1/Vapi, India
Vapi is a region overwhelmed by industrial pollution. More than 50 industries poison the local soil and groundwater with pesticides, PCBs, chlorine, chromium, mercury, cadmium, dyes, and lead. Industrial pollution is a severe problem in all of India. The Blacksmith Institute have reported the pollution levels based on the Gujarat Pollution Control Board of 1998. But since then not much has changed and the pollution is getting worse day after day. The Common Effluent treatment plant does not meet all the parameters set by both state and central pollution control boards.
2/Tianying, China
Tianying, population 140,000, is one of the largest lead production bases in China, with an output accounting for half of the country’s total production. Low-level technologies, illegal operation and the lack of any serious pollution control measures have caused several severe lead poisoning cases in the region. Numerous small scale recycling plants, notorious for polluting, are based in the area. The average lead concentrations in Tianying’s air and soils are 8.5 and 10 times higher than national health standards, respectively. Eighty-five per cent of air samples have lead concentrations higher than the national standards. Residents, particularly children, suffer from lead poisoning and its related effects: lead encephalopathy, lower IQs, short attention spans, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, impaired physical growth, hearing and visual problems, stomach aches, irritation of the colon, kidney malfunction, anaemia and brain damage.
3/Sukinda, India
Sukinda has an abundance of chromite deposits, which is around 97% of India’s total deposits. This makes it among the world’s 10 most polluted places. Around 12 mines operate in the area without proper environmental controls. Pollution caused by the mines is a major health hazard. This area is also flood-prone, resulting in further contamination of the waterways. Approximately 70% of the surface water and 60% of the drinking water contains hexavalent chromium at more than double national and international standards and levels of over 20 times the standard have been recorded. An Indian health group estimated that 84.75% of deaths in the mining areas — where regulations are nonexistent —are due to chromite-related diseases. There has been virtually no attempt to clean up the contamination.
4/Port Harcourt, Nigeria
The area lacks strategies for preventing oil spills and contamination, and the clean-up methods after disasters require significant improvement. Wastewater in these drains, especially in high density areas, are dark in appearance with high levels of turbidity, total solids, BOD, chloride and hardness. The rivers into which these drains discharge are always contaminated with refuse items, with the result that aquatic life is endangered.
5/Linfen, China
Linfen’s pollution problems began with the economic boom of the late 1990s and sped up after 2002, when domestic energy demand spiked, coal prices jumped, and the reins on private mine owners were loosened. Despite recent green policies, cleanup efforts, and the launch of a green building program, economic growth usually crushes environmental concerns in China. In Bejing, the curtain of smog over the city was only recently labeled haze–previously, it was called fog.
6/La Oroya, Peru
The years 2006 and 2007 the Blacksmith Institute have accomplished a research about the cities more contaminated to the world and arrived to the conclusion that the Oroya city was between the 10 cities more polluted of the world and, the environment Graffiti 2008 said that is between five more pollute too to the world.In La Oroya, a mining town in the Peruvian Andes, 99% of children have blood levels that exceed acceptable limits, thanks to an American-owned smelter that has been polluting the city since 1922. The average lead level, according to a 1999 survey, was triple the WHO limit.
7/Dzerzhinsk, Russia
According to September 12, 2007, study by Blacksmith Institute (United States), Dzerzhinsk is one of the worst polluted cities of the world and has a life expectancy of 42 years for men and 47 for women, with the 2003 death rate exceeding its birth rate by 260%. Environmental action groups such as Greenpeace attribute such low life expectancy to high levels of persistent organic chemicals, particularly dioxins. Much of the toxic waste dumped over the years has gone directly into the water. This has lead to local waters becoming a white sludge waste, with toxin levels millions of times higher than is safe. Because many of the factories in the area are also shut down, less water is being used than before.
8/Norilsk, Russia
Norilsk has an extremely high level of air pollution from the mining that has occurred there throughout the past decades, leading to major problems with smog and acid rain.Home to the world’s largest heavy metal smelting complex, more than 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc are released into the air every year. Heavy metal pollution near Norilsk is so severe that it is now economically feasible to mine the soil, as a result of acquiring high concentrations of platinum and palladium through pollution.
9/Chernobyl, Ukraine
Air pollution in major cities may be more damaging to health than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to a report published today.Two explosions at the Chernobyl reactor killed three people immediately and more than 30 died from acute radiation poisoning, but the radioactive plume released from the reactor spread over most of Europe and is estimated to have caused up to 16,000 deaths.The scientists grew flax seeds in radiation-contaminated soil in the Chernobyl region and compared the resulting plants with plants grown from seeds planted in non-radioactive soil. They discovered that radiation exposure had relatively little effect on the protein levels in the plants, with only about five percent of the protein levels altered. Among these were certain proteins that are involved in cell signalling, or chemical communication.
10/Sumgayit, Azerbaijan
Sumgayit is not just notorious for its pollution. In 1988, as nationalist sentiments rose in the ailing Soviet Union, violence flared up between ethnic Azeris and ethnic Armenians in the city. As a result, the Armenian population fled the city. Untreated sewage and mercury-contaminated sludge (from chlor-alkali industries) continue to be dumped haphazardly. A continuing lack of pollution controls, dated technologies and the improper disposal and treatment of accumulated industrial waste are just some of the issues that plague the city.
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