The Pollution Blog

Solving Pollution Problems, Saving Lives

Meet Blacksmith’s Global Team

Apr 29

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Blacksmiths global team

Blacksmith's global team

Blacksmith experts from around the world gathered  in New York in early April to discuss remediation work in their home countries, share ideas and plan future projects.

Among them are lecturers, doctors, engineers, researchers and other pollution and public health experts, who bring with them knowledge of the local community. Many have worked with the environment ministries of their countries, and some are founders of local and regional NGOs. Meet some of our global team below and find out what Blacksmith is doing from Kenya to Tajikistan.

Yaw Osei - Ghana

GHANA

Yaw Amoyaw-Osei is Blacksmith’s expert in Ghana, which houses one of the world’s most notorious e-waste dump sites – the Agbogbloshie recyclers market. Yaw previously worked with Ghana’s enviornmental agency conducting research on e-waste and helping to raise awareness about the problem. Phillip Raburu - Kenya

KENYA

“If villagers living in areas with high levels of toxic pollutants are poisoned and fall sick, they would always attribute it to witchcraft,” says Phillip Raburu.  ”This is because health facilities in Kenya never investigate toxins in the blood as a routine. Lack of positive diagnosis of known diseases is normally attributed to witchcraft.”  As a lecturer at the university teaching environmental issues and an active participant in community-based environmental activities, Raburu feels that experts should not speak from their ivory towers but instead, should connect with locals in their language to make impacts of toxic pollutants easier to understand.

Promila Sharma - IndiaINDIA

“A lot of people do not know that great things are happening in India,” says Promila Sharma. She explains that cleanup efforts take time but that real change is coming. She has helped Blacksmith identify and assess over 400 polluted sites in the country. The government now has a national plan for rehabilitating the worst of these sites. Leyan Wang

CHINA

Leyan Wang has been working on a pilot project to detox polluted rice paddies in China. She says there is a food contamination problem in areas where chemicals have polluted the farmland and the crops grown on them. Sometimes, Leyan tells us, local farmers sell their contaminated crops, which end up in the food supply. As a result, the produce that people buy in supermarkets and other stores might be contaminated.

Roath Sith - CambodiaCAMBODIA

Roath Sith is helping Blacksmith assess polluted sites in Cambodia, including many contaminated by PCBs. The chemicals, he says, end up in the food supply. Roath used to train youths to debate environmental issues on television. That government program was very successful in raising awareness about pollution in the country. In the countryside, he used to work with monks to talk to villagers about the environment. Duong To - Vietnam

Nguyen Trinh Huong - VietnamVIETNAM

When an American plane went down in North Vietnam during the war, the story goes that a villager knew how to smelt down the plane for valuable aluminum. Today, that village is one of thousands of toxic “craft” villages that dot the Vietnamese landscape. Duong To and Nguyen Trinh Huong are working with Blacksmith on a plan to clean up this polluting legacy.

Budi Susilorini - indonesiaINDONESIA

Among other projects, Budi Susilorini is working with Blacksmith in Indonesia to test the borax method, which eliminates the use of toxic mercury in the gold mining process. Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of gold. Over 300,000 artisanal miners (including many children) release more than 1000 tonnes of toxic mercury every year. While Budi and her team have assessed hundreds of hotspots in Indonesia, she tells us that there are still many more. Larah ortega ibanez - Philippines

PHILIPPINES

Larah Ortega Ibañez oversees a variety of projects for Blacksmith in the Philippines, including both research and cleanup. Larah is currently preparing for a large-scale project aimed at reducing heavy metal contamination in fishponds in the river systems surrounding Manila.

Daniel Estrada - MexicoMEXICO

“Blacksmith is working in collaboration with the Mexican Government to solve a 500-year-old toxic problem,” says Daniel Estrada.  Traditional Mexican potters use toxic lead glazes to produce the colorful and popular wares that are used to cook and serve food every day.  The children of these artisans are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning because of their smaller bodies and developing brains. Many have high levels of lead in their blood.  Daniel is working on getting these potters to switch to a non-toxic glaze.  He also works on the Toxic Sites Identification Program in Mexico.

