Cleaning up the Most Toxic Pollution in the World

Hugh Pickens writes "Blacksmith Institute has published their list of the most polluted sites in the world compiled by comparing the toxicity of the contamination, the likelihood of it getting into humans and the number of people affected. For example, ninety-nine percent of the children living in and around the poly-metallic smelter at La Oroya in Peru, owned by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation, have blood lead levels that exceed acceptable limits. Scientific American says that despite the massive pollution, it would be relatively cheap and easy to clean up the most dangerous hazards. For $15,000, the radioactive contaminated soil from the Mayak plutonium facility on the shore of the Techa River in the Russian town of Muslyomova could be dug up, saving an estimated 350 lives. 'For about $200, the cost of a refrigerator, we are able to save someone's life,' says Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith."

Comments

Borders.

[sumdumass]

I need a map with country border on it. I couldn't find any in the US or Canada. But Europe, I couldn't tell which country was which or if it is old soviet union countries.

Actually, I'm kind of wondering why there isn't any marks in the US. Are we supposed to be the polluters of the world? Is there a mistake that the US is clean enough not to be on the list?

Re:Borders.

[Anonymous Coward]

Along with manufacturing (due to higher labor costs), U.S. businesses have also outsourced their dangerous and high pollution (due to EPA and OSHA). So in a way "U.S." (although technically global, and you may toss in European and Japanese) companies may be polluting as bad as ever. Just not so much on U.S., (western european, or Japanese) soil.

Basically "first worlders" have finally developed a strong NIMBYism learned from past mistakes, and are now getting around to cleaning up the mess at home. Unfortunately they're also all to eager to pass on the buck to make a buck. So no effort is made to effectively educate the up-and-comers about how expensive things like DDT, Minimata, dioxin, Pacific Gas & Electric, etc. become when it's finally time to fix things. Ironically, rapidly developing nations could really fall on their faces with such messes. Even if labor is damn cheap, any semblance of productivity could fall into the shithole if eveyone's to damn sick to work. Although folks with lost jobs in more advanced nations might have a "serves them right" thought or two about it, remember we all share the same atmosphere and water. Nobody gets away scott free from the environmental stupidity and short-sightedness.

I think there could be more effort to actually run cleaner rather than as the lowest common denominator if there was some kind of import penalty levied on products created by heavily polluting operations. (An EPA/OSHA fine of sorts not limited to one nation's territory.) The trick would be to get the all of the advanced nations to agree on such a thing. Unfortunately, what's compounding the difficulty in cleanup is the "leadership" in corporate pockets.

Outsourcing

[Bios_Hakr]

Every time I see a company go overseas to do this kind of thing, it breaks my heart.

We should ensure that any company that does work overseas, does it to US or higher standards. The includes Nike paying US minimum wages and Exxon following US pollution guidelines.

Re:Outsourcing

[Score Whore]

Because the shoes have to get from there to here. If the labor cost is the same then Nike won't go there because the shipping cost would make it more expensive to do the work in those countries. So now you're in the situation where there is no job at all. I guess the question is, would they rather get paid $0.50 or $0.00?

Not an expert on Nike or defending their actions, but come on, put a little thought into this will you?

Re:Outsourcing

[KillerBob]

I really wish that Liberals would pick up and read their economics textbooks before making such silly assertions and suggestions concerning wages, prices, globalization, etc. Are there problems? Yes, but offering solutions which every econ 101 student knows to be flawed doesn't really help either.

I'll thank you not to attribute that to liberalism. I'm very much a liberal, thank you, but I know what you're talking about.

When you start offering higher rates of pay, it becomes less economical. In some industries, particularly service industries such as call center, raising the rate of pay to be in line with what their counterparts would make in Canada or the US isn't as big a hit. It's still cheaper to build a call center in India (and I think Africa will be the next India in that respect. Fine by me, they speak better English in Africa). It's still cheaper to power a call center in India. You don't have to worry about heating bills in that country. Bottom line is that even if people in that country are getting the same rate of pay as we are over here, it's still cheaper to actually *run* the place.**

But when you start dealing with goods, and anything that actually needs to be shipped, the total cost of operation needs to be less than it would be to manufacture things over here. So they get lower rate of pay in order to make it economical.

