This week the Blacksmith Institute, which describes itself as “an independent environmental group working on pollution issues in the developing world,” released its annual list of what it calls the “worst polluted places” in the developing world.  The report, which is available online at:       http://www.blacksmithinstitute.org/wwpp2007/finalReport2007.pdf, is the second annual effort by the group to identify the most polluted areas on earth. The top ten most polluted areas on the list, as described in the chart below (which is reproduced from the report), include two sites each in China, India and Russia, as well as sites in Azerbaijan, Peru, Ukraine and Zambia.  The report also includes a list of “The Dirty Thirty,” which include six sites in Russia, six in China, four in India, two in Peru, and sites in Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgystan, Mexico, the Phillippines, Ukraine, and Zambia.  Six of these thirty sites involve pollution from mining, five from industrial complexes, five from air pollutants, four from petrochemical operations, and four from metals processing.  

I had never heard of the Blacksmith Institute before and I have always been somewhat skeptical about the validity of efforts to develop numerical rankings of anything because they inevitably are rather arbitrary.   However, the media seem to love them and anything that can draw attention to environmental problems that need more attention is probably a good thing.  The sites on the top ten list are not household names, except for Chernobyl, though one occasionally sees an article or two in the U.S. press about some of the others, such as the horrendous pollution caused by the Norilsk Nickel operations in Russia. 

When I was at EDF in the 1980s we sued EPA to force it to comply with a legal requirement to prepare a list of areas closed or restricted to the public due to environmental contamination.  EPA contracted the project out and when the report was finally ready for release USA Today promised a front page story.  However, when its reporters called locals for comments, USA Today discovered that so much of the information in the report was outdated that it abandoned its plans for a story.