Lilian Veas - Chile

CHILE

Lilian Veas is part of Fundacion Chile, a nonprofit organization that partners with the Chilean Government and private enterprise to share technology and knowledge to help the country deal with challenges and opportunities. She oversees Blacksmith’s Toxic Sites Identification Program in Chile. A chemical engineer, Lilian has extensive experience dealing with evironmental health issues and contaminated sites.

URUGUAY

Many informal settlements are located on or near contaminated sites in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and cleaning them up is a priority of the local government. Dr. Amalia Laborde’s background as a clinical toxicologist is extremely useful in her work with Blacksmith in Uruguay. She is the Director of the Toxicology Department at the Medical School of the Universidad de la Republica in Uruguay and also the head of the Pedriatic Environmental Unit at the State Administration of Health Services.

ARGENTINA

As a pediatrician/neonatologist, Dr. Lillian Corra has done extensive work to raise awareness about children’s health in relation to the environment. She is the Director of the Medical Specialist Program on Health and Environment at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. She connects with global aid agencies and South American governments on behalf of Blacksmith, which acts as Secretariat of the new Global Alliance on Health and Pollution. She also works with on the Toxics Sites Identification Program in Argentina, which has, in some cases, led local authorities to halt development on contaminated sites.

Johny Ponce, PeruPERU

Johny Ponce has been working on environmental health projects for 15 years.  Currently, he works with Blacksmith on the Toxic Sites Identification Program in Peru and coordinates with the local authorities to share expertise in toxic sites management and cleanup. Johny, who has a PhD in Environmental Health, is a professor and a researcher at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. He is also the president of the Center for Research in Environmental Health (CREEH Perú).

Petr Sharov, Russia

RUSSIA

Petr Sharov manages the Toxics Sites Identification Program in Russia and helps oversee Blacksmith’s work in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. He has a Masters degree in environmental science and is the founder and president of the nonprofit Far East Environmental Health Fund. Petr managed a lead cleanup project that was recently completed in the Russian Far East, and is currently publishing a paper describing the activities and results.

Ulugov Umidjon Amonovich - Tajikistan TAJIKISTAN

Ulugov Umidjon Amonovichis (Umed) is a lawyer and the Deputy Director of the nonprofit group Youth of the 21st Century in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where he seems to know everyone! He has consulted on a variety of international projects, and is active in many environmental and human rights advocacy issues. Umed is currently working on a proposal to help the government review its current chemicals policy and create a national strategy to identify and remediate toxic hotspots. Dr. Rovshan Abbasov - Azerbaijan

AZERBAIJAN

Dr. Rovshan Abbasov is an Associate Professor at Kazar University, teaching classes on environmental science, geography, disaster management, water resource management, climate chance, and related issues. Rovshan has consulted on projects for a variety of international organizations, including the World Bank and OXFAM.  His team has identified and screened over 50 sites in the first year of Blacksmith’s Toxic Sites Identification Program in Azerbaijan. Blacksmith is now working with the relevant ministries in Azerbaijan to create a national strategy to address abandoned waste sites, and to design a pilot cleanup project.

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India’s Amazing Pollution Story

Apr 15

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Our latest post appeared in the Indiaspora blog, reproduced below. Join us on May 7, 2013 for Blacksmith’s Benefit for India.

An Undesirable Export

Recently, the nonprofit I work with received a letter from a man who said he was writing to us as a “last resort.” He was asking for help dealing with toxic pollution in his neighborhood in India, half a world away from our offices in New York. This exchange reflects what pollution is – a problem with no boundaries.

On May 7, Blacksmith Institute will host its first ever Benefit for India to raise awareness and support for pollution cleanup work in India. The event, to be held in New York, will serve as a rallying point for the Indian American community (and their friends) to direct help back to India. Why? Because pollution in India is not just an Indian problem. Pollution is a global issue with worldwide ramifications. While pollution affects those living or working near the source of contamination the most, it also travels, affects the global economy, and accelerates the deterioration of the environment for everyone. This is why pollution in India should be our concern as well.

