A girl stands on the rubbish-strewn beach in Haina in the Dominican Republic. The New York-based non-profit Blacksmith Institute is sending researchers to 80 developing countries to find and assess many of the world’s dirtiest industrial waste sites. The institute recently led a clean up of a battery site in Haina, in which much of the underlying soil was 35% lead, a pollutant that leads to severe learning disabilities in children (via In pictures: World’s poor overwhelmed by rubbish | Environment | guardian.co.uk)
