The New Coronavirus (COVID-19), which started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has spread to more than 28 countries and killed more than 2,000 globally so far since the first case was reported Dec. 31, 2019. New Coronavirus (COVID-9), with the outbreak, started in Wuhan, China, has killed more than 2,000 globally since January. However, more than 21,000 have recovered so far.However, a new study shows that air pollution is more lethal than the outbreak with similar symptoms to those of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) that killed hundreds in 2002 and 2003.

Despite the frantic headlines about coronavirus, air pollution silently kills 7 million worldwide every year as IQAir CEO Frank Hammes said. He added that 90 percent of the global population breathe unsafe air. IQAir is a Swiss-based air quality data provider.

How is Air Pollution Measured?

The higher Air Quality Index (AQI) is, the worse the pollution level is. There are six chemical elements used to measure air quality in a region; average times of the chemicals ozone (O3), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO), particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM/Particulate Matter 2.5), and particles smaller than 10 micrometers (PM10).

Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 is a tiny air particle with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller. This particle can reduce visibility once the level increases. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that the standard limit of PM 2.5 is 25 microgram per meter cubic. Also, the colour of the AQI indicator can tell us about the level of pollution. The colors range from green (healthy) to maroon (hazardous).

Which Cities in the World Are the Most Polluted?

The study revealed that India’s capital New Delhi topped the list of the world’s most polluted cities in 2019. In fact, 21 of out of the 30 most polluted cities in the world are located in India.

The study focuses on the level of PM 2.5 in major urban areas. The index showed that in 2019, New Delhi’s average concentration of PM 2.5 reached 98.6, more than double that of Beijing (42.1), which ranked ninth the most polluted city globally.

Several cities in China made progress in decreasing the concentration level of PM 2.5 around up to 9 percent in 2019. Ninety-eight percent of cities in China have exceeded the WHO standard, and 53 percent of cities there have surpassed the country’s not-too-strict air quality standard.

The Leading Causes of Air Pollution

Numerous factors can cause toxic air, such as forest fires, gas emission from motor vehicles and human industrial activities, and volcanic eruption.

However, research shows that all volcanoes across the globe only emit 0.13 to 0.44 billion tons of CO2 annually. While in 2010, various human activities contributed at least 35 billion tons of CO2 emission to the atmosphere, as Climate.gov noted.

A research conducted by the University of Indonesia stated that motor vehicles’ smoke contributes between 70 percent and 80 percent to air pollution in Jakarta as Indonesia’s newspaper Republika reported. Smoke from motor vehicles is more dangerous as it quickly exposes to other people. 

How Dangerous is Air Pollution to Our Health?

Long-term exposure to PM 2.5 can trigger cardiovascular-related disease, and that can eventually lead to stroke and heart attack, according to a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association.

“Exposure to PM <2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5) over a few hours to weeks can trigger cardiovascular disease-related mortality and nonfatal events; longer-term exposure (e.g., a few years) increases the risk for cardiovascular mortality to an even greater extent than exposures over a few days and reduces life expectancy within more highly exposed segments of the population by several months to a few years.”

The WHO predicts that from 2010 to 2030 there will be an increase in death from lung function failure caused by air pollution, especially in countries with poor transportation management and air pollution control.

As governments around the world are making policies to reduce air pollution, we can do simple things to minimize it by taking public transportation instead of private vehicles, reducing the use of electricity, planting plants that can contain pollutants, and turning to renewable energy.

L'articolo Silent and Deadly: Pollution Kills More People Than Coronavirus proviene da InsideOver.

Volunteers cleaning up the oil spill in Brazil are getting sick. The mysterious spill has polluted more than 130 Northeastern beaches in Brazil for nearly two months.

Volunteers, without proper equipment, have been cleaning up the toxic sludge with their bare hands and feet. More than 2,000 kilometres of the coastline has been covered, as volunteers work without boots and gloves to protect themselves from the fumes.

“I had nausea and diarrhoea the next day, and a splitting headache,” Vera Lucia Silva, a local government clerk said. Ms. Silva, who volunteered on the Itapuama Beach, South of Recife, said that she and her friend collected 80 kilograms of oil with their bare hands into plastic bags.

The local infirmary admitted Ms Silva, where she received a drip. According to the volunteer, the government has provided no equipment for the oil clean-up, leaving it up to charity groups to hand out masks and boots to volunteers.

Gerald Graham, a Canadian oil spill response expert, commented, saying:

The government’s response has been really pathetic. They were not there. Why did they take so long to act?

He further advised the authorities to keep volunteers off the beach, stating that were not properly trained and equipped to deal with exposure to the hazardous oil, which could cause injury and even death.

Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, claimed that a crude oil “is very likely from Venezuela”. His conclusion came after a study carried out by the state oil company, Petrobras.

