The Stockholm Convention established a science-based process for new persistent organic pollutants (POPs) under the Stockholm Convention. The Convention recognizes that a lack of full scientific certainty should not prevent a candidate substance from proceeding in the evaluation or listing and clearly mandates Parties to decide on listing “in a precautionary manner.” This new Guide highlights three new candidates for listing in the Convention in 2017 - decabromodiphenyl ether (DecaBDE), short-chain chlorinated paraffins (SCCPs), and hexachlorobutadiene (HCBD) - and provides the POPs Review Committee's recommendation for which annex the POPs should be listed under in the Convention, the chemicals' uses, alternatives, adverse effects, and more.
IPEN and colleagues in the European Union (EU) sent a letter to Representatives of the European Commission and EU Member States urging them to support decisions at the upcoming Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions' Conference of the Parties that uphold Convention principles and EU commitments to protect human health and the environment.
Non-government organizations in Southeast Asia have joined forces to curb a preventable source of plastic pollution of the marine environment: microparticles of plastic, or microplastics, in cosmetics.
Through an online petition at Avaaz, the groups are urging the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a huge market of over 500 million consumers, to prohibit microplastics in the production of personal care and cosmetic products (PCCPs).
This video is an introduction to the United Nations Environment Programme's Dioxin Toolkit (2013). It offers a brief history of the Toolkit, including its relationship to the Stockholm Convention, and a step-by-step search of the Toolkit for information on identifying sources of dioxins and other unintentional POPs addressed by the Convention.