Toxic Substances

• It is absolutely critical that the Agreement retain the virtual elimination and zero discharge goals. 

• Substances of concern in the Agreement should be expanded to include those substances that are not technically PBTs but are regularly released and therefore persistent through repeated and regular exposure.

• Specific objectives in the agreement should be retained

• The Agreement should explicitly reference human health protection as a goal of the Agreement (with objectives). 

• Emphasize the principle of prevention as a fundamental value in the Agreement.

• The Agreement must require comprehensive, long-term ongoing surveillance of ecosystems to monitor the status of existing chemicals, provide an early warning system for recognizing emerging chemicals and materials of concern, and assess the efficacy of interventions. 

• The Agreement should require a comprehensive biomonitoring plan of people and wildlife in the basin. New emerging chemicals/substances of concern including nanochemicals, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other emerging chemicals of concern should be monitored as well as existing substances of concern such as PCBs, mercury, and radioactive isotopes.

• Within a year of the signing of the Agreement, Annex 1 and Appendices 1 and 2 of Annex 10 should be reviewed and updated. The Agreement should include an explicit provision for updating and adding new chemicals on a designated regular schedule which includes reporting requirements to facilitate accountability. A protocol for adding new chemicals should be developed that is precautionary. This is critical to coordinate with emerging scientific understanding of the impacts of chemicals cumulatively and synergistically – the role of complex interacting factors in health of organisms and ecosystems. This listing must also recognize the new science on toxicity of compounds related to timing of exposure, genetic susceptibility, etc. These issues are addressed in the 2009 National Academy of Science report “Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment”. 

• The Agreement should create a mechanism to allow citizens to petition for additional chemicals to be added to the list. 

• The Agreement should create a mechanism to prioritize chemicals based on inherent hazard. Prioritization should trigger the development of chemical action plans by Governments where they are required to provide a plan that will demonstrably reduce the loading of the pollutant of concern with benchmarks and timelines.  
   
• The Parties should initiate regulatory mechanisms to require the phase-out and sunsetting of hazardous processes and chemicals for which viable, safer substitute technologies and approaches exist.

• There should also be a provision for automatically listing chemicals under the Agreement if they are added to other authoritative lists, two examples would be the European Union’s REACH RoHS list, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) list.

• Evaluation of chemical toxicity, fate and transport must be grounded in “real world” low dose and age related sensitivity to repeated exposures, degradation byproducts, toxic metabolites, and additive and synergistic toxicity with other substances.   Evaluation of toxicity, exposure, fate, and transport of chemicals – including measures of persistence - must reflect current toxicological findings addressing factors such as timing of exposure, non-linear dose-response relationships, and pseudo-persistence of chemicals for which there is repeated and ubiquitous exposure.  

• The Agreement should require governments to develop research programs to develop safe, non-dispersive clean up technologies to address the significant existing contaminants in the basin.

• The Agreement should explicitly reference and support the development of Green Chemistry practices and implementation perhaps through an Annex on Green Chemistry (see Appendix 3)

• The Agreement should require producer responsibility for retrieving and properly reusing, recycling or, if necessary, disposing of products they made or sold after their use should be required.

• The Agreement should require wastewater treatment plants to use their    authority to restrict the discharge of chemicals of concern with a focus on critical pollutants

• The Parties should harmonize their assessment and prioritization processes to better understand and reduce persistent contaminants of concern from WWTPs

• Strategies should be developed to address persistent toxic substances entering the Great Lakes ecosystem in sewage effluent, through combined sewer overflows or via land application of biosolids (e.g., sewage sludges or manure). See “land application” section below. Examples of promising strategies include source control through comprehensive municipal sewer use by-laws and U.S. “pretreatment programs” through which industrial effluent is first treated on site before being released into sewers. Programs directed at reducing household chemical use and improving household hazardous waste collection can also reduce toxic chemicals in sewage effluents and biosolids.

• The governments should adopt and apply consistently the precautionary approach (as applied in the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act and the revised Canadian Pest Control Products Act) to require manufacturers to assure the safety of new chemicals (including cumulative and synergistic effects) prior to manufacture and use. These programs should also be fully funded to regain their effectiveness.

• For existing chemicals that remain in the ecosystem after their discharge, such as PCBs, new technologies must be developed to assure their complete destruction so they are not simply moved from one medium to another (e.g., landfilling or incinerating) or do not produce other toxic substances (i.e., heavy metals, dioxins and furans, etc.). The U.S. Great Lakes Legacy Act takes this approach by giving preference to funding for contaminated sediment cleanup projects that destroy contamination instead of just moving it.

• We recommend new language in the articles of the Agreement or the addition of a new annex that will result in the reduction of pharmaceutical and endocrine disrupter contaminants in the Great Lakes particularly from sewage treatment facilities. The strategies needed to manage nonpersistent contaminants include:
  
  • Developing Basin-wide programs to return unused substances to manufacturers.
  • Improving treatment of domestic sewage to remove these substances and manage biosolids and sewage sludges.
  • Regulating select contaminants known to be wastewater contaminants (beginning with those that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic). For example, regulations can target for removal and replacement select chemicals such as NPs and NPEs by industry and consumers as close to the source of generation as possible.
  • Require labeling for products that are known to contain substances such as PBDEs, phthalates, and other significant Great Lakes contaminants listed under the Agreement Annex noted above.
  • Require take-back programs for all household pharmaceuticals to ensure proper and safe disposal.

• Require Waste Water Treatment Plants to implement complete anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge (or use a comparable sludge treatment technology), and encourage methane gas capture and use as a fuel source.

• Require that the remaining residues be treated to remove toxics (after complete digestion) and be disposed through permanent destruction or in a secure manner (such as landfilling with pump and treat assurances).

• If complete digestion of sludge takes place, sludge should be safer to apply to land. As such, land application of digested sludge should only be approved if the jurisdiction from which the sludge originates has source control (e.g., a comprehensive and enforced sewer use law) and industrial effluent pretreatment requirements to ensure that toxics loadings and pathogens are controlled.

• The Agreement should establish benchmarks for the Parties to re-commit sufficient resources for enforcement of programs such as the U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Initiative, and sufficiently staff discharge permit programs to eliminate backlogs and “rubber stamping” without thorough review of permit re-issues.

• The Agreement should require proponents using and releasing substances listed under the Agreement Annex to prepare toxic use reduction plans, including timelines for reduction and elimination of toxic substances.

• The Agreement should require the expansion of pollutant release and transfer registries to collect information on all the substances of concern and from a broader range of facilities and release an annual report combining Toxics Release Inventory and National Pollutant Release Inventory information to the Great Lakes St Lawrence River basin.

• The IJC should conduct an assessment of the adequacy of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (“POPs” treaty) in reducing deposition of airborne toxic chemicals to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River basin from elsewhere in the world and make recommendations for further action based on those findings to the Parties.

• The Parties should re-commit resources to comply with Annex 15 of the 1987 Agreement, especially with regard to establishing controls and reduction strategies for sources of mercury.

• The Agreement should commit to using the same principles for the release and management of those radionuclides that are persistent and bioaccumulative as for other PBTs in the GLWQA. This means that the principles of virtual elimination and zero discharge should be stated as goals for persistent radionuclides.

• The Agreement should commit the Parties to conduct full cost accounting studies on buried radioactive waste sites as was completed in 2008 for the West Valley, NY nuclear waste repository.

• The Agreement should ban the siting of nuclear reprocessing or storage sites in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River basin.

• The Agreement should address contamination from mining operations and clean up of legacy contamination at mining sites.