According to the World Bank, by 2020, India’s water, air, soil and forest resources will be under more human pressure than those of any other country. With over a billion industrious people all striving to make a living, India must find a way to sustain its economic growth without exposing its residents to the deadly health impacts from pollution.

Children are especially at risk. Young developing minds and bodies can be devastated by prolonged exposure even to low doses of pollution, resulting in I.Q. losses and a battery of other lifelong ailments. About 1,000 Indian children reportedly die of pollution-related illnesses every day. At the current rate, India could lose a whole generation, and part of its future, to pollution.

But there is good news.

“The India story is truly amazing,” says Karti Sandilya, the guest of honor at the Blacksmith Benefit for India. “Within the next few years, ten of India’s worst polluted sites should be dealt with.”

“These are large sites that Blacksmith assessed, compiled in an inventory, and shared with the Indian government. The government has set up a fund to clean the ten worst sites” explained Sandilya, the former US Resident Director of the Asian Development Bank and a Blacksmith advisor.

“But there are still many small polluted sites in India and that’s where India Americans can help,” says Sandilya. “If they can channel resources and support to India through Blacksmith, we can start tackling the thousands of small sites scattered all throughout the country.”

Small sites perhaps like the one described by our letter-writer. He believes a battery manufacturer situated in the middle of his densely populated neighborhood is responsible for the daily pollution. He writes about obnoxious smells spewing from the factory’s chimney, and he says his family, including a ten-month old baby, has difficulty breathing. To make things worse, he fears the factory is expanding and he feels that there is nothing he can do about it.

“Does the law permit this kind of polluting?” he asks.

Well, the answer is no. Under India’s Environment Protection Act of 1986 and other regulations, the storing and manufacturing of hazardous chemicals is not permitted inside a densely populated area. But due to weak enforcement of regulations, we believe that what our letter-writer is experiencing is not unusual.

Factories in India often pollute with little consequences, while many small, informal mom-and-pop operations, which are responsible for much of the pollution, fly under the radar. These small operators have little incentive or resources to clean up their act.

For example, many Indian families recycle lead-acid batteries, the kind found in every car or truck, for a living. They break the batteries by hand in their yard, and smelt the toxic lead they collect in their kitchens. Even if they understand that their families are being poisoned, few will or can stop the practice because it is their livelihood. And that problem is getting worse.

“People who have bicycles now have scooters, and those who have scooters now have cars. So there are lot of batteries all over country,” says Sandilya. “Every town has underground battery operations. Only half of all batteries in India are recovered and recycled by the battery manufacturers with some kind of controls. 50% is done by backyard operators.”

The other big problem is tannery waste. Many Indians, including children, work with toxic chemicals in tanneries with few safeguards because for them, making a living, even in the most poisonous surroundings, is better than not making a living at all.

And so, toxic pollutants have permeated the Indian landscape, especially the waterways, where untreated industrial waste is often dumped. Add to this the estimated 32,000 million liters of untreated sewage that flows into the country’s rivers every day, and you have a “ticking health bomb.”

The Indian pollution story is not that different from what is happening in China, and what has happened in the U.S. and in Europe. Industrialization brings pollution but it is a problem that can be solved using lessons we have learnt globally.

For example, Blacksmith is working to get pollution scrubbers used by manufacturing plants around the world installed in factories in India to stem the flow of toxic waste. In Muthia, Blacksmith used worms to “eat” up toxic heavy metals from some 2,750 tons of industrial waste dumped in this village in Gujarat. Vermiculture is a low-cost technique that can be easily replicated at toxic hotspots around the world. In Kanpur, Blacksmith introduced elements into the groundwater to trigger a reaction with the toxic hexavalent chromium pollutant, causing it to bind to rocks and preventing it from contaminating water. This is a technique that has been used successfully in various countries for years.

So May 7 join us in New York to help fight pollution in India. All of our lives are intertwined across borders through economies, culture, families, and friends. This is what the letter-writer in India understands. He is not alone. We can all help by sharing and supporting solutions and ideas. In India, change has already begun with the upcoming cleanup of the ten large polluted hotspots. Now help us tackle the rest. More information about the event can be found at www.blacksmithbenefit.org.