** this example doesn't take into account attrition rates, both among employees and among customers. It's worth noting, for example, that the attrition rate for Dell's call center in Hyderabad is 100%. That is to say that 100% of their employees leave within a year. That affects the total cost of running the place. Right now, it's cost-effective to run the place. As wage rates rise in that country, it's going to be less and less cost-effective, and they will reach a point where they may as well just shift everything back to North America again. Or where they move everything to Africa or some other region where people are not currently being paid what they're worth.

Re:Outsourcing

[superdude72]

I really wish that Liberals would pick up and read their economics textbooks before making such silly assertions and suggestions concerning wages, prices, globalization, etc. Are there problems? Yes, but offering solutions which every econ 101 student knows to be flawed doesn't really help either.

And I really wish that Conservatives would take some of the economics classes that come *after* Econ 101. There is no reason we should not set some minimal standards for wages, environment, worker protection, etc,, in our trade agreements. If China wants to sell to the USA then it has to offer something other than slave wages and a willingness to wreck the environment beyond what anyone in a democratic country would tolerate. We don't have to eliminate all of China's competetive advantage, but let's set some standards below which no one is allowed to sink. For starters, how about some real regulation of industry so they don't ship toys with lead paint on them?

During the Cold War, many people bought into this propaganda that Capitalism == Goodness and Light and any interference with the market == Stalinism. But now we're seeing how that really isn't the case.

Re:Outsourcing

[BakaHoushi]

Not the parent, but...

Yes. Profit is the first, and only, goal of business.

And that is why I believe profit-above-all-else mentalities must be destroyed. See, I have no problems with a company that wants to make money. I'm a college student, but I also work part time at a grocery store as a janitor. Why do I work as a janitor? Because I make money doing it. I make exactly $8.50 an hour (and with about 20 hours per week and factoring out taxes) I make about $150 a week. I would not clean toilets and wipe up spills like that if I was not being paid.

However, suppose someone offered to pay me double my rate. I'd love it. Except... to earn it, I need to use a cleaning chemical that will make 1/100 of the customers in the store very sick (For the sake of argument, let's pretend its untraceable, so lawsuits don't get involved). Now I'm not too sure. I'm there to make money, but at the expense of the health of others?

Basically, I, as a human being, want more. This is natural and instinctual. However, I also feel that it is wrong to help myself at the expense of others. I want to further myself, but have qualms with dragging others behind.

Corporations lack this failsafe of greed. "Sir, if we paid each worker 25 cents a week, we'd make $12billion by the end of the fiscal year in pure profit." "What if we paid them minimum US wage?" "Well, we'd make $11billion." "...Screw the workers, I want that extra billion!"

As I said, there's nothing wrong with one wanting to be paid what they are worth. Profit is okey-dokey by me. But when you try to squeeze every last dollar you can out, the costs in damages you can cause to a workforce, an environment, or a country far exceed what little extra you gain. Thus "profit by any means necessary" is foolish and immoral.

Re:Outsourcing

[Watson Ladd]

We have one atmosphere, one hydrosphere. Smog in LA has been found to come from burning forests in Southeast Asia. Chernobyl spewed radioactivity over Finland, hundreds of kilometers away. Flame retardants have been found in Antarctic penguins. If China wants to fill up their corner of the earth with toxic waste that waste will travel and end up everywhere. And the free market doesn't care about the needs of those with no money. In the words of Brecht: ''And there are some who are in darkness, and the others are in light. And you see the ones in brightness, and those in darkness drop from sight.'' Read Dickens or Sinclair to see how true this is.

Re:Outsourcing

[Fulcrum of Evil]

How about less goods and services from China?

That would be one effect, yes.

