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| A coal mining concession area in the middle of tropical forest land in Central Kalimantan province. (AFP Photo/Romeo Gacad) |
Hundreds of
millions of people worldwide risk exposure to toxic pollution, environmental
groups warned Monday, publishing a list of the world’s worst areas, which
included Indonesia’s Kalimantan and Citarum River Basin.
“We
estimate that the health of more than 200 million people is at risk from
pollution in the developing world,” said Richard Fuller, who heads the
Blacksmith Institute, a US-based environment watchdog.
The
institute and Green Cross Switzerland published a new top 10 list of the
“World’s Worst Polluted Places” — their first since 2007 — based on more than
2,000 risk assessments at contaminated sites in 49 countries.
Newcomers
to the 2013 list included Indonesia’s Citarum River Basin in West Java, an area
that is home to around nine million people, but also some 2,000 factories.
The river,
which is used among other things for human consumption and to irrigate rice
farms, is contaminated by a wide range of toxins, including aluminium and
manganese.
Drinking
water tests have shown lead at levels more than 1,000 times above US standards,
the report said.
Another
area of Indonesian — Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo — was also added to the
list due to the widespread artisanal small-scale gold mining there.
Most
practitioners of this craft use mercury in the extraction process, and
contribute to a large portion of global emissions of the hazardous metal each
year.
This is West
Africa’s second largest processing area for the world’s swelling piles of
electronic waste, at Agbogbloshie in Ghana’s capital Accra was among new
additions.
Each year,
Ghana imports around 215,000 tonnes of secondhand consumer electronics, mainly
from Western Europe — a number that is expected to double by 2020, according to
the report.
The main
health concern linked to e-waste processing in Ghana is the burning of sheathed
cables to recover the copper inside, the report said, pointing out that the cables
can contain a range of heavy metals, including lead.
Soil
samples from around Agbogbloshie have shown concentrations of that toxic metal
that are 45 times more than accepted levels, the report said.
“E-waste is
really going to be a challenge. It’s growing exponentially. Everybody wants a
computer, a laptop, the modern devices, so I think we’re seeing the tip of the
iceberg,” Blacksmith research director Jack Caravanos told reporters in a
conference call.
year’s list
also includes Hazaribagh in Bangladesh, which is home to most the country’s 270
registered tanneries.Every day, they collectively dump around 22,000 cubic
litres of toxic waste, including cancer-causing hexavalent chromium, into the
Buriganga, Dhaka’s main river and key water supply.
The Niger
River Delta in Nigeria and the Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin in Argentina were
also added to the list.
Several
toxic industrial areas in the former Soviet Union, including the site of the
devastating 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, were carried over from
the last list, as was Zambia’s lead-mining city Kabwe.
Unlike the
list six years ago, which was dominated by Chinese and Indian sites, those two
countries are missing from the list published Monday.
“There has
been a reasonably strong movement towards clean-up in India and China,”
Hanrahan explained.
Agence France-Presse
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