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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."
I didn't see MySpace on the list
Please tell me more about this $200 fridge.
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Companies do accounting to determine the value of everything, including the cost of lawsuits due to deaths caused by their products. Maybe the companies determined that, to them, a human life costs less than $200 dollars. This is not a joke. This really happens.
certain weeds of the Astragalus and Stanleya Genus can clean up areas high in selenium and plants that have high levels of glutathione can help mop up cadmium and other toxic metals. the Astragalus especially can take up oxyanions of the chromium group [molybdenum and tungsten, likely chromium as well] not only that but bacteria like deinococcus radiodurans can withstand high radiation levels can interestingly they bind metals to certain chemical groups, specifically sulfur and selenium compounds. they can also reduce metal ions common to toxic waste sites and in effect lock them up as mineral deposits so that they are not leaching into water supplies. If the metals are not mobile, they are not nearly as poisonous or dangerous as they are leaching into the local water supplies.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Now why do we keep on wanting to sell ourselves out to these places again? Oh, wait- it's to escape regulation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Bah, the worst pollution is the oil sands in Northern Alberta - billions of tons of polluted sand - now being meticulously washed clean by the big oil companies. The oily gunk so removed is then distributed for disposal in millions of privately owned mobile incinerators, leaving behind nice clean sand for future (post global warming) children to play in and build sand castles on the pristine arctic beaches...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Not just toxic sites, but you must stay so the gov can study you!
From birth to death, generation after generation.
Small clip about the people around Mayak, a 1950's nuclear fuel reprocessing plant on the River Techa, Russia.
It "leaked". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR1wo5s3Ua4
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
while 7 of the top 10 real polluters are Soviet/Russia and China.
I am not nitpicking when I point out that those are 7 out of 10 most polluted cities/areas, not the biggest polluters. Not the same thing.
If you bother to check the actual data USA consistently comes up in top 5 biggest polluters both per capita and overall. China and (not Soviet anymore) Russia are right up there as well to be sure, but ranting about media propaganda and hypocritcal AlGore elitists doesn't reveal anything about the actual problem, only about your political preferences (and perhaps what radio stations you listen to).
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
For all you people who complain about litigation, this is why we have it. If your actions adversely affect others, they can seek financial compensation and punitive damages. This has the effect of correcting negative eternalitys if and when they are discovered, and giving people good reason to be careful in determining all the effects of their actions.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Really? I don't think the word "norm" means what they think it means...
I'm not trying to say the Chernobyl accident wasn't a very bad accident or that the area isn't heavily polluted. It just gets a bit tiresome to see the same mistakes over and over again. For a list which focuses on the polluted status of various regions you would have expected to see he studies that have been done on how birds have been hard hit by the contamination, instead you get pictures of mentally handicapped children being abandoned, which is of course more a consequence of the failure to provide care for them than it is a result of the accident.
There are problems in the Chernobyl area, but this article fails quite badly at describing them.
DDT is not banned in most of the developing world; it can be obtained, and rather cheaply. Nobody has cut off supplies. What has actually happened is that--- due to massive overuse for agricultural spraying--- many species of Malaria-carrying mosquito have developed immunity. Simultaneously, other more effective pesticides have dropped in price to the point where DDT is just one of many tools in the arsenal (and an ineffective one in most cases). To counter the notion that DDT has been banned everywhere, it's informative to note that a number of countries still use some quantity of DDT in their anti-malaria programs, but these efforts have only limited success and only in certain regions where DDT immunity has not been fully established.
The argument "for" DDT is mostly political, and carried along by people who aren't familiar with the facts. Some people are tempted by the notion that DDT is some kind of panacea for Malaria, but that evil environmentalist hippies are using their awesome power to prevent it. Of course, there's usually very little evidence supporting the latter notion, but it's tempting to believe because it sounds like a "free lunch" solution to a hard problem (one that happens to reinforce some folks' pre-conceived political notions). Unfortunately, the idea founders on, well, just about every basic fact of the story--- including the very important one that many of the nations that would ostensibly be "saved" by DDT use have chosen not to use it because it doesn't work anymore.
http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/05/who_put_out_the_contract_on_ra.php#more