China is a sovereign country and they will run their afairs how they choose. You will never win with "forcing" China to comply.

And we are a sovereign nation, too - nobody is forcing us to buy from them. We are adding a proviso to the trade agreement and China is free to take it or leave it. I think they'll take it.

There is no need to "regulate" it per se so long imported products are inspected for safety and the information is passed on to consumers, the market will take care of the problem itself.

No, people that get burned will have bad publicity, while the public will fail utterly to generalize and demand higher standards because that's what they don't do. It won't force anyone to start demanding increased standards, but the USA as a whole demanding it will probably work. China wants to save face, so this is a good time for it.

markets work and governments don't.

This is true, although I'll caution that markets work at providing goods cheaply. They don't necessarily provide good goods.

Re:Outsourcing

[hobo sapiens]

I don't think this post was a troll. In fact it makes a parallel that is there to make: the American slave owners and modern industrialists have some things in common, not the least of which is the total willingness to make a buck at the expense of their fellow man. Even if sweatshops, etc aren't quite like American slavery, it's still a situation where the rich are exploiting those who can be exploited.

Can't exploit people here on American soil? Fine, we'll go somewhere else. Case in point, from TFA: "Currently owned by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation, the plant has been largely responsible for the dangerously high lead levels found in children's blood. "
I live in Missouri, have family in SE Missouri. There are still some streams, to this day, that are unfishable due the rampant lead mining that once took place at the hands of companies like Doe Run. The name Doe Run is vilified in SE Missouri. AFAIK, Doe Run doesn't do any mining in the US, though they do operate here.

From TFA, speaking about China: "Rapid development and unequivocal faith in industry has led to the development of hundreds of unregulated coal mines, steel factories and refineries"
Have the Chinese learned nothing from industrial revolution era USA? Faith in industry? Who in their right mind would put faith in an entity whose sole purpose is to maximize profits? This is why corporations NEED regulation. Guaranteed, almost any polluted site in the world could have been prevented if the government had actually stood up and did what a government is supposed to do: take care of its people.

Ah, the w-*cough*onders of Free Tr-*cough*ade

[sethstorm]

Now why do we keep on wanting to sell ourselves out to these places again? Oh, wait- it's to escape regulation.

Dioxin, sure, but DDT? No.

[Kadin2048]

I agree with the rest of your post, but you shouldn't just blithely toss in "DDT" with your list of toxins. There's nothing particularly wrong with DDT, used correctly, particularly in malaria-prone areas. In fact it was/is one of our best weapons against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. That the developed world has choked off supplies of DDT to the developing world, without providing much in the way of a replacement (ironically, many of the replacements for DDT are much more toxic than DDT is) is a travesty.

DDT was a casualty of Western gluttony and reactionism. We took something that worked well and sprayed it absolutely everywhere, far in excess of any defensible use, until it created a problem. Then, when we realized it was a problem, we went totally arse over teakettle: banned the stuff completely and pressured other countries to do the same, rather than realizing that it was the irresponsible use that was really to blame, and that there were parts of the world where any rational cost/benefit analysis still called for it.

Re: Polluted Sites?

[The Master Control P]

Along these lines, we must never forget Penny Arcade's description of 4chan/b/. To paraphrase: "/b/ isn't the bottom of the internet barrel; It's more like if the bottom of the Internet barrel had it's own barrel, and the bottom of *that* barrel leaked out into a set of festering, pustulent ooze. That ooze would be /b/."

Re:The value of litigation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the "companies" you are citing are or were principally owned by government organizations, and are/were immune from litigation. In the cases where they weren't, they were situated in countries where the law does not provide any kind of protection or possible recourse for the poor. If anything, your claim simply strengthens the parent. If these companies/organizations are immune to lawsuits entirely then the cost of such lawsuits will be $0, which is substantially less than $200.

