May 17, 2024
A project that was started 20 years ago has finally come to fruition! We used our XAD-based passive sampler to collect POP vapours from the atmosphere at 20 sites of the global GAPS network – from 2005 to 2016. This allowed us to assess whether releases of POPs have declined or remained steady over that decade. To our great surprise, global air concentrations of several unintentionally produced POPs, such as hexachlorobutadiene and hexachlorobenzene, actually increased, suggesting that the Stockholm Convention is not effective in curbing the releases of these types of contaminants. Read the paper in ES&T Letters for details of this work, which was a massive collaborative effort by Chuba, Michelle (an undergrad researcher with our group for several years), Ying and Anya.