“We are not in the presence of a constant leak. If it is the result of a shipwrecked oil tanker, the leaks will continue for the moment. It appears to be criminal. This oil could have been dumped at sea.”

Since September 2, 100 tonnes of oil has been collected from the coastline, although it remained “enormously difficult to contain”, according to Salles. Approximately 500 barrels of oil have been spilt so far.

Petrobras’ chief executive, Roberto Castello, said the oil was far too much to have been from a routine tank cleaning.

“We are not in the presence of a constant leak. If it is the result of a shipwrecked oil tanker, the leaks will continue for the moment,” President Jair Bolsonaro added in a news conference in Brasilia. “It appears to be criminal. This oil could have been dumped at sea.”

On the 21st of October, Brazilian Vice-President Hamilton Mourão announced that 5,000 more troops would be dispatched to clean up the spill. Brazilians, however, have criticised this move as coming too late for any real change to be made.

In April, José Álvaro Moisés, a senior professor of political science at the University of São Paulo, criticised April Bolsonaro’s government for closing parts of Brazil’s national contingency plan for oil spills.

Former Environment Minister, Marina Silva said in a tweet: “The oil spill that’s reached over 132 beaches in the north-east is criminal. Removing the residue from the ocean can take 10 to 20 years. This is a warning that we need to strengthen and not suffocate the environmental monitoring institutions in the country.”

According to the Pernambuco state health department, 19 people have been treated in hospital for intoxication from direct contact with the oil. Some hospitalised volunteers were also intoxicated from the solvents being used to dilute the oil during the clean-up efforts.

Last week, Tourism Minister, Marcelo Alvaro Antonio visited a tourist hotspot in Pernambuco, Porto de Galinhas. In a PR move, the tourism minister dipped his feet in the sea to prove that Brazil’s sea are clean and tourist-friendly, citing that only 10% of Brazil’s beaches has been polluted by the oil.

L'articolo Volunteers Cleaning up the Oil Spill in Brazil are Getting Sick proviene da InsideOver.

Reportage / Environment 20.09.2019

Elbasan: The Contaminated City

In Elbasan, there are no smells or sounds. It is an aseptic hybrid, half-city half-countryside. Goats graze in the contaminated fields. They also make no noise. By its mere presence, the Metalurgjiku silences everything that gravitates around it. The monumental…

Alessandra Briganti

Ivo Saglietti

In Elbasan, there are no smells or sounds. It is an aseptic hybrid, half-city half-countryside. Goats graze in the contaminated fields. They also make no noise. By its mere presence, the Metalurgjiku silences everything that gravitates around it. The monumental communist metallurgical plant no longer erupts toxic fumes. Or at least not as it used to.

 

Back then the environment was not a hot topic. It would be decades before the issue would be addressed. And yet the damage caused this imposing monument to an industry that had already corrupted the skies and dug deep into the earth. Elbasan was shrouded in a blanket of ferrous fog. The ground is still saturated with tonnes of heavy metal waste, two million of which was detected along the banks of the river Shkumbin. To this day the area has never been remediated. The soil remains contaminated as do the fruits it bears. As well as contamination there is also mutation, the genetic mutation of animals and human beings. In the early nineties with the downfall of communism revelations of two-headed calves and malformations in babies hit the news. What is certain is that the incidence of cancer in Elbasan continues to be very high. The result of a brutal past spilling into a just as ruthless present.

 

Deep in the bowels of Metalurgjiku, emptiness transforms into a sense of suffocation taking your breath away. Even more than an industrial site, the rusty iron scrap pieces represent an ideology. Buried under wild plants, just like Communism has been buried. Amongst the skeletons of the decommissioned plants are piles of metal scrap. They are waiting to be disposed of in the new Kurum factory. For years the Turkish company processed aluminium, iron and other metals without using filters to counter the collateral effects of metal recycling. As the years passed the clouds once again became shrouded in black. The inhabitants started to protest, exhausted and caught between a battle for their health rights and the wild privatization in which the State is all too often an accomplice of profit. Finally, Kurum was forced to comply with the mandatory requirements. However, these were not always applied. And so, the clouds once again turned black, the heavy air pressing down on your chest.

 

Waste. It is the latest scourge in Elbasan, after the poisons released into the air by Metalurgjiku and the metal waste which seeped into the ground. On a hill not far from the village looms the sole incinerator built in Albania. A bitter story mixing corruption, arrogance and a disregard of the rules which begins in the land of eagles and ends in Italy. Or at least that is what is suspected. Built by Albtek following a tender worth 22 million Euros with no participants, the incinerator processes garbage collected solely in the Elbasan district. Too little for it to function, declares Lavdosh Ferruni, head of an environmental movement monitoring the import of waste from abroad. For it to be operational, all the garbage collected in Albania would have to converge onto Elbasan. «There are two scenarios,“ comments Ferruni, “either the incinerator has never been operational, in which case the tenure was staged solely to satisfy the appetites of the company that built it; or the plant is used to burn waste illegally brought in from Italy.”

