The World's Most Polluted Places

From lead in the soil to toxins in the water and radioactive fallout in the air, The Blacksmith Institute has created a list of the world's worst ecological disaster areas

Norilsk, Russia

The Nadezhda nickel smelter pumps smoke over a pool of industrial water near Norilsk.

Sergey Ponomarev / AP
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Number of people potentially affected: 134,000
Type of pollutant: Air pollution — particulates, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals, phenols
Source of pollution: Major nickel and metal mining and processing

Norilsk was founded in 1935 as a Siberian slave labor camp, and life there has pretty much gone downhill since. Home to the world's largest heavy metal smelting complex, more than 4 million tons of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc are released into the air every year. Air samples exceed the maximum allowance for both copper and nickel, and mortality from respiratory diseases is much higher than in Russia as a whole. "Within 30 miles (48 km) of the nickel smelter there's not a single living tree," says Fuller. "It's just a wasteland."

by Bryan Walsh

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