Governments first showed their concern on the widespread environmental pollution in the early 1970s in the lead up to the UNEP Stockholm Convention on the Human Environment. Some thirty years later, in December 2000, after three years of negotiations, countries that had been obstructing the negotiations - the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand - bowed to international pressure and finally agreed to the draft text of the first global treaty to eliminate POPs. On May 22-23rd 2001, these same 120 countries will meet again in the Baltic city of Stockholm to sign the new treaty, to be called the Stockholm Convention. The birthplace of awareness of the problem is to become the birthplace of the solution.

POPs Properties

POPs are some of the most problematic chemicals to which natural systems can be exposed. They have all of the three following characteristics which makes them particularly dangerous:

Toxicity: disrupts biological systems causing various toxic effects
Persistence: POPs are stable compounds that resist natural breakdown processes so they persist and exert their poisonous effects on the environment for long periods of time.
Bioaccumulation: POPs build up and concentrate in fatty substances such as edible oils, milk, butter, meat, blubber and human tissue. The highest levels of POPs are found in predator animals at the top of the food chain such as polar bears, toothed whales, seals and humans. This is because POPS build up when one animal eats another that is contaminated.

POPs: Globe-Trotting Killers
POPs are global contaminants. As well as contaminating local areas close to where they are released they are also transported thousands of kilometres in rivers and on air and ocean currents. They migrate from warmer regions of the globe towards colder regions where they effectively condense and are deposited once again on the Earth's surface. Today, they have even contaminated remote regions, such as the arctic, where there is very little industrial activity.

POPs: Health Impacts
There is now hard scientific evidence that POPs are endangering people and wildlife all over the world. The primarily source of human exposure to POPs is through food, in particular fatty foods like meat, fish and dairy products.

In June 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that, due to dioxin exposure, people who eat a lot of fatty foods face a cancer risk which may be at least as high as one in a thousand.

Other health problems related to POPs exposure include:
Endocrine disruption, learning disorders, reproductive problems such as infertility immune system changes, endometriosis and increased incidence of diabetes.

The developing young of both wildlife and humans are the most vulnerable to toxic effects of POPs. The pollutants are passed to the foetus in the womb from a mother's body via the placenta and through breast milk to the infant. Evidence suggests that nursing children can exceed the World Health Organisation's recommended tolerable daily intake of the persistent organic pollutant, dioxin, by up to 144 times.

POPS: The Treaty
The Stockholm Convention will provide a solid basis on which to work towards solving the POPs problem. It will require a radical change in chemical policy and industrial practices worldwide as it aims to;
• Ban New POPs - prevent the manufacture and use of new chemicals that have POPs characteristics (coming out of research and development). This sends a clear message to the chemical industry that it can no longer use the environment and human health as a large-scale laboratory to test its chemicals.

• Eliminate Existing POPs - eliminate all existing POPs starting with a list of 12 (known as "the Dirty Dozen") that have been identified by the UNEP as in need of urgent action.

Other existing chemicals with POPs characteristics, such as brominated flame retardants, used in soft furnishings and electrical equipment, can be added to the treaty's elimination list, based on the precautionary approach. This recognises that lack of scientific certainty should not prevent action being taken to protect against harm. In the past, absolute scientific proof that a chemical causes harm to people and the environment has been required before the problem has been considered, by which point it is too late to prevent that harm from occurring

The Dirty Dozen list includes:

1. Chemicals deliberately produced by industry:
Eight pesticides: aldrin, endrin, toxaphene, chlordane, dieldrin, heptachol, mirex, DDT and the industrial chemicals: hexachlorobenzene and PCBs.

The manufacture and use of most of the POPs pesticides has already been banned in most countries but stockpiles still exist and are causing problems to people exposed to them or who handle them improperly. Research into the location of all stockpiles of POPs pesticides worldwide will be required under the treaty and, crucially, methods of disposal must be agreed. The treaty recognises that waste incineration is a significant source of dioxins, furans, hexachlorobenzenes and PCBs. If the POPs stockpiles are incinerated, the contamination will not be destroyed but more POPs will be spread into the environment. The POPs treaty requires destruction of stockpiles that does not create POPS or cause POPs to persist.

Some countries will be permitted to continue using some of the above POPs for specific uses, such as DDT for malaria control. Yet such uses will be restricted and only permitted for a certain amount of time, to be agreed at regular meetings of the governing body of the convention.

2. Chemicals released as unwanted industrial by-products:
PBCs, hexachlorobenzenes, dioxins and furans

All countries have agreed that, in order to work towards dioxin elimination, there is a need to replace all materials, products and production processes that release dioxins and replace them with substitutes that do not release them. Each country will have to start by compiling inventories outlining which of their industries release dioxins. This will include all industrial sectors that use chlorine, such as the PVC plastics and pulp and paper bleaching industries. It will also include incineration plants that burn municipal, medical or hazardous wastes that contain chlorine.

Financial Assistance for POPs Elimination:
An agreement has been reached that developing countries and countries in economic transition will receive financial and technical assistance from richer nations to clean up POPs contamination and to reform industry to ban POPs. Greenpeace supports this provision and stresses that countries that developed the technologies and manufactured the chemicals that caused the POPs problem should pay their share in solving it.

Conclusion:
Greenpeace supports the Stockholm Convention and considers that it provides a solid basis on which to work towards the elimination of POPs. Yet it stresses that treaties are not solutions in themselves as words alone are not enough to clean the environment. They are only effective if governments turn them into concrete actions and implement industrial and real regulatory change based upon the precautionary principle.

Greenpeace also stresses the urgent need for immediate action to eliminate POPs. Once it is signed, the treaty must be ratified by 50 countries to enter into legal force. This may take at least three years during which time the burden of POPs will continue to increase in the global environment unless action is taken.

Therefore Greenpeace is calling on:

• All governments attending the Stockholm meeting to sign the POPs treaty
• All governments and industry to act immediately to eliminate POPs. This will require an immediate end to the expansion of known or suspected POPs sources and the elimination of all known existing sources of POPs. It will also require that existing stockpiles of POPs are destroyed by means other than incineration which does not destroy POPs but causes their further formation and spreads them more widely into the environment.
• All governments to commit to the final elimination of all POPs within one generation (25 years).