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We’ve Passed A Red Line – A Conversation with Alexey Yablokov (VIDEO)

Mar 20

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“We passed the red line,” says prominent Russian scientist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, who stopped by Blacksmith’s offices for a chat recently when he was in New York.

Dr. Yablokov is one of the world’s leading authorities on radiation contamination. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and was an advisor to the Russian government under Yeltsin and Gorbachev.  He has worked for years to rein in the “Cold War inheritance” of toxic pollution. Today, he continues bringing attention to the persistent problem of legacy pollution as well as contamination brought on by modern industry.

In the interview, he notes the vast amount of chemicals and radionuclides that have permeated the environment since the 1950s, and he attributes that to the “disappearance” of a staggering amount of people from the world population today.  (Watch the video for the actual number)

Why then isn’t pollution bigger news?  Well, because pollution is, in many ways, invisible. He believes it is an issue many people fail to notice, especially when they are being poisoned by low doses of pollutants in an environment that presents no immediate danger. “No immediate danger,” Dr. Yablokov points out, does not mean no danger.

He is especially critical of the nuclear industry.  He co-authored a controversial book Chernobyl:Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment that claims official discussions about Chernobyl have largely undercounted the disaster’s true toll and that many findings reported in Eastern European scientific literature were ignored.

According to Dr. Yablokov, one of the solutions to the pollution problem is education.  Only when people know more about what is happening can they take steps to keep themselves safe.

Dr. Yablokov is currently working on helping to identify and assess hotspots in Russia for Blacksmith’s Toxic Sites Identification Program. He is also writing several papers for the Blacksmith Journal of Health and Pollution.

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Mercury Negotiations Recharged With Hot Chocolate and Cookies

Feb 14

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Fernando Lugris, chair of the INC negotiations (left), with representatives of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution at INC5.

I attended the INC5 mercury negotiations in Geneva last month along with members of the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP) from the EU, UNEP, UNIDO, and GIZ, and representatives from SAICM and various countries including Peru and Uruguay. We were there to share information about the GAHP and we did it with the help of “sweet breaks.”

So in the no-nonsense arena of the INC5 negotiations, where 750 participants from more than 140 countries huddled together for over a week, we set up tables filled with hot chocolate, cookies and colorful cupcakes to provide respite for the weary.  It turns out, the treats played a small but welcome role on the sidelines of the talks, which produced an agreement between more than 140 countries on rules to curb mercury pollution.

Bringing different groups together is what Blacksmith does on many of our remediation projects, and over the years we’ve learnt that sometimes all it takes is something simple to get people to come to an agreement. The treats refreshed and recharge participants and also provided the opportunity for casual connections. I like to think that the many valuable side conversations about pollution and mercury that took place over cookies and hot chocolate left an impression on the proceedings.

In business, many deals have been sealed over dinner and drinks. The path to a cleaner world, I believe, follows the same general course. It is all about building relationships. The GAHP is the result of an international coalition – a network of relationships – that took hold over years of conversations.  Now, we at the GAHP are extending our hands to low-and middle-income countries in need of help to deal with pollution issues. Along the way, I am sure we will share numerous meals and cups of tea with representatives at every level. We will talk, discuss, exchange ideas and work together to get rid of pollution.  And when the cleanup is done, we will look back and remember how that conversation started, over hot chocolate and sweet treats in the middle of a crowd.

Related: Q and A about the GAHP and mercury

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Pollution Lessons from History

Jan 28

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News about pollution has lately been dominated by reporting on China’s increasingly toxic air, water and land.  All this attention is crucial because it is the catalyst to change. We don’t know when or where, but change is bound to happen if we look at the history of industrialization. After all, what China is going through now has more or less already happened in the U.S. and Europe. Here are examples of a few pollution disasters that led to change:

  • In 1936, the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland, Ohio became so polluted that the water erupted into flames. Over the next 30 years, the river caught fire several more times until 1969, when a major fire prompted an outcry and action.
  • In 1948, about 40 people were killed and more than 7,000 became seriously ill as the result of a lethal haze over Donora, Pennsylvania. This led to the first federal attempt to control air pollution.
  • In 1952, what’s now known as the Great smog engulfed London, reportedly killing approximately 12,000 people.

