26Red river
In Oklahoma, there exists a ghost town named Picher so polluted from lead mining that leftover minerals have caused the rivers to turn red. Children who went swimming in the arsenic-filled water thought they were just getting sunburnt - in reality, they were being covered in chemical burns.
27. Zone Rouges are areas of France so polluted with vast amounts of human and animal remains and millions of items of unexploded ordnance from World War 1 that no human activity is allowed there.
28. "Microbeads" used in exfoliating soaps are actually made of plastic and they are a major source of pollution. They can stay in the environment for up-to 50 years as they can easily pass through water treatment plants.
29. Illegal coal mining activities in Mongolia and the intense use of coal burned on simple stoves have turned a region of Mongolia once famed for its blue skies into one of the world’s most polluted.
30. One liter of oil can contaminate one million liters of water. It's important to understand that when you dispose of oil in the sink, it affects a million liters of recyclable water.
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31Slash and burn practice
Slash and burn practices in Indonesia have essentially turned the whole country into a perpetual forest fire, causing widespread pollution problems across all of Southeast Asia every year in the dry season.
32. In the 1980s, India released 25,000 flesh-eating turtles into the Ganges River in an attempt to clean up corpse-pollution. The turtles were raised on dead fish so they wouldn’t develop a taste for the living, as they ate mostly everything. The $32 million plan failed due to corruption and mismanagement.
33. Cigarette butts are the most polluted items in the world, accounting for 2 billion pounds of waste per year. To combat this, some entrepreneurs have developed eco-friendly butts that decompose in 2-6 weeks and then sprout into trees.
34. Pollution in the city of Norilsk in Russia is so severe that mining the topsoil is now economically feasible because it contains so many heavy metals.
35. Cruise ship emissions can equal the equivalent of one million cars per day and air quality on deck can be worse than in the world's most polluted cities.
