Environmental lead risk in the 21st century.

IF 8.9 1区 地球科学 Q1 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Communications Earth & Environment Pub Date : 2025-01-01 Epub Date: 2025-09-30 DOI:10.1038/s43247-025-02735-x
Mengli Chen, Ludovica Gazze, Francis J DiTraglia, Reshmi Das, Jerome Nriagu, Yigal Erel, Edward A Boyle, Caroline M Taylor, Dominik Weiss
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Lead has been central to technological development for centuries; however, its release into the environment and subsequent human exposure pose significant public health risks. The review presented here critically assesses the contemporary environmental lead risk as global lead production and use are rapidly increasing, largely driven by the rising demand for electrification. We show that environmental lead exposure persists today due to legacy contamination, ongoing coal usage, and insufficient protection of workforces during production, use, and recycling of lead-acid batteries and other lead-containing products, particularly in low- and middle- income countries. We estimate that contemporary childhood lead exposure alone leads to an annual global economic loss exceeding $3.4 trillion (2021 US dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity), with pronounced disparities between high- and low- and middle- income countries. To prevent a large-scale resurgence in lead exposure, we identify four critical areas for urgent policy intervention.

21世纪的环境铅风险。
几个世纪以来,铅一直是技术发展的核心;然而,其释放到环境中以及随后的人类接触构成了重大的公共健康风险。在电气化需求不断增长的推动下,全球铅的生产和使用正在迅速增加,本文提出的综述对当代环境铅风险进行了批判性评估。我们表明,由于遗留污染、持续的煤炭使用以及在铅酸电池和其他含铅产品的生产、使用和回收过程中对劳动力的保护不足,特别是在低收入和中等收入国家,环境铅暴露仍然存在。我们估计,仅当代儿童铅暴露就导致全球每年经济损失超过3.4万亿美元(按购买力平价调整后的2021年美元),高收入国家与低收入和中等收入国家之间存在明显差异。为了防止铅暴露的大规模死灰复燃,我们确定了四个紧急政策干预的关键领域。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Communications Earth & Environment
Communications Earth & Environment Earth and Planetary Sciences-General Earth and Planetary Sciences
CiteScore
8.60
自引率
2.50%
发文量
269
审稿时长
26 weeks
期刊介绍: Communications Earth & Environment is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances that bring new insight to a specialized area in Earth science, planetary science or environmental science. Communications Earth & Environment has a 2-year impact factor of 7.9 (2022 Journal Citation Reports®). Articles published in the journal in 2022 were downloaded 1,412,858 times. Median time from submission to the first editorial decision is 8 days.
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