat HIGH mercury diets. That is not good, of course, and population wide presents a public health problem. but that is hardly the level of harm most people, including most journalists, assume about the notorious bogeyman of mercury. I am no fan of the stuff, but I am a fan of good journalism about risk that helps the reader understand things, and reporting about the danger of mercury that fails to describe the consequences part of the risk equation- as almost all mercury reporting is - is missing something really important.
David has a point. It would be easy enough for Scientific American to include a sentence or two about the magnitude of the threat that each pollutant poses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy should we put up with ANY threat, if it is preventable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould it have been so hard to put the pictures on one page instead of a slide show? Hint: SciAm should just ban slide shows altogether.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone who ever commits a crime is a potential future threat, so we should never let them out?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Steve D: "Would it have been so hard to put the pictures on one page instead of a slide show? Hint: SciAm should just ban slide shows altogether."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's get a movement started. I hate that presentation format, as do many others I'm sure.
I think you missed the point. The article is concerned with high level mercury exposure. The study you refer to is about much lower levels. I trVellex through a gold mining area in Indonesia recently and many of the miners are running significant risks of Minamata like symptoms.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBlacksmith's Bret Ericson, who managed the three-year project. "These are not large-scale, multinational corporations that are responsible for this pollution.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find it hard to believe that large scale corporations aren't paying these industrial parks and buying this fertilizer and causing arsenic to be released into aquifers. Bret should probably peel back another layer of that rotten onion.
In France, importation data clearly show that most mercury pollution comes from standard domestic batteries that are not recycled. From landfill or incineration sites, the mercury is lixiviated and finds its way into the oceans, than up through the food chain to predators, including man. Clean up amalgam technology yes, but first recycle batteries from all your household gadgets. And don't speculate on gold.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCool, so go break open some thermometers, chug down the Hg, and then let me know how you feel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, we should start with the closest, and probably most dangerous (USA : 30,000 fatalities 2009, of whom 4,000 pedestrians http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx): traffic accidents.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat do you propose?
What if over one billion people spent 1/3 of their lives breathing through a filter saturated with two chemicals identified on their MSDSs as 'highly toxic', 'do not breathe'. Would you rally against it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat if you found that the UN and US governments were funding these filters, and touting them as safe?
As I identify in my upcoming book The Carbon Trap, the mosquito nets sent to Africa present such an issue. Don't believe me? Check out the UN WHOPES site.
Alpha-cypermethrin and Deltamethrin are the chemicals.
And straight off one MSDS:
Highly Toxic (USA) Toxic (EU)
Dangerous for the environment
Harmful in contact with skin; readily absorbed through skin system
Toxic by inhalation
Very toxic if swallowed
May cause sensitization by inhalation and skin contact.
Target organ(s): central nervous system, cardiovascular system
Recent efforts promoting the use of LLIN (long-lasting insecticidal nets) have shifted their emphasis from a focus on vulnerable populations to a broader objective of universal coverage, defined at the household level as the use of insecticide-treated nets by all household members regardless of age or gender
Gold is expensive.I like gold.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey David, how about you eat fish for a couple weeks and see is you don't get sick? Fact is coal is by far the largest US mercury source. And more and more people are getting mercury poisoning from fish.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a reason they say mad as a hatter as they used mercury. Or ask the Japanese about their mercury poisoning problems, I think something like Mataha diease.
And lead in the US cities when it was eliminated from gasoline, innercity kids IQ jumped 10%.
Steve's suggestion of life imprisonment for any criminal conviction poses an interesting philosophical question. "At what level in criminal activity should permanent incarceration kick in? And further more which of us should pay for that "early retirement"? Further more, what do you do when everyone is in prison? Who pays for that and how would such universal imprisonment differ from our lives right now?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find it interesting that tanneries are top of the list when chromium is mentioned as a pollutant, yet nobody realize, or concern themselves with the fact, that the stainless steel used in kitchen utensils and cooking containers consist of 11% plus chromium. These utensils and containers wear away by mechanical and chemical action in the process of cooking. And then we do not even talk about the cheaper chrome plated utensils which can lose flakes of chromium metal. These chromium gets into the food people eat. So for the same mode of entry into the body, chromium containing drinking water is a problem, but ingesting chromium from kitchen utensils apparently not. Sorry, does not add up for me.
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