Re:Mental Pollution is Borderless

[TapeCutter]

It works like the "war on terror", the US makes a mess overseas so it doesn't have to clean up at home. /ducks

Seriously though, it IS about consumption and the methods used to sustain and grow it. The US consumes ~50% of the worlds resources with only ~5% of the population, China and India are busy posioning themselves to stock the shelves of the western world just as Detroit did in the 50's only on a much larger scale.

"To find out if the Slashdot crowd honestly cares about the enviroment, or are simply hypocritcal AlGore elitists, just watch how this thread gets moderated."

Well atm you have +4 interesting and the number of posts on any environmental issue shows a lot of slashdotteres "care" about the issue one way or another. Personally I think I have "cared" about the environment since my parents raised me that way nearly five decades ago. I have no idea if I am an "Al Gore elitist" but I can tell you how the climate, bird and animal species have changed in my small corner of Australia over the last 40yrs.

Gore's documentry is just that, a documentry, it's a "slide show" for laymen that spells out what the IPCC reports say, Al Gore is simply demonstrating his personal and political support for the findings in the reports (ie: they are not "his ideas"). Gore was initially skeptical of AGW but was persuaded by (amoung others) Hansen to change his mind. Regardless of what else Gore has done I would have thought an influential politician with the ability to be skeptical of his own ideas and interested enough to take the time and effort needed to understand the science behind a complex subject would be regarded as a GoodThing(TM), particularly on a "nerd" site.

None of this means that governments of the developing world can shirk their responsibilty or that Al Gore doesn't (ironically) create a shitload of CO2 with his "personal presentations" of the movie to the likes of Bush, Murdoch, Howard, Blair, Putin, et-al. Economic infrastrature has outgrown single nations (eg: oil/gas pipelines, telecomms, food production, ect), what is missing is a coherent science based plan "to preserve the commons" on a scale bigger than any single nation. However as soon as one mentions "global plan" it's "OMG Stalin" rather than "hmmm, the plan to remove lead from car emmisions seems to be working".

Americans responsible for Chernobyl?

[Nymz]

It works like the "war on terror", the US makes a mess overseas so it doesn't have to clean up at home.

Are you seriously going to tell me you didn't read the article? That Chernobyl was due to greedy Americans consuming so much energy? That any of the coal, metal, or chemical manufacturing plants were equally unsafe and intentionally destructive to the enviroment because America made them do it?

I personally look at facts and reality, and then I come to a conclusion. You appear to conclude that America is responsible for everything, and then twist any reality or new fact to fit.

Of course the workers are free to choose...

[Poingggg]

...between starving to death or working too many hours under bad circumstances for a too-little-to-live-from-but-just-too-much-to-die salary. Free choice all over!

Selective reporting...again

[prisoner-of-enigma]

I decided to go through the list to compare the number of "potentially affected people." Here's the list (in descending order):

        * Chernobyl, Ukraine - 5,500,000 (initial)
        * Linfen, China - 3,000,000
        * Sukinda, India - 2,600,000
        * Dzerzhinsk, Russia - 300,000
        * Sumgayit, Azerbaijan - 275,000
        * Kabwe, Zambia - 255,000
        * Tianying, China - 140,000
        * Norilsk, Russia - 134,000
        * Vapi, India - 71,000
        * La Oroya, Peru - 35,000

So, for the one example cited in the /. header, the poster chooses to pick the one site affecting the least people, then goes out of its way to point out it's run by an American corporation. Why not choose to castigate the Chinese government for its massive neglect of the environment? Or the Indian conglomerates? No, we have to pick the American one because it it fits the evil-rich-Americans-causing-everyone-else-harm motif. So, I guess it's PC to leave the Chinese and Indians alone -- even though they're causing orders of magnitude more harm -- just so long as we find an American organization to smear in the teaser.

Re:Old Ike

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to page down 12x to get past this pablum of puke. Normally, the "Read the rest of this comment" appears sooner (maybe 3x page downs at most).

It's not my job as moderator (browsing at -1) to tire out my fingers on the page down key. I would like to, umm, you know, read some real slashdot content. Please fix the message length threshold. Fix it stat!