Dioxins Intro - Dioxin Sources - Achieving Zero Dioxin - Dioxin Elimination Report - Health & Environmental Effects - What are POPs? - POPs Sources - Eliminating POPs

Persistent Organic Pollutants - or POPs - are highly toxic, synthetic chemicals that can be found in human and wildlife body tissue the world over. From the North Pole to the deep ocean, POPs can be found in our air, our water, even the food we eat.

Since the boom of the chemical industry, an enormous amount of POPs have been produced, and released into the environment: up chimney stacks, down outflow pipes, in agricultural sprays. POPS are contained in some consumer products, such as computers, paints and household products, and can also find their way into the environment when products like these are used, disposed in landfill or incinerated.

POPs: GLOBE-TROTTING KILLERS

Once released into the environment, POPs can travel vast distances across air and sea currents - meaning that they not only contaminate the immediate surroundings of the chemical plants where they are produced, but also pristine and remote environments like the Arctic, Antarctic, mountain ranges and the oceans. POPs evaporate in warm areas and less so in colder climes, so they are found in high concentrations near pristine areas like the North Pole. Because of geographical and meteorological factors, the Arctic is a global sink for chemical contaminants, that get transported far from their source. Studies on atmospheric transport rates have shown that polluted air masses can reach the Arctic from Asia and Europe within two to 10 days.

TOXIC, PERSISTENT, FAT LOVING POPs

POPs have a number of other insidious qualities that combine to give them a devastating effect on our global environment. They are extremely toxic even at very low concentrations. They build-up - or bio-accumulate - in the environment, and can take decades, possibly centuries, to break down. Because they remain in the environment for so long, POPs can build up for decades after they were first used.

POPs dissolve easily in fats. As a result; they accumulate in the fatty tissues of animals or humans. So animals with high fat contents, like humans, whales, polar bears or dolphins, are particularly susceptible to the build up of POPs.

As POPs travel up the food chain - if an animal with POPs in its body tissue, is eaten by another animal, for instance - they biomagnify, or multiply in concentration, by factors of millions, as they go. This means that long-living animals, at the top of the food chain - humans, polar bears, beluga whales - will accumulate the highest levels of POPs.

Because of their insidious, globe-trotting nature, POPs are a global problem, that need a global solution.