A Russian city where chemical weapons were once manufactured and a town in Zambias copper mining belt are among the 10 most polluted places on Earth, a US environmental group said on Wednesday. The list was compiled by the New York-based nonprofit group the Blacksmith Institute, which said the worlds pollution is sickening up to 1 billion people.

Blacksmith Director Richard Fuller said environmental problems cause up to 20 percent of deaths in developing countries. And environmental toxins in these towns put residents at risk of being poisoned, developing cancers and lung infections and having mentally retarded children, the group said.

"The worst problem is the damage it does to childrens development ... and that damages the future of the countries," Fuller said in a telephone interview. In Dzerzhinsk, Russia, a former Cold War-era center for making chemical weapons, including Sarin and mustard gas, the average life expectancy is 42 for men and 47 for women.

Chemicals from the weapons manufacturing were dumped into an aquifer that also provides the local community with drinking water, according to Blacksmith. The group researched 300 sites to come up with its list. The sites were not ranked because health records in some developing countries were not available. Several cities with industrial operations like coal and metal mining dominated the list.

"Norilsk in Russia is also just a horror story," Fuller said about an industrial city founded as a slave labor camp in 1935. "Smelters with no pollution control: nickel, copper, lead, cadmium. No pollution control. Just an awful place."

In Kabwe, Zambia, one of six towns around the countrys copper belt, soil contamination levels of heavy metals are higher than those recommended by the World Health Organization. The average level of lead in a childs blood is five to 10 times the levels allowed in the United States, according to Blacksmith.

No US sites were listed in the groups top 10, as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Superfund law helped cleaned up the country, Fuller said. "Weve managed to clean up a lot of these horror stories. Pittsburgh 20 or 30 years ago probably ranked as badly as some of these sites did, and now its quite a lovely place," he said.

Fuller said pollution in developing countries is best combated through funding from international donations and training on how to clean up sites. He said support for environmental clean-up was gaining strength, but took time.
(By Timothy Gardner, Planet Ark, 19/10/2006)
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38561/story.htm