 

L'articolo Elbasan: The Contaminated City proviene da InsideOver.

Reportage / Society 11.01.2019

Petrolia’s Broken Dreams: The City of Black Gold

Walking down the streets of Kucova is like taking strides through Albania’s history. A history made of countered invasions, betrayed ideals and shattered hopes. There is all this amongst the ruins of what once used to be one of the…

Alessandra Briganti

Ivo Saglietti

Walking down the streets of Kucova is like taking strides through Albania’s history. A history made of countered invasions, betrayed ideals and shattered hopes. There is all this amongst the ruins of what once used to be one of the country’s most important industrial cities. Its subsoil, rich in oil, turned out to be both its fortune and its misfortune. Even the air is thick with the intense and pungent smell of oil. The black gold gushes from the wells scattered all over the city. On-street corners, in courtyards, between cemetery tombstones. Rusty iron car skeletons continue to dig into the ground, pumping to the surface a few thousand tonnes of crude oil.

Kilometres of roads, bridges, oil pipelines, railway and extraction plants were built. Also, a small refinery to process the oil in loco and a military airport. The village population increased with the arrival of labourers and office workers, both from Albania and Italy. And so it happened that during the Fascist occupation Kucova was even renamed Petrolia, the city of oil. Those were the years of the booming economy, but also those of betrayal: Italy betrayed its promise to build refineries in the city’s outskirts. Most of the oil extracted was shipped to Bari where it was processed and kept for internal use. The plundering lasted until the end of the Second World War. Once the invaders had been ousted Kucova went through yet another metamorphosis.

Forty-five years went by before Kucova resumed its original name. It was 1990. The regime had toppled, collapsing under the weight of misery. Every trace of that past had to be removed and the utopia of an open free world embraced, that same utopia which had brought about the fall of the Berlin wall. And yet it was not just the pyramids that were brought down, but also hope. After only seven years Albania was hit by an economic crisis which pushed the country to the brink of civil war. Kucova bore the scars of those clashes for a long time. Buildings were riddled with Kalashnikov bullets, the military airport building was damaged. It was then that the city’s slow phase of decline began, with most of the facilities shutting down. Kucova was left with nothing but disillusion.

 

L'articolo Petrolia’s Broken Dreams: The City of Black Gold proviene da InsideOver.

When Evgeny moved to the village of Starobachaty, next to his home there was a potato field. Nowit has been replaced with a mountains of rubbish, traversed by trucks that kick up a yellow dust along their path. “When the wind blows toward us , we can’t even leave our homes. The dust gets in your mouth and crunches in between your teeth”, tells Evgeny in a shaky voice.

In Kuzbass, the biggest coalfield in Russia, open air mines are popping up everywhere, turning the territory into a lunar landscape. The coal dust, which is highly toxic, spreads into the air, taints the rivers and poisons the crops.

It is not surprising that the life expectancy of the Kuzbass inhabitants is around four years shorter than Russia’s national average. Or that the region holds the record for highest rate of occupational diseases, especially those afflicting the respiratory system. Indeed, the frenzied mining activities have always taken place in spite of safety standard violations. The local environmentalist organisation “Ecozashita” revealed more than fifty violations of the minimum distance requirement – 1 kilometer – that, according to the law, represents what is the mandatory minimum distance between mines and residential areas.

“It would actually be possible at a minimum, the environmental impact of the mines. However extracting the coal in an a more ecological manner is far more costly and the mines’ owners are too stingy” explains a bitter Vladislav Tannagashev, a resident in the village of Chuvashka. The coal companies must bear the huge costs of transporting the coal thousands of kilometers toward the nearest sea ports. This is why, according to the activists, entrepreneurs are cutting back on safety costs.

The spokespeople for the local administration have been restrained in revealing the extent of the mines’ environmental impact. They have stated only that “if there had been irregularities, they would have already been fixed”. However, according to the local activists, there is deep collusion between government authorities and the mining industry. “Governor Tuleev is the chief lobbyist for the coal companies, and so has no interest in imposing sanctions on them” explains Lementuev.

The Kuzbass inhabitants are defenseless against the tyranny of the coal companies, especially due to limited awareness about their civil rights and the instruments available to defend themselves. “People write letters to President Putin or to Governor Tuleev asking for their help, as if they are writing to Santa Claus”, says a dejected Lementuev.

The main victims of this unlawfully expanding industrialization is the indigenous population of the Šori. In the past they used the land to hunt, fish and harvest, today the Šori have been forced to leave their ancestral land, made uninhabitable by the mines. No longer having any bond with the territory, they move to the cities, and as a results their language and traditions are disappearing. “We lived on top of coal. Our ancestors chose to settle in a land filled with riches. This is our curse” acknowledges bitterly Vladimir Bekrenev, a Šori businessman.

