Persistent Organic Pollutants (Pops)

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)

WWF Position Statement – January 2000

WWF’s mission is to conserve nature and ecological processes, and to address this in a way which benefits human needs and livelihoods. Recognizing that controlling pollution is essential to conserving biological diversity and protecting human health, one of WWF’s goals is to phase out and ban chemicals that threaten life on earth, while working to identify and implement acceptable, effective, and affordable alternatives. This includes alternative methods for producing commercial goods, and less toxic and nonchemical approaches for managing agricultural pests.

Over the last 75 years, modern civilization has developed a host of synthetic chemicals to control disease, to combat insect pests, and to provide unprecedented comfort and convenience in daily life. In the course of this chemical revolution, human societies around the world have released vast amounts of manufactured compounds only to discover later that these miracle chemicals posed unanticipated hazards. Today there is unequivocal evidence that a number of widely distributed man-made chemicals have already caused serious damage to the health of wildlife and people and pose an ongoing danger.

As evidence has mounted about contamination from synthetic chemicals, the dangers posed by one group of chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have become a pressing concern. These carbon-based POPs compounds or mixtures pose a particular hazard because of four common characteristics: they are toxic; they resist the normal processes that break down contaminants in the body and the environment; they are not readily excreted and accumulate in body fat; and they can evaporate and travel great distances. On this last point, an alarming result of the global experiment with POPs is the plight of indigenous people in the Arctic – an environment long-regarded as one of the Earth’s few remaining pristine places. POPs contaminants have arrived in the Arctic by wind and water currents, and have condensed and accumulated there, passing up the food web to the seals, polar bears, and narwhals that are components of the Inuit diet.

Threatening both wildlife and people, the POPs targeted for regulatory action also have endocrine disrupting effects, meaning they can interfere with the activity of hormones in the body. For wildlife, exposure to these chemicals has contributed to stunted penises and reproductive failure in Florida alligators, the extinction of native lake trout in the Great Lakes, the disappearance of mink in the U.S., and the decline of otters in Europe. For people, acute exposure in tropical agriculture to organochlorines has caused large numbers of deaths and injuries, including severe nervous system and liver damage. Such hormone-disrupting contaminants can also be hazardous at extremely low doses and pose a particular danger to those exposed during pregnancy. During prenatal life, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) can disrupt development and undermine the ability to learn, to fight off disease, and to reproduce. They have been linked to immune dysfunction, neurological and behavioral abnormalities, and reproductive disorders in people.

POPs jeopardize human and wildlife health in all parts of the world: in the tropics through the continued use of persistent pesticides; in temperate industrial regions through the release of persistent combustion and manufacturing by-products; in the Arctic and other remote places where globe-hopping contaminants come to rest; and in many regions due to leaking stockpiles.

Responding to the gravity of this threat, the international community has engaged in important steps toward phasing out some of the most dangerous POPs. In June 1998 in Montreal, nearly 100 nations embarked on a series of UNEP-sponsored negotiations with the goal of concluding a binding, global treaty on POPs before the end of 2000. The second round of negotiations took place in Nairobi, Kenya in January 1999, and the third in Geneva in September 1999, with the fourth and final rounds set for March 2000 in Bonn, and for November 2000 in South Africa, with a diplomatic signing ceremony scheduled to occur in Stockholm, Sweden in May 2001. The immediate focus of the negotiations centers on 12 particularly dangerous POPs, but the treaty negotiators also are establishing criteria and procedures for identifying other POPs to add to that list, and are addressing financial and technical assistance – issues that are of critical importance to the ability of developing countries to effectively implement the new treaty.

The 12 POPs targeted in the POPs negotiations include eight pesticides (aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex, and toxaphene), two types of industrial chemicals (polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs and hexachlorobenzene), and two chemical families of unintended by-products of the manufacture, use, and/or combustion of chlorine and chlorine-containing materials (dioxins and furans).

Fortunately, viable alternatives exist for virtually all known uses and sources of these chemicals. Utilizing cultural, biological, physical, and bio-rational control methods, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) offers the agricultural sector with alternatives to POPs pesticides. Industrial chemicals such as PCBs used as insulators in electrical transformers and capacitors can be replaced by biodegradable substitutes such as mineral oils and silicone oils. As unintentional by-products of manufacturing processes and combustion, dioxins and furans pose a more difficult challenge due to their ubiquitous nature. However, dioxin emissions can be significantly reduced through such actions as: moving away from municipal waste incineration and concentrating on expanded recycling, reuse, and composting programs; eliminating the use of chlorine bleaching in pulp and paper manufacturing; and replacing PVC plastic with other plastics that don’t contain chlorine or more traditional materials such as wood, metal, paper, and glass.

Because of their properties, POPs pose a special kind of challenge that makes it impossible for any nation to remedy the problem by acting alone. POPs don’t degrade readily in the body or soil and, even more important, they don’t stay put. They can travel thousands of miles in complex journeys on air, water currents, and through the food web, making one country’s contamination inevitably the world’s problem. Because of the persistence and mobility of POPs, this contamination is now pervasive and global. POPs by their nature are unmanageable substances. Given the immense stakes and the availability of effective alternatives, precaution dictates swift and strong action to eliminate the use and production of this class of chemicals.

WWF believesthat the global POPs treaty under negotiation must achieve several critical objectives:

set the clear and unequivocal global goal of POPs elimination, allowing for a rapid, orderly, yet just program for their total phaseout;
embrace the “precautionary principle,” focusing on prevention and elimination of POPs at their source, with action taken before there is damage or conclusive scientific proof;
ensure that the costs of phaseout and clean-up of POPs and their sources are shared, through extended producer responsibility and the “polluter pays” principle;
ensure that the destruction of POPs stockpiles and associated contamination is carried out expeditiously and thoroughly such that no undestroyed POPs or newly-formed POPs remain;
support and encourage POPs research on health effects and alternatives in developing countries and help those countries shift to alternatives through financial, technological, and capacity-building assistance from industrialized countries, multilateral development banks, and the private sector; and
require industry and governments to undertake aggressive programs to determine the toxicity of many persistent chemicals which have not been adequately tested individually and in combination.

WWF will:

Continue to inform the public and policymakers about the threat of POPs and the viable, successful alternatives currently available;
Work to find additional safe and cost-effective alternatives to persistent pollutants;
Work with developed and developing countries, the private sector, and financial and lending institutions to establish financial sources and mechanisms to help countries, especially in developing regions of the world, shift to alternatives;
Promote research on the science involving POPs and their effect on biodiversity; and
Support efforts to collect reliable data on POPs inventories and stockpiles.

More detailed information on the threat of POPs and the events leading up to the negotiations is available in the WWF issue brief, “Persistent Organic Pollutants: Hand-Me-Down Poisons that Threaten Wildlife and People.” A more recent issue brief, “Successful, Safe, and Sustainable Alternatives to Persistent Organic Pollutants” spells out the various alternatives to POPs. Those documents, and other pertinent information, are available at <