In the early twenty, this industry started its walking in Hazaribagh. According to the ministry of industry, there were only 30 tanneries owned by west Pakistani businessman in Hazaribagh during 1965. There are about 270 tanneries in the whole Bangladesh. The significant portions of the tanneries (90% of 270) are located in Hazaribagh, a very densely populated area in the megacity of Dhaka in Bangladesh. This industry is located in 25 hectares of land in Hazaribag. There is no denying that most of the urban-based industries in Bangladesh pollute environment. Of them, tanneries do the extreme damage. It has devastating effects on environmental factor like water, soil, air, plants, human beings and other ecological factors. Water in the river Buriganga is like more than poison that is black in color. The physical look and smell of the area is frightening and intolerable.

In a survey of UN Food and Agriculture Organization, it has been identified that more than 7.70 million liter liquid waste and 88 MT solid wastes are produced by this industry everyday only by the tanneries located in Hazaribagh. So think, if these wastes are thrown to the river every day, what will happen to its aquatic plants? Many chemical like sodium sulfide, sodium metabisulfite, sulfuric acid, basic chromium sulfate, acid dyes and formic acid that are very detrimental to the environment, are mixed into the water and soil. The liquid waste causes immense harm to the fish and other living spices in the water. The situation of the environment gets worsened during the rainy season. Each and every business (as per law of labor) should provide the safety of their employee. But the workers who use these chemicals do not have any protective masks and training for using it. They regularly inhale the poisonous and dying agents. That’s why most of them are losing their longevity and are being affected by many incurable and dreadful diseases like skin cancer, bronchitis, agama, high blood pressure, dermatitis, skin lesion etc. Many of them have lost their fingers to run the machine and many workers have almost lost their sight to use the poisonous gas in the process.

The polluted air often causes diarrhea, stomach problem and nausea when it goes into human body. Chemical analysis suggests that tannery wastes are characterized by strong color, high biochemical oxygen demand, high PH and high dissolved salts. Disposal of these wastes into water course or onto land, with or without prior sedimentation, creates a great problem in the environment in the vicinity. During the dry season the waste water is flushed out into the river causing pollution of the river water and affecting the aquatic flora and fauna further. The dumping of the solid wastes is seriously affecting the soil and plants, besides vitiating the air, groundwater and human health. Talking to several people of Hazaribagh, I have gathered a terrific experience that they use the river water for domestic purposes in the dry season when there is a lack of water. As a result, they are also facing food poisoning. Above all, the total environment of this Hazaribagh area is no more suitable for healthy living. Rather, the basic elements of the environment are almost ruined.

The Dhaka city dwellers want to get rid of this unhygienic ecology. If this situation goes on, Dhaka will soon be a rejected city. Although our government has taken an initiative to relocation of tannery industry from the Bangladesh capital city’s Hazaribagh to suburban Savar, it is being delayed for years since the government is yet to set up a common effluent treatment plant (CETP) at the new site. The cost of shifting and the unwillingness of the owner and the mortgage bank are the basic drawbacks for shifting. Besides a lot of families are now dependent on this industry. It is difficult for them to be shifted there. We all expect improve leather processing technologies that will cause least pollution because nobody want to breathe in the poisoned air. So the government should take some pragmatic steps so that environment is saved to save human beings.

Thick black warts tattoo her palms and fingers, the result of drinking arsenic-laced well water for years. It’s a legacy that new research has linked to 1 in 5 deaths among those exposed inBangladesh – an impoverished country where up to half of its 150 million people have guzzled tainted groundwater.

The World Health Organization has called it “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history,” as countless new wells continue to be dug here daily without testing the water for toxins.

“The magnitude of the arsenic problem is 50 times worse thanChernobyl,” said Richard Wilson, president of the nonprofitArsenic Foundation and a physics professor emeritus at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “But it doesn’t have 50 times the attention paid to it.”

The issue surfaced about two decades ago, after some 10 million shallow hand-pump wells like Bibi’s were sunk across the country in the 1970s with money from international donors.

The wells were meant to provide clean drinking water to help prevent deadly waterborne diseases, such as cholera. But they unintentionally tapped into arsenic deposits in the ground, releasing the odorless, colorless and tasteless toxin into water used for drinking and cooking. Arsenic has been linked to cancers, liver ailments, skin diseases, heart problems and other health issues.

The new research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and published online June 19 inThe Lancet medical journal, is the first to examine how drinking arsenic-contaminated water over time shaves years off lives.

For the nearly 12,000 people followed over 10 years in the country’s Araihazar region east of the capital, researchers found that even low doses of arsenic in drinking water could increase the chances of early death. The study also found that damage on all levels appears to be permanent.

