The 10 most polluted places on earth

About 200 million people in the world are directly confronted with environmental pollution. Heavy metals contaminating the soil, chemical waste blown in the air or toxic electronic junk tossed into rivers. Those are only a few examples shown in the Green Cross Foundation's Environmental Toxic Report.

Loads of old satellite dishes and broken televisions are piled up in West Africa's second biggest electronic junk dump. The Environmental Toxin Report ranks it as one of the most polluted places on earth. The burning of wires to recover valuable copper inside a plastic coating makes the electronic junk is especially dangerous and releases lead into the surrounding area.

The Citarum River's water in Indonesia is about 1,000 times more polluted than conventional drinking-water and contains huge amounts of aluminum and iron. About 2,000 factories use the river as a water source and dump their industrial waste into the water. The river also serves as a basis of life for millions of people.

Dzerzhinsk is one of Russia's most important centers of chemical industry. Between 1930 and 1998, about 300,000 tons of chemical waste were not been properly disposed of in the area. Lots of these chemicals polluted the ground water as wells as the air. In Dzerzhinsk women have a life expectancy of 47 year while men's is 42 years.

To this day Chernobyl is recognized as the worst nuclear accident in history. On April 25, 1986, tests in the nuclear power plant lead to a core meltdown with fatal results: to date no people live within a radius of 30 kilometers. The soil around the nuclear power plant still is contaminated and endangers the food production. Many people around Chernobyl contracted leukemia.

Hazaribagh has more tanneries than anywhere else in Bangladesh. The majority of these factories use old and ineffective methods and end up tipping about 22,000 liters of toxic waste every day into the Buriganga River - Dhaka's most important water source. Many people suffer from skin and airway diseases caused by carcinogenic material.

In Kabwe, the second biggest city in Zambia, many children suffer from increased levels of lead in their blood. For a century, the lead mines released heavy metals in the form of dust particles that fell on the ground in and around the city.

Kalimantan belongs to the Indonesian part of the island Borneo and is particularly known for its gold mines. To get at the gold, many mines use mercury releasing more than 1,000 tons of this toxic material into the environment and ground water every year.

About 5,000 factories dump their sewage into the Matanza-Riachuelo River in Argentina. Chemical producers can be blamed for more than a third of the river's pollution, the report said. The water contains increased amounts of zinc, lead, copper, nickel and other heavy metals. In this area the populations suffers from intestinal and airways diseases.

The Niger River delta is a heavy populated region in Nigeria and home to as much as 8 percent of the country's population. It is strongly polluted with oil and hydrocarbon poisoning the soil and ground water. On average, each year 240,000 barrels of petroleum reach the Niger delta caused by accidents and oil robbery.

In Norilsk, a Russian industrial city, almost 500 tons of copper and nickel oxides as well as 2 million tons of sulfur oxide are released into the air. The air pollution is so extreme that factory workers' life expectancy in Norilsk is 10 years less than the Russian average.