Today, the problem of life-threatening pollution has been solved for the most part in U.S. and Europe.  While pollution still exists to some extent, it is nowhere near the levels they were at a century ago, and most of the worst contamination has been cleaned up.  As a result, none of the hotspots on Blacksmith’s list of world’s worst polluted places are in the U.S. or Europe.

The lesson that history is teaching us is that there is a solution to the pollution problem.  All we need is:

  1. attention to focus the forces of change
  2. resources to conduct cleanup
  3. Education, incentives and regulations to stop current pollution and prevent future contamination

The lessons and solutions learned from pollution prevention work in the U.S. and Europe can be applied to the rest of the world. The template for change already exists.  All we need to do is to make it accessible and provide support for change.  One way we are working to make this happen is through the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution (GAHP). By coming together and sharing resources, we can make sure that in this instance, history will repeat itself.

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Protecting Children in Schools

Jan 10

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As we’ve been harshly reminded, schools can sometimes be exposed to great danger. The tragedy last month got me thinking about what we are doing in schools in Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan. Although the threat is different, the response is the same – we are working to reduce the risks and make things safer.

Mailuu-Suu was where the Soviet Union mined uranium for the first atomic bomb. Since then, residents have been living with this tragic legacy.  Radiation literally flows out of the taps in Mailuu-Suu.  But you wouldn’t immediately spot the danger just by looking at the water or the surroundings.

Mailuu-Suu school cafeteriaIn one school’s neat cafeteria (pictured), where pretty pink curtains frame the windows, and rows of tables are set with lace tablecloths and colorful mugs, children were eating food cooked with contaminated water every day.  Overlooking the room, as if to obscure Mailuu-Suu’s position as one of the world’s worst polluted places, is a poster of a pristine lake flanked by lush mountains and trees. Outside, the children were washing their hands and faces, and drinking water filled with radioactive particles out of a tap in the yard.  Mailuu-Suu’s schools were preparing these children for a bright future, which they might not have because of the constant, everyday poisoning.

It is a complex problem that cannot be solved quickly.  The contamination is everywhere.  We had to start somewhere. So what we did was to focus on reducing the risks to the most vulnerable. We began installing water filters in schools and the hospital.

Child getting blood test, Mailuu-Suu

Child getting blood test, Mailuu-Suu

While each filter is supposed to last for 3 years, in Mailuu-Suu they are useless after just 9 months because of the severe levels of contamination. Until the entire community is cleaned up, we will just have to keep replacing these water filters.  It is the last line of defense for these children.

It is not the ideal solution but it is working.  It is reducing the health risks to these children.  There is still much work to do and the threat remains.  But we cannot just do nothing and we cannot wait for a perfect solution. We must do what we can to make a difference now.  This is true in Mailuu-Suu.  And it is true here in the U.S.

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Detoxing Polluted Rice Paddies With Lime

Nov 28

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Rice Paddies are the cradle of life in many countries.  But some have become conduits of death and disease because of industrial pollution.

A famous case of rice padi poisoning was documented in Toyama prefecture in Japan in the 1960s. Mining activities had polluted the region’s river with cadmium and other heavy metals. The contaminated water was then used to irrigate the padi fields.  Unfortunately, rice absorbs cadmium particularly well.  As a result, the contaminated crop poisoned many of the villagers, who fell ill with a devastatingly painful disease locals called itai-itai, which literally means ouch-ouch. The removal of cadmium in Toyama was just completed in March this year after almost three decades.

Such instances of rice padi pollution and poisoning, however, continues in many other countries. Currently, Blacksmith is piloting the Guixi rice padi cleanup project in Jianxi province in China. But rather than removing and replacing the contaminated soil as I believed they did in Japan, we are hoping that the method we are trying out will be easier and quicker.  It involves applying lime to the soil followed with a soil amendment that consists largely of a by-product from wheat milling.  This should adjust the pH of the soil so that is will “fix” the cadmium, preventing it from leaching into and contaminating the groundwater, while also preventing the toxin from traveling upwards into the rice crop.

