Finding informal car-battery recycling yards, a major cause of severe lead poisoning, in countries where nobody has mapped them
- Good it would do
- 4 / 5
- Can AI help
- 3 / 5
- How neglected
- 4 / 5
- Can we check it
- 4 / 5
Why it's stuck
These backyard operations are too small to see from satellites and are missing from official registers. One estimate puts 6 to 17 million people at risk.
What we'd try
Combine Pure Earth's list of several thousand field-assessed toxic sites with high-resolution satellite imagery, local-language map and business listings, night lights and population data to train much larger models and build the first public benchmark. Check on held-out confirmed sites in other countries, then spot checks with portable X-ray lead meters by partner groups.
What could stop us
Labelled sites are few and mostly South Asian, Pure Earth's site list may not be open, and the 2026 paper barely beat a simple baseline.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04215
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