A Strategy For Virtual Elimination Of Persistent Toxic Substances Report Of The Virtual Elimination Task Force To The International Joint Commission

`Are the Great Lakes getting better or worse?' This is the question that the public, scientists and managers are asking the International Joint Commission after a quarter-century of cooperative action by the United States and Canadian governments to clean up the Great Lakes. This volume contains papers from the workshop on Environmental Results, hosted in Windsor, Ontario, by the Great Lakes Science Advisory Board of the International Joint Commission, on September 12 and 13, 1996. The Great Lakes have been through almost a century of severe pollution from the manufacture, use and disposal of chemicals. In the 1960s wildlife biologists started to investigate the outbreaks of reproductive failure in fish-eating birds and ranch mink and to link these to exposure to organochlorine compounds. Human health researchers in the 1980s and 1990s linked growth retardation, behavioral anomalies and deficits in cognitive development with maternal consumption of Great Lakes fish prior to pregnancy. The Great Lakes became the laboratory where the theory of endocrine disruptors was first formulated. Now a group of Great Lakes scientists, hosted by the International Joint Commission, has compiled the story of the trends in the concentrations and effects of persistent toxic substances on wildlife and humans. The technical papers review the suitability of various organisms as indicators, and present the results of long-term monitoring of the concentrations and of the incidence of effects. The evidence shows that there was an enormous improvement in the late 1970s, but that in the late 1990s there are still concentrations of some persistent toxic substances that have stubbornly remained at levels that continue to cause toxicological effects.

Preface When you write a book like this after ten years' working as an environmental specialist, you end up with something that reflects your career. Of course, when I started working at the Ministry of the Environment in the Netherlands, I could not foresee that I would now be at TNO, nor that I would have performed research into chlorine, PVC, waste, etc. , that would come to form the basis for this book. But step by step, with some coincidence and with the support of several people - who were probably unaware of the crucial role that, with hindsight, they played - I arrived at a position where I could start to consider this enterprise. At this point I shall try something dangerous - thanking a few of those people who gave that support. At the same time, it is obvious that I cannot mention them all. I hope that those whom I do not mention will forgive me. A first, crucial moment in this sequence of events came quite soon after I joined TNO in 1990. Just a few weeks later, all the senior staff in my section decided to leave in order to set up their own company. I decided to stay at TNO. As a consequence, I had to manage it on my own.