In Jianxi province, the contamination comes from Guixi smelter, the largest copper factory in China, which started operation in the 1980s.  The pollution includes copper, cadmium, arsenic, lead and other heavy metals as well as acid gas, but cadmium contamination is the most extensive.

All the soil tested had more cadmium than the agricultural standard of 0.3 mg/kg, sometimes over by a factor of 10 or more.  Rice grown in the area was also tested – 100% of samples were over the cadmium standard, and 37% of the samples were over the lead standard.

15 villages with a total population of 10,000 people are affected. An estimated at 132 hectares of rice paddies and 6 hectares of vegetable farmland are contaminated.  The goal of our pilot project is to find a way to make the rice paddies and farmland suitable for growing food once more, and of course, to eliminate the health threat.

We used worms to “eat” up toxins in the soil in India.  We hope that a little lime and wheat by-product will do the trick in China. Read the Guixi rice padi remediation pilot study here.

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From Elections to Pollution – Data is Key

Nov 9

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One of the most interesting outcomes of this U.S. election is that it has reminded us that data is king.

Nate Silver from the New York Time’s FiveThirtyEight blog has become a celebrity of sorts for coming up with data that predicted the election results almost to a T.  The art and science of collecting, interpreting and presenting data is vital because it can give us a clearer picture of everything, from elections to global issues. Remember what Al Gore did for global warming in the film “An Inconvenient Truth?”  I’d like to think that in a similar way, our recently-released 2012 World’s Worst Pollution Problems report will help push the increasing support for pollution cleanup over the edge because for the first time, we have data about pollution’s terrible toll worldwide.

For years, the true scope of pollution’s impact has been as murky as the contaminated landscape itself. Measuring and collecting data on pollution is complicated because there are so many types of toxins and sources involved, causing a wide range of diseases that affect communities in multiple ways.

In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the Disability Adjusted Life Year or DALY as a measure of disease burden. DALY is expressed as the number of life years lost not only from early death but also from disability and ill health. Chronic headaches, for example, are given a lower value in the DALY metric than more severe health outcomes such as blindness or cancer.

Using this method, WHO began to calculate the health toll of diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV to show what those diseases were doing to the global community.  Today, the fight against those diseases is going strong partly because we know what the stakes are. We have the data.

In last year’s report we began to calculate the toll of pollution in select contaminated sites using data from the Toxic Sites Identification Program - our ongoing  survey of the world’s worst polluted hotspots. This year, we built on that effort to calculate, for the first time, the impact of pollution on health in 49 countries. As a result, we can now see that industrial pollution causes as much damage and suffering as some of the world’s most dangerous diseases (see a comparison of DALY numbers). With data in hand, it has become increasing clear that we have to fight toxic pollution as hard as we fight TB, malaria and HIV.

Without data, pollution is invisible. With data, we can see what’s coming and take action.

Read a selection of coverage about the 2012 World’s Worst Pollution Problems report here in The Guardian, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Toronto Star, and the leading medical journal The Lancet.

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Working with the “enemy”

Oct 3

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I see the “us” and “them” mentality all too often especially when pollution is involved.  Take legacy pollution for example. Legacy pollution refers to what is left behind after the source of the contamination – say a polluting factory – is shut down.  What usually follows is years of bickering, sometimes involving lawsuits, as all parties involved fight over who is responsible for the cleanup. As a result, often nothing is done and the community’s residents continued to be poisoned.

That is why at Blacksmith, right from the start, we’ve subscribed to the notion of working together. Viewing industry and corporate representatives as the enemy discounts the complicated reality of many polluted sites. Rather than pointing fingers, we should join hands and heads to find a solution.

When we were criticized by an industry group of leather manufacturers for listing tannery operations as one of the world’s worst pollution problems, we responded to them and began a conversation about how we could all help solve the problem together.

