Burning roadside dumps in India can be the most toxic place on Earth – the level of toxins in their smoke a thousand times higher than normal and it contains a whole “rainbow” of toxic substances, say environmentalists in an article published in the journal Atmospheric Environment. “If you measure the quality of air we have here in the US or in other parts of India, the detectors you’ll see just a set of plain gray strips. But these steaming dump turned our filters in the colors of the rainbow, so bright and colourful, that one of my colleagues thought I was holding a shadow set makeup,” says Heidi Vreeland (Heidi Vreeland) from Duke University in Durham (USA).
As says another author, Michael Bergin (Michael Bergin), if a person spend just one minute inside this “rainbow”, he will receive the same dose of toxins and dangerous particulate matter, if he breathed in the city air, polluted by emissions from vehicles and industrial emissions, for the whole day.
Every year the inhabitants of the Earth and the industry of the planet produce about two billion tons of liquid and solid waste. A large part of it is burned in landfills, usually located away from settlements and roads in developed countries, where there is infrastructure for the collection and disposal of garbage. In India, according to Vreeland, the situation is different.
“When you go on almost any street in India, you can see both sides of the road are giant piles of garbage, which gradually grow until, until someone decides to set fire to them. Even in large cities, such as Bangalore, and in the relatively prosperous areas of other metropolises, such a strategy of “recycling” garbage is the norm,” continues Vreeland.
Implications for the environment, as shown by measurements of the Karolinska environmentalists are more than deplorable. Collecting samples of smoke from 24 burning dumps in Bangalore and studying the “rainbow” of their emissions, scientists have discovered that they contain all conceivable toxins, whose concentration and “deadly force” was so high that they quickly killed the culture of cells on which they were tested by scientists. According to scientists, smoke dumps caused hundreds of times more mutations and breakage of DNA than “normal” air pollution.
Interestingly, every landfill had its own “rainbow” of toxins from the how to look like sets of toxic substances in other burning piles of trash. This is probably due to the fact that each lot represents a unique combination of various paper and plastic materials made up of different organic substances.
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