According to the United Nations Environment Program, no country in the world today utilizes leaded gasoline for automobiles and trucks.

For almost a century, hazardous fuel has polluted the air, land, and water.

It's been also related to difficulties with brain development in children, as well as heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

By the 1980s, most high-income nations had outlawed the fuel, but Algeria, the last country using leaded gasoline, ran out in July.

The elimination of leaded gasoline has been hailed as an "international success story" by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

"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.

Five workers were reported dead and scores more were hospitalized after having convulsions at a refinery owned by the US oil company Standard Oil in 1924, raising the alarm.

Despite this, lead was nevertheless added to all gasoline in the world until the 1970s.

Wealthier countries began to phase out their usage, but three decades later, in the early 2000s, 86 countries still used leaded gasoline.

North Korea, Myanmar, and Afghanistan all stopped selling leaded gasoline by 2016, leaving only a few nations, such as Iraq, Yemen, and Algeria, to do so in the latter half of the last decade.

Since 2002, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has worked with governments, private companies, and civic groups to phase out the use of leaded gasoline.

"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.