Where is the world's most polluted place...and what are the hopes that it will get cleaned up?

Question

Where is the world's most polluted place...and what are the hopes that it will get cleaned up?

Answer 1

USA

None

have a nice day !

Answer 2

My vote is for Kowloon Harbor, Hong Kong. A colleague who participated in the annual Dragon Boat Race there told me that everyone who fell into the water there got quite sick. I'd like to live long enough to see it cleaned up but dont think that I will.

In regard to Lake Erie, it got "cleaned up" when zebra mussels were released in ballast water. The zebra mussels are filter feeders which vaccumed up all the nutrients and changed them to more zebra mussels, clogging all intake and outflow pipes in the lake. It was sort of like importing mongooses to get rid of rats and losing all of your ground-nesting birds as a result.

Answer 3

Definitely China, they need to wake up:)

Answer 4

probably one of the developing cities in either china or india, cleaning up is not high on the list of priorities at the moment.

Answer 5

Clear Creek by NASA space center, Tx.  There is no hope.

Answer 6

The rest stop on NB I-75 at mile marker 87.

Answer 7

The city of Linfen in China is bottom of the World Bank's air quality rankings due to severe air and water pollution from the coal, steel, and tar industries.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/...

According to Scientific American other places you wouldn’t want to live are:

Sumgayit, Azerbaijan

Forty factories that manufacture industrial and agricultural chemicals release 70-120,000 tons of detergents and pesticides into the air every year. Untreated sewage and mercury-contaminated sludge are dumped arbitrarily.

Tianying, China

One of the largest lead production bases in China with average lead concentrations in the air and soils 8.5 to 10 times national health standards.

Sukinda, India

Twelve chromite ore mines dump untreated water into the river, and over 30 million tons of waste rock have been dumped in the valley's riverbanks, which has resulted in severe water contamination.

Vapi, India

There are over 1,00 industries covering over a thousand acres in the region that has contaminated local produce.

La Oroya, Peru

Lead, copper, zinc, and sulfur dioxide from mining have contaminative the town.

Dzerzhinsk, Russia

A major Russian chemical manufacturing center, which produced Sarin and other deadly poisons during the cold war. Between 1930-1998, nearly 300,000 tons of chemical waste were improperly disposed of.

Norilsk, Russia

An industrial city in Siberia founded in 1935 as a slave labor camp, Norilsk is home of the world's largest heavy metals smelting complex and is plagued by severe air pollution.

Chernobyl, Ukraine

The world's worst nuclear disaster took place on April 26, 1986. The 19-mile exclusion zone around the plant remains uninhabitable.

Kabwe, Zambia

The country's second largest city is severely contaminated with lead from the mining industry.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?article...

How long will it take these places to clean up their acts? Not soon enough is the answer. But public awareness, intergovernmental lobbying and western technology and know how (also good business) are likely to help speed up the process.

As for Dr Schmoo’s somewhat romanticised view of how altruistic western companies are (above) all the major improvements in cleaner air and handling and disposal of toxic wastes came after the passing and enforcing of legislation, often only after lobbying and public awareness work by environmental organisations. Voluntary self-regulation sadly has been shown time after time to be insufficient.

e.g.

http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itgic/0...

http://www.ametsoc.org/sloan/cleanair/in...

http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.ph...

Answer 8

somewhere in china, Linfen City, in Shanxi Province

16 of the 20 "dirtiest" cities in the world are in china.

But they are supposedly "allowed" to pollute so much because they are still considered a developing nation I guess.  They are only now beginning to clean up china a little because of the coming olympic games.  Who knows if what will happen after that.

Answer 9

well the air in mexico cities is like smoke three packs a day,

and most native reseves are pretty bad do to explotation from the non natives...  not all of them tho I should say...

Answer 10

my daughters bedroom,

not much hope at all.

Answer 11

Probably Chernobyl. All we can do is wait for the radioactive isotopes to decay.

Answer 12

The former Soviet Block countries.  That is why I think a large part of the so-called "environmental" movement which advocates huge centralized governments is a farce.  Huge totatalitarian government-based systems have been an unmitigated environmental disaster.  The best way is to inform people intelligently and give them the freedom to clean up their environment themselves.  I know of few companies which set out to ruin the earth.  Most of the pollution done here by industry in the past was done due to ignorance, not viciousness.  Now that they know better, most of the companies left here have really cleaned up their act.  There is not much chance all of it will be cleaned up by humans, some of the pollution involves huge dioxin spills, and abandoned nuclear submarines laying around on the seabed, but the forces of the earth will eventually clean things up.  The earth is much more resilient than we give it credit for, Lake Erie was supposedly going to be hopelessly polluted for hundreds or thousands of years, yet now you can catch and eat fish out of it, and while not pristine, it is quite safe after only twenty five or thirty years.  We MUST be good stewards of the earth, but dont believe it when a bunch of manipulators tell you the sky is falling.