From 1-12 May, IPEN members will participate in the Meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COPs) to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions taking place in Geneva, Switzerland. Check this page for updates throughout the meetings.
IPEN and its members have been contributing to the development of the Stockholm Treaty since its inception in 2001. The Treaty aims to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, such as pesticides, industrial chemicals, and their toxic by-products. We have also contributed to the Basel Convention and its work to protect human health and the environment from toxic waste, and to the Rotterdam Convention’s work on the international trade in hazardous chemicals.
On the first day of negotiations, the Stockholm Convention reached a decision to add the pesticide methoxychlor to its Annex A list of susbstances for global elimination, without exemptions.
Methoxychlor is an organochlorine pesticide that is used as a substitute for DDT in agriculture and veterinary medicine. As María Cárcamo of RAPAL Uruguay noted in her intervention for IPEN during the plenary, the chemical shows “genotoxicity, reprotoxicity, and immunotoxicity, providing a strong basis for consensus among parties to list methoxychlor in Annex A for global phase-out without exemption.”
IPEN supports the recommendation to list two other chemicals – the plastics additive UV-328 and the flame retardant Dechlorane Plus (also commonly used in plastics) – on the list of hazardous persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that meet the criteria for global elimination, without exemptions.
