Global Meeting Seeks Ways to Cope With Industrial Toxins

POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants)

Michael Kilian / Chicago Tribune 3dec00

WASHINGTON --  The U.S. and more than 100 other nations will meet in Johannesburg on Monday in hopes of stemming a menace to the environment that is rapidly poisoning the Arctic and threatening the Great Lakes.

Persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, are highly toxic pesticides and industrial chemicals that do not decompose.

Produced by industrial and developing nations, the pollutants are carried by ocean and air currents to the once pristine Arctic and deposited there in alarming quantities.

The POPs, which include DDT, chlordane and industrial PCBs, have been passed up the food chain to human populations, invading body fat and vital organs, and now pose a health danger to Alaskan and Canadian native people as well as others in the region who depend on fish and game.

"They're showing up in mother's milk," said acting Assistant Interior Secretary Lisa Guide, who toured areas of Alaska's north coast last summer.

According to Guide, these contaminants have been shown to reduce a woman's ability to conceive and carry babies. They also suppress the immune system, impair brain function, slow growth rates, create developmental abnormalities and are known or suspected carcinogens.

Because the U.S. government only recently became aware of the extent of the problem, no comprehensive American studies have been undertaken to determine how much damage the POPs have caused.

Recent surveys by the Canadian government have found that breast milk from Canadian Inuit women has five times the levels of polychlorinated biphenyl, an industrial pollutant known as PCB, as the milk of women in southern Canada.

"There are no . . . grocery stores for these people," said Patricia Cochran, executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. "More than 90 percent of the diet of our community comes from traditional foods."

She said observations by locals have backed up scientific concerns.

"Animal skins are so thin that women making mukluks can see through it," she said. "People are seeing many, many species with anomalies. Fish are being reported with tumors, lesions, lumps and changes in liver condition. People have reported bone marrow loss in caribou."

The problem is not confined to the Arctic. Though the U.S. and Canada eliminated much of the industrial pollution that contaminated the Great Lakes and adjoining river systems, airborne POPs transported by Arctic airin winter are redeposited in these waters.

"Lake Superior has the least number of local [pollution] sources of the Great Lakes but still has a major problem with persistent toxic substances because airborne pollutants settle on its large surface area," said Brooks Yeager, deputy assistant secretary of state for the environment and the leader of the U.S. delegation to the South African talks.

"We've experienced this in places like the Great Lakes and Alaska as part of a contaminants problem we can't deal with ourselves," Yeager said. "Even if we eliminated all our local sources of the pollution, if we don't have any help in getting at the global problem, then POPs will continue to be a Great Lakes problem."

According to Carl Hild, senior researcher for the Institute for Circumpolar Studies, pollution is now highly visible in the Arctic though the area is supposedly an industry-free, purely natural environment.

"People have come up to measure pristine air and found haze," he said. "Air currents bring these atmospheric particles up from lower latitudes. They move into the Arctic in the wintertime. We have the Arctic haze in extremely cold air that holds a lot of material. This gets very dense and this pollution piles up all winter long. It comes from Europe. It comes from Asia. It comes from North America. In the springtime, we have the Arctic sunrise effect. The air becomes less dense and a lot of this pollution falls out onto the ground and runs off into the rivers and ocean. It expands and breaks up over the upper Great Lakes."

Hind said it has been only within the last decade that scientists have become aware of the extent of the problem because scientific studies in the harsh climate and topography of the Arctic are very difficult and expensive.

He said more study is imperative.

The goal of the Johannesburg conference is a global treaty that will ban the production or use of 12 pesticides, industrial chemicals or chemical byproducts worldwide.

These include DDT and chlordane, industrial PCBs and HCB, and dioxins produced as industrial waste. The treaty would seek to curb pollution from arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury deposits as well.

According to Yeager, the U.S., Canada and most European nations have already eliminated most local sources of this contamination, especially DDT pesticides and PCB industrial waste.

But other major countries around the world have few restrictions on their use.

"China and India are clearly major players," Yeager said. "China manufactures a number of these chemicals and uses them extensively. India uses them, as do other emerging industrial economies. Brazil is important for similar reasons. A solution is not possible without their cooperation, so they're very important."

According to Hind, Russia is also a major contributor to the contamination, as most of that country's polluted rivers run north into the Arctic.

Though talks on halting global warming broke down last month because of differences between the U.S. and Europe, Yeager said he is optimistic progress against POPs will be made at Johannesburg.

He said most developing nations have shown concern about the problem but have made clear that their cooperation is contingent on large-scale financial and technical assistance from the U.S. and other industrial nations.

This could run to hundreds of millions of dollars.

"They understand this is an important problem, but on a scale of their environmental problems, this is not the most important, and they have very few resources to attack it with," Yeager said.