Caribbean nations taking steps to clean up cancer-causing chemicals: UN

Caribbean governments have made headway in reducing the presence of cancer-causing chemicals that have long been plaguing their environments, according to the United Nations.

With the conclusion of a seven-year, $9 million program, eight participating countries have ramped up their abilities to sample and inventory “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs) — long-lasting, accumulative chemicals that contaminate the Caribbean, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) reported Monday.

Among the most notorious types of POPs are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are slow to degrade and can gradually migrate as far north and south as the planet’s poles, according to the UN agency. POPs both harm the environment and increase the risk of cancer, reproductive disorders, immune system issues and birth defects, the agency noted.

POPs made their way to the Caribbean through imported pesticides, firefighting foams, electrical equipment and foreign-used vehicles. While these compounds are often unintentionally leached through poor waste management practices, they also come from the oil and gas industry, according to UNIDO.

“Lack of resources, weak institutional capacity and non-existent or inadequate regulatory frameworks have been stumbling blocks for the Caribbean when it comes to chemicals and waste management,” UNIDO Industrial Development Officer Alfredo Cueva said in a statement.

The governments of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago all participated in the seven-year project.

The participating countries are all parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a May 2001 treaty that called upon signatory nations to phase out the use of PCBs in equipment by 2025 and ensure their elimination entirely by 2028, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

While PCBs were banned in the late 1970s by many countries, including the U.S. and Canada, these chemicals sometimes still exist in transformers, electrical capacitors and other materials.

To date, 181 nations have become parties to the treaty. The U.S. has yet to ratify the convention, as the State Department has said the government lacks “the authority to implement all of its provisions.”

While most nations are party to the convention, 42 percent of these signatories remain unaware of the quantities and locations of PCB stocks in their country, according to a June 2022 study covered by The Hill.

The Stockholm Convention requires parties to eliminate the production and use of 26 listed chemicals, such as the common pesticide DDT and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), a type of “forever chemical” used to make firefighting foams and stain resistant products, according to UNIDO.

Signatories to the treaty also must reduce the unintentional creation of POPs by controlling processes like medical waste incineration and the open burning of trash, the agency stated.

In each of the Caribbean countries that participated in the UNIDO program, the project created comprehensive inventories of their POP chemicals.

Government officials and electrical utilities were also able to properly sample and analyze the makeup of transformers added or removed from their electrical networks, according to UNIDO.

Legal experts involved with the project also helped draft model legislation for integrated chemical management within these countries, the agency reported.

Some particular success stories cited by UNIDO were a sanitary engineered landfill design proposed for Suriname, a remediation plan developed for a landfill in Trinidad and Tobago and improvements to medical waste disposal in Belize.

“POPs represent a very real threat to human health and the environment in the Caribbean,” Cueva said. “But waste management facilities struggled to keep up as POP pollution was rising with the region’s recent economic growth and consumerism.”

This situation, Cueva explained, led “to ever-larger quantities of solid, hazardous and chemical wastes ending up in landfills and dumpsites.”

“One of the project’s first challenges was simply to capture this data accurately, use it to prepare the national implementation plans, and share it region-wide as a new online database and knowledge management system,” he added.

The eight-country program was facilitated by UNIDO, with funding from the Global Environment Facility and execution expertise from the Basel Convention Regional Center for Training and Technology Transfer for the Caribbean.