ENVIRONMENTALISTS on Monday said several smoke-belching factories still continue operating despite the absence of the required permit to operate and environmental clearance certificate from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Environmental Management Bureau.
“We were shocked to discover that smoke-belching factories are continuously operating in our country without the required documents from the government. Even worst, some of them do not possess the mandatory ECC,” said Manuel Galvez, Clean Air Philippines Movement Inc. president.
“The massive air pollution coming from such factories poses as a clear and present danger not only to the environment, but also to the health and life of factory workers inside the establishments, as well as the people in the community where the factories are located,” Galvez added.
He was referring to factories run by Melter Steel Corp., Real Steel Corp., Wan Chiong Steel Corp., Davao Mighty Steel Corp. and MetroDragon Steel Corp., for violation of the Clean Air Act and the provisions in the ECC’s environmental impact assessment plan.
“We filed the necessary complaints against certain smoke-belching factories nationwide months ago, but until now we are still awaiting the decisive action of EMB to swiftly resolve the deadly air pollution that the factories are producing,” Galvez said.
“On behalf of the unwilling victims who are continuously being exposed to the dangerous air pollution from these establishments, we are appealing to government to immediately put a stop to this environmental crime,” he added.
“Each day of inaction clearly results in another day of life-threatening air pollution exposure that our people are subjected to,” Galvez said.
One out of every six premature deaths in the world, or about nine million, could be attributed to disease from toxic exposure, according to a major study released in 2015 in the Lancet medical journal.
The financial cost from pollution-related death, sickness and welfare is equally massive, the report said, costing some $4.6 trillion in annual losses, or about 6.2 percent of the global economy.
“There’s been a lot of study of pollution, but it’s never received the resources or level of attention as, say, AIDS or climate change,” said epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and the lead author on the report.
The report marks the first attempt to pull together data on disease and death caused by all forms of pollution combined.
“Pollution is a massive problem that people aren’t seeing because they’re looking at scattered bits of it,”’ Landrigan said.
Experts say the nine million premature deaths the study found was just a partial estimate, and the number of people killed by pollution is undoubtedly higher and will be quantified once more research is done and new methods of assessing harmful impacts are developed.
Areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to even set up air pollution monitoring systems, the Lancet report added. Soil pollution has received scant attention. And there are still plenty of potential toxins still being ignored, with less than half of the 5,000 new chemicals widely dispersed throughout the environment since 1950 having been tested for safety or toxicity.
“In the West, we got the lead out of the gasoline, so we thought lead was handled. We got rid of the burning rivers, cleaned up the worst of the toxic sites. And then all of those discussions went into the background”’ just as industry began booming in developing nations, said Richard Fuller, head of the global toxic watchdog Pure Earth and one of the 47 scientists, policy makers and public health experts who contributed to the 51-page report.
“To some extent these countries look to the West for examples and discussion, and we’d dropped it,”’ Fuller said.
Asia and Africa are the regions putting the most people at risk, the study found, while India tops the list of individual countries.
One out of every four premature deaths in India in 2015, or some 2.5 million, was attributed to pollution. China’s environment was the second deadliest, with more than 1.8 million premature deaths, or one in five, blamed on pollution-related illness, the study found.
Several other countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, North Korea, South Sudan and Haiti also see nearly a fifth of their premature deaths caused by pollution. Still, many poorer countries have yet to make pollution control a priority, experts say.
