Comparison of POPs Control in China and USA

Running head: ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
Environmental Pollution
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1ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) can be described as the chemical substances that
have a particular combination of both the chemical properties and the physical properties like the
long-range transport, persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity. POPs are produced and used in a
range of activities including the agricultural areas, urban centres and the industrial centres and
these serve as the primary source of chemicals in the environment. Due to global issues that are
caused by the POPs, in the year 2001 Stockholm Convention was adopted and this entered into
force in the year 2004. Till the present day, around 23 chemicals have been enlisted as POPs
(Xu, Wang & Cai, 2013).
Comparison of two countries (the best and the worse), discuss the factors contributed
to the success and failures of POPs (persistent organic pollutants) control and regulations-
China is considered as a developing country which is presently undergoing economic and
the social growth in the past decade. As because the Chinese government is a signatory to the
Stockholm convention and due to this reason, China is obliged to reduce as well as eliminate the
emission and the production of the POPs. In response to this, the Chinese government has
established the China National Coordination Group for Implementation of the Stockholm
Convention in the year 2005. Similarly, in the year 2007, a national implementation plan was
released which was dedicated towards the Stockholm convention implementation (Wang et al.,
2012). Due to this in the past ten years, positive effects have been seen in the elimination and the
reduction of the POPs along with the reduction of the ecosystem and human exposure to these
persistent pollutants. Information based on the POPs in China encompass the monitoring and the
inventory data that play a major role in the implementation of the Stockholm convention in
China. This has been registered in the databases at the national scale. In the past decade, reviews
have been conducted that highlight the environmental risk, temporal patterns, spatial and

2ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION
occurrence of the POPs (Yang et al., 2013). It has been seen that the levels of contamination, the
ecological effect of POPs, environmental behaviours in the polluted areas are reviewed to make a
complete analysis. At the national level, the environmental management of POPs, environmental
policy, human exposure, environmental risk, pollution status was considered as the mitigation
strategies (Liu et al., 2016). The factors that have caused China to take up the regulatory measure
is the Stockholm convention and then it was an obligation for China to consider the several
measures for the protection of the environment from the POPs (Bao et al., 2012).
Table 1: Environmental standards, laws and regulation in relation to the unintentional POPs in
China [source: Lau et al., 2012]