Why We Prioritize Lead Poisoning
Lead exposure is a significant public health challenge in LMICs, where it disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, particularly children. In these regions, lead contamination is often linked to poorly regulated industrial activities, and the widespread use of lead in consumer goods such as foods, spices, cosmetics, toys, cookware and paints. Lead exposure is responsible for an estimated 3.5 million deaths each year. More than one billion children are believed to have elevated blood lead levels, damaging brain development, limiting learning and educational attainment, reducing earnings, and increasing the risk of lifelong illness and death. This has broad economic impacts, with lead poisoning estimated to have an economic cost of $6 trillion annually. Stealing the potential of one child is a tragedy; doing it to a billion children sabotages the trajectory of entire nations and robs a generation of its intellectual capital.
We prioritize lead poisoning not only because its toll is immense, but also because it is solvable today, with the tools we already have. Preventing lead poisoning does not require new technologies or the reordering of global economies. It just requires our will to act. And the benefits are enormous. By preventing lead exposure, our work improves health, educational outcomes, and economic development. Children can reach their full cognitive and emotional potential, and societies are better equipped to solve the next set of challenges they face.
Global Lead Program
Pure Earth’s Global Lead Program aims to prevent and reduce lead poisoning in low- and middle-income countries by removing lead contamination sources and/or by reducing human exposure to them. We achieve this through pragmatic interventions that generate data and knowledge, improve regulatory frameworks, remediate lead hazards, improve the environmental performance of industry, facilitate the adoption of lead substitutes in production processes (e.g., pottery glaze), and increase resources to address lead pollution.
Global Mercury Program
Pure Earth’s Global Mercury Program strategy focuses on decreasing mercury emissions to the environment from the main source of pollution- artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM)—and reducing human exposures with an emphasis on the most severely affected populations, namely miners and surrounding communities. This is achieved by training legal artisanal and small-scale gold miners on mercury-free mining techniques, restoring degraded mining sites, engaging the jewelry industry, and promoting the recovery and responsible management of mercury from contaminated artisanal gold mining tailings.
How Pure Earth Prioritizes Locations
Pure Earth selects the locations in which we work using two main criteria: Impact Potential and Tractability. For lead, Impact Potential considers quantitative factors such as the number of children affected by elevated blood lead levels, the prevalence (%) of children affected, and the average severity of exposure. For mercury, such data are less available, so the Impact Potential considers the total estimated tonnage of mercury used and released from artisanal and small-scale gold mining as a proxy for exposure data.
Tractability assesses qualitative feasibility factors such as government commitment and readiness; local partner capacity to implement and sustain interventions; safety of staff and collaborators; operational feasibility factors such as specialized equipment availability, local skills, stable governance, rule of law, transportation access, and operational costs; and socioeconomic context. Pure Earth is also responsive to donor interests and often works with our donors to align project locations with our mutual interests and priorities.