UI pair becoming pollution sleuths

MOSCOW, Idaho – Two University of Idaho professors who helped identify toxic sites in the Silver Valley mining region two decades ago are now using their experience to find some of the world’s most contaminated areas, including in Russia, Africa and India.

Husband-and-wife team Margrit von Braun and Ian von Lindern recently traveled the planet to develop an updated list of the world’s top-10 polluted places for the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit environmental organization focused on solving pollution problems in the developing world.

As a result of their work, von Braun and von Lindern are creating a companion program at the Moscow-based school. They hope to attract international students from regions hit by industrial and mining pollution, develop modern cleanup solutions adapted to the cultural and economic peculiarities of their home sites – and then send the students back to take care of the problems.

“For us it’s an interesting challenge,” von Braun, a dean in the College of Graduate Studies, told the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. “It’s how to apply the science to other parts of the world and make it work.”

In 1984, von Braun and von Lindern established TerraGraphics Environmental Engineering in Moscow and Kellogg, Idaho, to aid cleanup activities at the Bunker Hill Superfund site in North Idaho.

Now, they’ve turned their attention further afield.

The Blacksmith Institute received 300 nominations for most-polluted sites before narrowing the list to 35.

Then, the New York City-based outfit sent the Idaho researchers to identify the 10 worst.

Those tabbed by the couple include well-known areas like Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the site of a 1986 nuclear-reactor disaster. But there are also more obscure places, such as Ranipet in India. There, waste from a leather tannery containing hexavalent chromium and azodyes has contaminated the region’s groundwater, fouled farmland and caused painful, ugly ulcers on local residents’ skin.

In Dzerzinsk, Russia, the Cold War has left its own legacy: Chemicals and toxic byproducts from chemical weapons manufacturing, including sarin and VX, could harm 300,000 residents who draw drinking water from the same aquifers into which these wastes were pumped.

Local standards and lack of financing often hamstring efforts to remedy problems that have been years in the making.

“The international industrial community is very active in contributing to these problems, but they are often absent in the solution,” von Lindern said.

Once a contaminated site becomes well-known, the battle isn’t over, von Braun said, and it’s necessary to keep the problem in the spotlight to avoid complacency.

“It’s one of those things where because a lot of people know about it, people think something is being done,” she said.