After the Paris Agreement, many western countries have begun reducing their coal consumption and are investing in clean energy sources. Nevertheless in the Kuzbass they are continuing to relentlessly extract coal. Most of the inhabitants of the region work in the mining industry or in sectors linked to the industry.

The activists of “Ecozashita” believe that if the Kuzbass does not diversify its exports, in the coming decades the region will be afflicted by a grave economic crisis. “And then, there won’t be jobs for anyone -concludes Lementuev – and there will be nothing left except the craters left by the mining industry.

Pictures of Giovanni Pigni

L'articolo Russia living on the coal proviene da InsideOver.

“I invite you to stop going up and down the valley taking photographs and interviewing people. Be very careful, we could ask for your arrest.” This is how the phone call between myself and Mr Jorge Esteva, head of communications for the Barrick Gold corporation came to a close.

I am in the Dominican Republic, more precisely in Pueblo Viejo de Cotuì where, in 2012, the largest mine on the planet was opened, the number one leader in terms of extraction.

It is Saturday morning, rain is pouring heavily and, despite being February, it is extremely hot. I stop the car to take some photographs of the Maguaca River water. It is yellow/orange with the nasty sulphuric stench of some chemical product. In a matter of minutes my eyes begin to itch terribly and to water; my mouth is so dry that my tongue feels as thick as if I had chain-smoked a whole packet of cigarettes.

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I come across a small hut made of wood and metal sheets. It is light blue, two men approach and greet me. “How long has the river water been this color?” I ask curiously. “Since 2012. Since Barrick Gold began mining activities. They wash the metals and all the discharge ends up in the Maguaca”.

It was 2012 when the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold started digging, drilling and extracting gold in what for decades had been a property of the Dominican Republic. Back then the Rosario Dominicana company had found the precious metal deep in the terrain of Pueblo Viejo de Cotuì providing work for thousands of Dominicans. Unfortunately Rosario was not equipped with sophisticated machinery and, above all, did not have the thousands of dollars necessary to continue extraction. They were forced to close down.

“I worked for Rosario”, Mr Juan tells me,”We used shovels and pickets, we would set off dynamite and then dig using our hands 10/12 hours a day.”

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Unwilling to give in to the corporations which were pining to invest in this extraordinary adventure, things got increasingly tough and the company finally had to cease operations at the end of the nineties.

In 2006 a tendering procedure was initiated to relaunch the mine and Barrick Gold beat all other competitors. It took six years to move all the necessary machinery from Canada and the United States to the Dominican Republic. Since 2012 (the year work began) to the present-day extraction output has increased three-fold, meaning Cotuì has gone from fourth to first position worldwide. Every two months between 7 and 10 thousand kilos of pure gold are extracted and exported.

All this however has a cost. Not only in terms of millions of dollars but also thousands of human lives. There are approximately 1600 families living in three small communities, Naranco, La Pignita, and La Laguna – nestled on the banks of the rivers Maguaca and Jagal.

“Since 2012 over 200 people have died as well as thousands of animals such as cows and horses.” Over the following two weeks they take me to visit many families who have become victims of environmental contamination. Many of the children who have been swimming in the river have contracted fungi causing patches on their heads similar to alopecia. Many others suffer from light and dark patches covering their bodies, purulent sores and loss of nails from their hands and feet. 80% of women are afflicted by vaginal diseases.

The air in this area is unbreathable: the acid rains have killed off hundreds of coffee, tobacco and orange plants, all of which provided subsistence for the 1600 families. “Water is the most precious element to any living being, whether human or animal,” Maria tells me. “We live off three large bottles of clean water per week which we use to wash ourselves, cook, drink, wash our children and do laundry,” Ramon says.

The families have founded a committee and often rally during political campaigns and organize protest marches to let President Danilo Medina know that they can no longer go on living like this. They are asking loud and clear to be moved to areas further away from the mine, or preferably, for the mine to be immediately shut down for good.

However they are all well aware that considering the millions of dollars available, and hundreds of corrupt politicians willing to be bought, their battle will be a long and hard one and the finale an inevitable one: defeat on all fronts. “We would like to make an appeal to the Pope, to the United Nations and all non-profit organizations; please do something to help us otherwise we will all die.”

On their website Barrick directors speak of respect for the environment and human rights. They say they are trying to cleanse the rivers and reforest areas that had been destroyed and contaminated by Rosario Dominicana. But what I have seen with my eyes is a horrific environmental disaster, destined to destroy and pollute a consistent part of the Caribbean island which from “tourist paradise” is slowly and inexorably plummeting into a true “inferno”.

L'articolo We are all going to die here proviene da InsideOver.