IPEN has undertaken three influential projects to build the capacity of nongovernmental (NGOs) in developing countries and countries in economic transition to engage in toxic pollution and heavy metals (mercury) elimination issues.
Since 2005, IPEN has been carrying out sampling projects in countries around the world to test for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and other toxic chemicals.
The term 'nanotechnology' describes materials, systems and processes that exist or operate at the extremely small scale of a few hundred nanometres or less. To put a nanometre in context: a strand of DNA is 2.5nm wide, a red blood cell is 7,000 nm and a human hair is 80,000 nm wide.
Pesticides, chemical preparations for destroying plant, fungal, or animal pests,
Heavy metals are a loosely defined subset of elements with metallic properties and relatively high densities or relative atomic weights, some of which are dangerous to health and / or the environment.
IPEN's work on heavy metals currently focuses on lead (specifically, eliminating lead from paint) and mercury (including sampling of mercury in fish and human hair and work on the international mercury treaty), although IPEN has also produced data about arsenic and cadmium via product testing with a x-ray fluorescence machine.
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are a class of highly hazardous chemical pollutants that are recognized as a serious, global threat to human health and to ecosystems. POPs are substances that specifically:
Industrial chemicals are chemicals that are developed for use in the industrial processing of chemicals. Some industrial chemicals are only used in industrial production processes while many others are used as ingredients in the commercial products that appear in consumer markets.
Some persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are by-products that were produced unintentionally and released to the environment during combustion or during some chemical processes. For example, dioxins, furans, alpha-HCH, and beta-HCH are never intentionally produced (except for laboratory purposes). Dioxin, for example, one of the original "Dirty Dozen" of the Stockholm Convention, is typically produced during incineration. Two others, PCBs and HCB, are produced both intentionally and unintentionally.