“It’s similar to tobacco smoking. Once you smoke for 20 years and then you stop smoking, your risk of getting tobacco-induced cancer over the next decade will still be high,” co-author Habibul Ahsan from the University of Chicago’s Center for Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention said by phone. “Even if, say, for some miracle all the individuals are provided arsenic-free water from tomorrow, these people will also be at a higher risk of dying for many years to come.”

More than 75 percent of those studied drank arsenic-contaminated water above WHO’s recommended safe limits. About a quarter of deaths from chronic illnesses and a fifth of the total 407 adult deaths were attributed to arsenic.

The environmental group on Wednesday presented Stelmach's spokesman, Jerry Bellikka, with two enlarged photos of tar-covered ducks, hoping the premier would take a look at the images.

They were entered as evidence at the ongoing trial against Syncrude, which faces environmental charges related to the April 2008 incident in which 1,600 ducks died in its Aurora tailings pond.

"It's time he stops hiding from these images. It's time he stops denying that these problems exist and starts admitting the problem," said Mike Hudema, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner.

Whether Stelmach has or hasn't seen the images has been a source of controversy at the legislature this week.

On Monday, Stelmach told reporters he had not seen the pictures. The following day, he clarified his remarks, saying he hadn't seen recent photos prior to their admission as evidence in the Syncrude trial.

French Greenpeace activists blocked a train carrying some 650 metric tons of radioactive waste in protest against the export of nuclear waste to Russia, the Greenpeace Russia website said.

A shipment of depleted uranium hexafluoride was due to be loaded onto the Captain Kuroptev in the port of Le Havre and sent to St. Petersburg. However, the ship weighed anchor and headed towards the port of Montoir-de-Bretagne pursued by the Greenpeace ship Esperanza.

The Greenpeace statement said the activists chained themselves to railway tracks, delaying rail traffic towards Montoir-de-Bretagne for more than four hours.

The activists said that the radioactive nuclear waste shipment from their country to Russia violates French law and an EU directive banning the import and export of dangerous waste.

In February, activists conducted several protests against nuclear waste transportation to Russia and its storage in the country.

The dangerous cargo belongs to the French nuclear group Areva, which has a contract with Russia, the only country in the world accepting uranium hexafluoride in industrial quantities. The deal lasts until at least 2014 so a few thousand tons of depleted uranium may be transported to the country.

Areva claims the waste is send to Russia for reprocessing and is to be returned to France, but critics say it is actually just waste. Over the past 15 years, Areva and its Brussels-based counterpart Urenco have dumped 140,000 tons of waste in Russia.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The violent threats are not what bother Michael Mann the most. He's used to them.

Instead, it's the fact that his life's work — the effort to stop global warming — has been under siege since last fall. That's when Mann suddenly found himself in the middle of the so-called "climategate" scandal, in which more than 1,000 e-mails among top climate scientists — including Mann — were obtained illegally by hackers and published on the Internet.

The e-mails showed some of the scientists sharing doubts about just how fast the Earth's temperature is rising, questioning the work of other researchers and refusing to share data with the public. Critics, including Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., have seized on the e-mails as proof that Mann and his colleagues deliberately exaggerated the scientific case behind global warming.

In a rare extended interview, Mann acknowledges "minor" errors but says he has been bewildered by the criticism — including a deluge of correspondence sent to his Pennsylvania State University office that, he says, occasionally has turned ugly.

"I've developed a thick skin," Mann says. "Frankly, I'm more worried that these people are succeeding in creating doubt in the minds of the public, when there really shouldn't be any."

MORE: Climate research e-mail controversy simmers CLIMATE DEBATE: Religious groups get involved CHICKEN MANURE: Could it help curb climate change?

Indeed, the controversy has contributed to a fundamental shift in efforts to stop global warming, forcing environmentalists to scale down long-held ambitions and try to win back an increasingly skeptical American public. Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, says recent events may be causing "the death of the global warming movement as we know it."

Others don't go quite that far, but there have been setbacks:

• Citing doubts raised by the "climategate" e-mails, state governments in Texas, Virginia and Alabama filed legal challenges last month to stop the federal government from regulating carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The challenges could force the Obama administration to modify or abandon its plans to regulate carbon emissions from factories and vehicles.

• Senate Democrats including John Kerry of Massachusetts have set aside House legislation that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from factories and other businesses nationwide. They are pursuing a new bill that may instead focus on utility companies, Kerry says.

• After more than a decade of fruitless efforts to negotiate a binding global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, culminating in last December's summit in Copenhagen, the USA may now pursue a more narrow strategy, State Department climate change envoy Todd Stern said last month. He said future talks might be limited to a smaller group of major polluters such as the USA and China — and leave out small countries that blocked a deal at Copenhagen, such as Sudan.

• The United Nations announced Wednesday that it would bring in an outside panel of scientists to help review an occasional study put together by a U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The study was regarded as the gold standard of climate science until several errors came to light this year.