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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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From Chernobyl to La Oroya, Peru, the world is littered with toxic wastelands, the residue of human industry. For the past two years, the Blacksmith Institute, an environmental health organization based in New York City, has been cataloguing the world's worst pollution problems. But with 40 cleanup projects in 19 countries, Blacksmith also knows that toxic pollution can be among the easiest problems to solve.
This week a new report by Blacksmith and Green Cross Switzerland highlights the best cleanup examples. First among equals: the global phase out of leaded gasoline, which has helped bring down blood levels of this potent neurotoxic in children. As of this year only 11 countries still use leaded gasoline.
Here are some other top successes: destroying stockpiles of chemical weapons globally as well as local stores of DDT in Tanzania; new cooking stoves to eliminate indoor air pollution in Ghana; separating copper mine tailings from the local water supply in Chile; alternative fuels to reduce air pollution in New Delhi as well as treating arsenic in well water in West Bengal; removing lead-contaminated soil in the Dominican Republic and Russia; reducing mercury vapors from artisanal gold mining in Indonesia; and new sewage systems to clean up contaminated Suzhou Creek in Shanghai.
Even the lingering radioactivity from Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear power accident, can be mitigated. The introduction of a new containment structure around the meltdown as well as group therapies for the children can reduce radiation exposure by as much as 80 percent.
This is all grounds for hope even in the world's most polluted places.
—David Biello & Christie Nicholson
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7 Comments
Add CommentSure, the most polluted places can - and eventually will be - cleaned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe question is whether of not humans will still be here by that time.
According to "The Lead Education and Abatement Design Group" (and others) there are 15 countries (not 11) that still use leaded gas.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst27.html
Where there's a will, there's a way!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe moment you said destroying DDT as a success, I quit reading. I knew at that point I was dealing with an ignorant ideologue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDelhi is the only example presented here for the urban air pollution, but air pollution is one of the growing problems in many of the developing country cities and requires more focus from both local and national communities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThough Delhi breathed some clean air by converting the entire bus fleet and parts of the passenger transport to compressed natural gas, the benefits were very short lived. Averaging a registry of 1000 new vehicles per day and slightly biased towards to diesel fuel and SUVs is not helping the cause. See some reports by CSE and UrbanEmissions.Info
Currently, we have a lot of interest in carbon mitigation and what we don't realize is that when it comes to cities, air and water pollution issues come before the carbon talks. And lets not forget that the sources (fossil fuels) are the same. If the focus shifts a little bit to prioritize the local concerns, we will garnish carbon cuts by default.
Judging by Archeology, and years of digging the answer would seem to be a resounding
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNO. Not yet, anyway.
The world's most potentially polluted place in the long term will be our oceans. Plankton and the food change are already beginning to remove toxins, only for them to migrate back up through the food chain back to us...
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