Stockholm convention and current situation on pops in turkey

POPs are mainly aromatic compounds with extreme high toxicity and received high publicity for their toxic characteristics because they are: x Highly toxic to humans and environment x Persistent in the environment, resisting biodegradation x Taken up and bioaccumulated in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and capable of long-range transboundary atmospheric transport and deposition The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Polluters (POPs) was adopted by 125 countries including Turkey, on 22 and 23 May 2001 with the objective of protecting human health and environment, focusing on eliminating or reducing releases of 12 POPs, the "Dirty Dozen". These 12 chemicals include aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex, and toxaphene used principally as pesticides, two industrial chemicals polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and hexachlorobenzene (HCB) used in industry but also produced unintentionally together with dioxins and furans. In Turkey, on 15 Jan. 2004, the POPs project started and the main objective of this project was to prepare inventories by the responsible authorities that would agree upon the information and experience gathered national environmental priorities evolve. Turkey has prepared National Implementation Plan (NIP) in 2005 and ratification process is underway. According to the first evaluation, Turkey has 10,930 kg of DDT and 2,700 t of HCB in stocks. They have been used as insulators in almost every transformer for years and most of the transformers in Turkey contain PCBs. The numbers of transformers are about 250,000 in Turkey and only 10% of these were