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The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants requires Parties to implement certain measures to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants by eliminating or reducing production, use, and releases of these chemicals. The global treaty involves politics and economics, but also science and technology to resolve global environmental problems. It is a living treaty and will evolve with time. First results to tackle a global problem jointly by developed and developing countries can already be seen. The Stockholm Convention also calls for cooperation between intergovernmental organizations.

The aim of this article is to disseminate information about Moldova experience in the field of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) and how Moldova managed to solve a part of its problems related to POP-contaminated pesticides and PCB-contaminated dielectric oil. This letter will not describe the technical issue related to POPs but only the achievements of Moldova in the field of POPs and how the Moldovan results could be used by other countries in solving their national POPs issues.

POPs are mainly aromatic compounds with extreme high toxicity and received high publicity for their toxic characteristics because they are:

The present paper presents the lessons learned and the good practice in the preparation of the National Implementation Plan (NIP) for the management of POPs in Bulgaria, developed under Stockholm Convention, Assessment of POPs issues in the country, based on preliminary National POPs Inventories and the Measures taken to implement the Bulgarian NIP for POPs.

Reviewed are problems of POPs management, application and safe disposal in Ukraine and historical roots of this problem as well as legal, institutional, economic and technological approaches to its solution. Existing constraints to efficient management of POPs in Ukraine such as lack of interdepartmental coordination, insufficient funding, poor public involvement, education, and awareness of the problem are discussed.

Quite a quantity of old pesticides has been accumulated in the country since the Soviet times. They are kept in broken-down and obsolete storehouses and their adjacent territories. Due to the precipitation, they get into the environment (soil, surface waters, and ground waters). Certain quantity of these pesticides are Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), characteristic by the ability to be accumulated in the environment and all kinds of living beings creating threat to the human health and other living organisms. The situation is aggravated by the fact that there is no special burial sites in the country for the toxic wastes, where they would be safely disposed. It is worth mentioning that near the city of Rustavi on the mountain of Iagluji there has been a burial place since the Soviet times, which, however, does not meet any environmental requirements and needs urgent relevant measures to be carried out. The aim of Stockholm convention is to take measures for reducing or eliminating POPs releases from intentional and unintentional production and use, also the releases from existing stockpiles and wastes. Georgia is currently in the final stages of preparing its National Implementation Plan (NIP) for POPs. The NIP priority setting exercise conducted during the NIP process gave the first priority among the various POPs categories to obsolete POPs pesticides.

In an attempt to evaluate levels of polychlorinated dibenzo--dioxins, polychlorinated dibenzofurans and polychlorinated biphenyls in Greece, blood serum, breast milk, food, and feed samples were analyzed. Analytical results reported in this study include blood samples and milk from people living in an urban (Athens) and a rural (Kozani) area of Greece, dairy products, meat, fish, olive oil, eggs, fruit, vegetable, and feed. Contamination levels in blood and human milk from Greece reported here are low compared to the previously reported dioxin data from other European countries. Besides, all food and feed samples had a dioxin content far below the EC Regulation 1881/2006/EC.

Variability in the enantioselective degradation of chiral organochlorine pesticides (OCPs: α-HCH, - and -chlordane (CC and TC), chlordane MC5 and '-DDT) in background soils was investigated on a global scale and in small-scale transect studies. Background soils collected from 32 countries displayed a wide range of enantiomer profiles for a particular compound, showing varying degradation preferences. In some locations, grassland and woodland soils which were collected only a few hundred meters apart showed differences in the enantiomer profiles and even reversals in degradation preferences. Further studies at small plots in Scotland indicated that such differences could be found within a few meters horizontally and a few centimeters in depth. Soil organic matter content and pH exerted a minor influence on the variability. For chlordanes, the enantiomer profiles in background soils were much more variable than those in ambient air, suggesting that degradation occurred following atmospheric deposition. Thus, background soils play a role in sequestering and degrading OCPs, although enantiomer profiles are not a quantitative measure of overall degradation. The results of this study show that caution is needed when considering the enantiomer signatures in air as a marker of volatilization of weathered soil-derived OCPs.

There are five hot spots of dioxins and PCBs pollution in Russia. These hot spots are situated in various regions of the country, where DDT, PCB, and other chlorinated substances had been produced earlier. Despite phasing-out of these production facilities, high levels of dioxins, PCBs and DDT are routinely detected in the environment. These substances represent chlorinated organic substances that are most frequently found in the environment, food products, or breast milk. The levels of dioxins in breast milk of the residents of Chapaevsk and Ufa are among the highest in the world. These residents have been shown to have health effects, typically caused by persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

On 17 August 1999 a powerful earthquake struck the eastern part of Marmara Region and Izmit Bay, the most industrialized and populated area of the region. Environmental effects of the earthquake and subsequent refinery fire were partly investigated by several scientists (Okay et al., 2001, 2003; Tolun et al., 2001, 2006; Balkıs, 2003; Unlu and Alpar, 2004; Karakaş and Pekey, 2005). As a part of the previous efforts, in this study, the levels of total PCBs, sum of the marker PCBs and TEqs in mussels collected immediately after and 1 year later the earthquake were presented. Total PCB (# 1–209) levels in mussels from different coastal locations were found between 5.47 and 14 ng/g in September 1999 and between 11.2 and 36.0 ng/g in June 2000. June 2000 samples from throughout the Bay contained higher quantities of total, marker PCBs and TEq values when compared with the before earthquake values. The elevated concentrations of PCBs in mussels collected after the earthquake implies an input of PCBs to the water column form different sources such as underlying sediments and/or land-based sources such as industrial inputs. Although WHO-TEq values found in this study for Izmit Bay (0.4 ± 0.1 − 1.4 ± 0.7 pg/g) are lower than the proposed values for fisheries products (4 pg/g) by EC Regulation 199/2006, considering the TDI value as 2 pg WHO-TEq/kg bw (COT, 2001) it was concluded that consumable mussels from Izmit Bay pose a risk for health.