Norilsk Mines Metals From Pollution

By 2007, industrial nickel smelting had polluted Norilsk in Arctic Russia so severely that workers dredged city ponds to recover valuable heavy metals from the sediment. Norilsk, the world's northernmost city with more than 100,000 residents, ranked among Earth's most polluted cities, while its industrial complex produced an estimated 1 percent of global sulfur dioxide emissions. Pollution had left no living trees for roughly 30 miles and concentrated metals such as platinum and palladium in the topsoil so heavily that extracting them became economically feasible. Residents faced this contaminated landscape while temperatures often fell below -25 degrees Celsius (-13 degrees Fahrenheit).

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