There is presently no country on the planet that utilizes leaded petroleum, the UN Environment Program has declared.

The profoundly harmful fuel has defiled air, soil and water for right around a century.

It can cause coronary illness, malignancy and stroke, and has been connected to issues with mental health in children.

Most high-income nations had prohibited the fuel by the 1980s, yet it was distinctly in July that Algeria – the last country still to utilize leaded petroleum – ran out.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the eradication of leaded petrol an “international success story”.

“Ending the use of leaded petrol will prevent more than one million premature deaths each year from heart disease, strokes and cancer, and it will protect children whose IQs are damaged by exposure to lead,” he said.

Lead began being added to petroleum in the mid 1920s to further develop motor execution.

The alarm was raised as early as 1924, when five workers were declared dead and dozens more hospitalised after suffering convulsions at a refinery run by the US oil giant Standard Oil.

Yet, in spite of this, lead kept on being added to all petroleum around the world until the 1970s.

More well off nations then, at that point began eliminating its utilization – however after thirty years, in the mid 2000s, there were as yet 86 countries utilizing leaded petroleum.

North Korea, Myanmar and Afghanistan quit selling leaded petroleum by 2016, leaving just a small bunch of nations, including Iraq, Yemen Algeria, actually giving the harmful fuel in the last 50% of the last decade.

The UN’s environmental body Unep has worked with governments, private companies and civic groups to end the use of leaded petrol since 2002.

“Leaded fuel illustrates in a nutshell the kind of mistakes humanity has been making at every level of our societies,” Inger Andersen, Unep executive director, said.

But, she added, eradicating the fuel shows that “humanity can learn from and fix mistakes that we’ve made”.

Environmentalist campaign body Greenpeace hailed what it called “the end of one toxic era”.

“It clearly shows that if we can phase out one of the most dangerous polluting fuels in the 20th century, we can absolutely phase out all fossil fuels,” Thandile Chinyavanhu, climate campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, said.