On average, those afflicted by the 10 worst pollution problems lost 12.7 DALYs of life. "It could mean that a person has 6.7 years with a serious disease as well as dying six years earlier than they otherwise would have," Ericson explains. But that ranges from nearly 24 years lost because of lead in industrial wastewater to just under three years lost from hexavalent chromium, the carcinogenic form of the element, from tanneries.
"The chromium process is old, historic and efficient, and any other process is not likely to dominate," says environmental health scientist Jack Caravanos of the City University of New York School of Public Health, who consulted on the report and suggests chromium tanning for leather is not going away. "The goal is to install industrial waste treatment plants that collect the waste, as opposed to just discharging it. We have to live with hexavalent chromium and manage it at the source." Management tactics range from using bone charcoal to soak up the carcinogen and then dispose of it as toxic waste to chemically transforming hexavalent chromium to a more benign form.
In many cases, however, the fixes are even simpler. "We have also seen people working in these mines ill-equipped, who do not wear gloves or very often shoes," Robinson notes. "The mines are located in the middle of villages, and children are playing on the waste rocks and tailings."
The solution for the health impacts of artisanal gold mining is not to shut down the mines. "We're not interested in putting people out of work," Ericson says. It is instead a simple retort—essentially a still, or a sealed chamber, for heating the amalgam with an attached outlet tube for cooling and recapturing the mercury vapor. "They are built by local craftsmen using locally available materials and cost a few dollars," Robinson says. "It allows miners to recycle 99 percent of the mercury and saves their health, but also the health of the global community."
There is one major source of toxic hot spots worldwide that does not appear on this list: oil production and its ancillary industries. "If the data existed, the petrochemical industry would be included as one of the top 10 pollution problems," the researchers wrote in the report, noting that processing one ton of crude oil results in 3.5 to five cubic meters of wastewater and three to five kilograms of sludge and other solid waste. They add that thousands of sites are "contaminated by the petrochemical industry, often in highly populated areas." But, because such sites tend to be neither abandoned nor defunct and are largely immune from regulatory control, the oil industry "falls out of the focus of what we're looking at," Ericson explains. "There's a lot of information on petrochemicals out there."
In the future the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross Switzerland hope to be able to measure the pollution burden of individual countries. In the meantime the environmental health groups note that the health impacts of pollution rival diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis but lacks similar systematic global systems to combat it. "The problems we're looking at are on a scale with other types of public health threats in these countries, like malaria," Ericson notes. "Toxic hot spots are a problem hiding in plain sight."
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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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