Recently, we worked with the ICCA – the International Council of Chemical Associations (a chemical industry group) – on a project at an abandoned chemical factory in Gorlovka, Urkaine.  We brought to the table our expertise in pollution cleanup strategy along with a strong coalition of  international and local stakeholders, which included former employees of the chemical plant.  The ICCA contributed their crucial understanding of the chemicals involved and how to deal with them. As a result, working together, we anticipate that we will be able to remove the toxins by September 2013. This is indeed progress for Gorlovka, after languishing for decades on the brink of disaster.

Read more about how we worked with the ICCA on the Gorlovka cleanup below, or download the entire pdf here.

This abandoned, former state-owned and operated chemical plant in Gorlovka, Ukraine presented a major health threat to the town’s 200,000 residents. A cocktail of chemicals at the site – mainly mononitro chlorobenzene (MNCB) and some 30 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) were contaminating ground water and creating risk for potential explosion. Clearly, urgent remediation was required.

As a first step, Blacksmith introduced the ICCA team to the draft remediation and safety plan, setting the wheels in motion for the two organizations to pay their first joint visit to the Gorlovka plant in November 2011. The visit was an important step, enabling partners to get a better understanding of the situation on-site and to meet with local contractors and sub-contractors specializing in the remediation of TNT. ICCA experts summarized their findings on the Gorlovka site in a detailed report providing numerous recommendations on safety, cleaning of TNT-contaminated equipment and removal of a submersed TNT tank. They also provided feedback for revision of the draft remediation plan.

With the Ukrainian government tackling the MNCB problem, and together with local experts, Blacksmith will conduct the clean-up which anticipates removal of the TNT by September 2013. Funding permitting, Blacksmith will evaluate the need for further remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater at the site.

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One-Stop Shop For Pollution Solutions

Sep 14

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Retailers figured it out a long time ago. They could improve business if they made shopping easier. So they began to offer consumers everything they might need under one roof. Hence the success and popularity of one-stop shops. In a way, we are applying the same concept with GAHP, our one-stop shop for pollution solutions. The newly formed GAHP, or Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, will make pollution cleanup easier for low and middle-income countries looking for help.

While the international community has resources available to help clean up toxic pollution, navigating the process can be daunting. Expertise is available from different organizations and agencies depending on the type of toxin, the source of pollution, and where the hotspot is located. Often countries are plagued by more than one type of pollution problem, making the task of looking for help even more complex. The time and effort taken to find the right match can delay life-saving cleanup.

With GAHP, that process is now simplified. Instead of having to “shop around,” countries can now turn to one source – the GAHP – to access multiple lines of support. This is how it works. GAHP is made up of an unprecedented international alliance of members that include the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and UNIDO, among other agencies. All GAHP members have an interest in fighting pollution. They just have different expertise and rules governing their operations. By banding together, they can help fill the gaps. If one member cannot offer a complete solution, maybe two or three working together can.

Whenever a country seeks help, GAHP members get together to see who can help with what. For example, one GAHP member might have a program that targets lead cleanup, while another may only deal with education. Working together, they can help a country clean up lead-contaminated hotspots AND establish an education program to prevent further pollution.

Different GAHP members might also get together to help a country deal with a range of pollution problems. For example, in the Philippines, GAHP members convened to strategize on how they could help the government solve its toxic pollution problems. The USAID Philippines mission expressed interest to deal with artisanal gold mining issues in the country, while the World Bank plans to support a US$50 million initiative to begin cleanup of the Marilao-Meycauayan-Obando river system. Meanwhile, Blacksmith will continue to provide technical assistance and support for smaller remediation projects. Before the meeting, activities in the Philippines in this area were piecemeal, and there was no large institutional support for dealing with problems at scale.

What we are trying to do with GAHP is to make pollution cleanup easier. If cleanup is easier, we believe more cleanups will take place. GAHP is the first ever one-stop shop for the world’s pollution fighting needs. Our doors are open.

To join GAHP or seek GAHP help, contact the GAHP Secretariat at info@gahp.net

Read about the GAHP in the Huffington Post: Global Alliance to Fight Toxic Pollution

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