Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)
WWF Position Statement – January 2000
WWF’s mission is to conserve nature and ecological processes, and to address this in a way which benefits
human needs and livelihoods. Recognizing that controlling pollution is essential to conserving biological
diversity and protecting human health, one of WWF’s goals is to phase out and ban chemicals that threaten life
on earth, while working to identify and implement acceptable, effective, and affordable alternatives. This
includes alternative methods for producing commercial goods, and less toxic and nonchemical approaches for
managing agricultural pests.
Over the last 75 years, modern civilization has developed a host of synthetic chemicals to control disease, to
combat insect pests, and to provide unprecedented comfort and convenience in daily life. In the course of this
chemical revolution, human societies around the world have released vast amounts of manufactured compounds
only to discover later that these miracle chemicals posed unanticipated hazards. Today there is unequivocal
evidence that a number of widely distributed man-made chemicals have already caused serious damage to the
health of wildlife and people and pose an ongoing danger.
As evidence has mounted about contamination from synthetic chemicals, the dangers posed by one group of
chemicals called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have become a pressing concern. These carbon-based
POPs compounds or mixtures pose a particular hazard because of four common characteristics: they are toxic;
they resist the normal processes that break down contaminants in the body and the environment; they are not
readily excreted and accumulate in body fat; and they can evaporate and travel great distances. On this last
point, an alarming result of the global experiment with POPs is the plight of indigenous people in the Arctic – an
environment long-regarded as one of the Earth’s few remaining pristine places. POPs contaminants have
arrived in the Arctic by wind and water currents, and have condensed and accumulated there, passing up the
food web to the seals, polar bears, and narwhals that are components of the Inuit diet.
Threatening both wildlife and people, the POPs targeted for regulatory action also have endocrine disrupting
effects, meaning they can interfere with the activity of hormones in the body. For wildlife, exposure to these
chemicals has contributed to stunted penises and reproductive failure in Florida alligators, the extinction of
native lake trout in the Great Lakes, the disappearance of mink in the U.S., and the decline of otters in Europe.
For people, acute exposure in tropical agriculture to organochlorines has caused large numbers of deaths and
injuries, including severe nervous system and liver damage. Such hormone-disrupting contaminants can also be
hazardous at extremely low doses and pose a particular danger to those exposed during pregnancy. During
prenatal life, endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) can disrupt development and undermine the ability to
learn, to fight off disease, and to reproduce. They have been linked to immune dysfunction, neurological and
behavioral abnormalities, and reproductive disorders in people.
POPs jeopardize human and wildlife health in all parts of the world: in the tropics through the continued use of
persistent pesticides; in temperate industrial regions through the release of persistent combustion and
manufacturing by-products; in the Arctic and other remote places where globe-hopping contaminants come to
rest; and in many regions due to leaking stockpiles.
Responding to the gravity of this threat, the international community has engaged in important steps toward
phasing out some of the most dangerous POPs. In June 1998 in Montreal, nearly 100 nations embarked on a
series of UNEP-sponsored negotiations with the goal of concluding a binding, global treaty on POPs before the
end of 2000. The second round of negotiations took place in Nairobi, Kenya in January 1999, and the third in
Geneva in September 1999, with the fourth and final rounds set for March 2000 in Bonn, and for November
2000 in South Africa, with a diplomatic signing ceremony scheduled to occur in Stockholm, Sweden in May
2001. The immediate focus of the negotiations centers on 12 particularly dangerous POPs, but the treaty
negotiators also are establishing criteria and procedures for identifying other POPs to add to that list, and are
addressing financial and technical assistance – issues that are of critical importance to the ability of developing
countries to effectively implement the new treaty.
The 12 POPs targeted in the POPs negotiations include eight pesticides (aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin,
endrin, heptachlor, mirex, and toxaphene), two types of industrial chemicals (polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs
and hexachlorobenzene), and two chemical families of unintended by-products of the manufacture, use, and/or
combustion of chlorine and chlorine-containing materials (dioxins and furans).
Fortunately, viable alternatives exist for virtually all known uses and sources of these chemicals. Utilizing
cultural, biological, physical, and bio-rational control methods, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) offers the
agricultural sector with alternatives to POPs pesticides. Industrial chemicals such as PCBs used as insulators in
electrical transformers and capacitors can be replaced by biodegradable substitutes such as mineral oils and
silicone oils. As unintentional by-products of manufacturing processes and combustion, dioxins and furans pose
a more difficult challenge due to their ubiquitous nature. However, dioxin emissions can be significantly
reduced through such actions as: moving away from municipal waste incineration and concentrating on
expanded recycling, reuse, and composting programs; eliminating the use of chlorine bleaching in pulp and
paper manufacturing; and replacing PVC plastic with other plastics that don’t contain chlorine or more
traditional materials such as wood, metal, paper, and glass.
Because of their properties, POPs pose a special kind of challenge that makes it impossible for any nation to
remedy the problem by acting alone. POPs don’t degrade readily in the body or soil and, even more important,
they don’t stay put. They can travel thousands of miles in complex journeys on air, water currents, and through
the food web, making one country’s contamination inevitably the world’s problem. Because of the persistence
and mobility of POPs, this contamination is now pervasive and global. POPs by their nature are unmanageable
substances. Given the immense stakes and the availability of effective alternatives, precaution dictates swift and
strong action to eliminate the use and production of this class of chemicals.
WWF believes that the global POPs treaty under negotiation must achieve several critical objectives:
 set the clear and unequivocal global goal of POPs elimination, allowing for a rapid, orderly, yet just
program for their total phaseout;
 embrace the “precautionary principle,” focusing on prevention and elimination of POPs at their source,
with action taken before there is damage or conclusive scientific proof;
 ensure that the costs of phaseout and clean-up of POPs and their sources are shared, through extended
producer responsibility and the “polluter pays” principle;
 ensure that the destruction of POPs stockpiles and associated contamination is carried out expeditiously
and thoroughly such that no undestroyed POPs or newly-formed POPs remain;
 support and encourage POPs research on health effects and alternatives in developing countries and help
those countries shift to alternatives through financial, technological, and capacity-building assistance
from industrialized countries, multilateral development banks, and the private sector; and
 require industry and governments to undertake aggressive programs to determine the toxicity of many
persistent chemicals which have not been adequately tested individually and in combination.
WWF will:
 Continue to inform the public and policymakers about the threat of POPs and the viable, successful
alternatives currently available;
 Work to find additional safe and cost-effective alternatives to persistent pollutants;
 Work with developed and developing countries, the private sector, and financial and lending institutions
to establish financial sources and mechanisms to help countries, especially in developing regions of the
world, shift to alternatives;
 Promote research on the science involving POPs and their effect on biodiversity; and
 Support efforts to collect reliable data on POPs inventories and stockpiles.
More detailed information on the threat of POPs and the events leading up to the negotiations is available in the
WWF issue brief, “Persistent Organic Pollutants: Hand-Me-Down Poisons that Threaten Wildlife and People.”
A more recent issue brief, “Successful, Safe, and Sustainable Alternatives to Persistent Organic Pollutants”
spells out the various alternatives to POPs. Those documents, and other pertinent information, are available at
<www.worldwildlife.org/toxics>