Pure Earth
environmental organization
Pure Earth (originally Blacksmith Institute) is a New York City–based international nonprofit founded in 1999 that works to identify and address pollution-related issues in low- and middle-income countries. Pure Earth's work focuses on two key pollutants: lead and mercury.
The Global Lead Program works on reducing lead poisoning from three key sources poisoning millions of children in low- and middle-income countries: the unsafe and informal recycling of used lead-acid batteries, lead-glazed pottery, and contaminated spices.
The Global Mercury Program works to reduce mercury from artisanal and small scale gold mining communities around the world by training miners to go mercury-free, and helping miners in the Amazon rainforest restore land damaged by mining.
Pure Earth is known for the Toxic Sites Identification Program, a global movement to find and clean up some of the world's most toxic sites. The program has trained over 500 pollution investigators and 90 government representatives worldwide, who have identified and mapped over 5000 toxic hotspots in communities around the world. The data they collect has built an "unprecedented public database of toxic sites" that helps local communities and governments plan clean up to protect residents.
Pure Earth is also known for initiating the Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, which in turn led to the formation of The Lancet Commission on pollution and health and the publication of a report from the Lancet Commission on health and pollution concluding in 2017 that pollution is the largest environmental cause of death in the world, killing three times more people than AIDS/HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than war and other forms of violence.
In 2015, Pure Earth advocated for broadening the scope of toxic pollution addressed in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. In 2020, Pure Earth and UNICEF issued an urgent call to protect 800 million children poisoned by lead, following the publication of their joint report: The Toxic Truth: Children’s exposure to lead pollution undermines a generation of potential.
“Pure Earth” enters the record as environmental organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pure, Earth and environmental can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Pure Earth” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Pure, Earth and environmental provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q145590. VIAF identifies the subject as 8029147425869545040009. The Library of Congress control number is n2016187573. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2017, 2015 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pure Earth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.