Yoshitoku Yoshida
Environmental Health and
Safety Division
The Ministry of the
Environment, Japan
In Article 16 of Stockholm Convention
for the global elimination of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), it is
written that "comparable monitoring data" reported by the Parties
will be used for the "effectiveness evaluation of the Convention".
A detailed evaluation scheme will be decided by the Conference of the
Parties, but various technical aspects of this POPs monitoring were discussed
by the international experts at UNEP Chemical's workshop on the development
of Global POPs Monitoring held in Geneva in March 2003, and the guidance documents
for the monitoring are now being prepared based on the results of the workshop.
The Ministry of the Environment (MoE), Japan, has been conducting environmental
monitoring of various pollutants including major POPs in Japan for more than two decades,
and reported the results every year in a report “Chemicals in the Environment”.
Originally a conventional GC/ECD method had been employed for the analysis
of organochlorine chemicals (OCs) in
biological samples. Then a GC/MS
(low resolution) was introduced for OCs analysis
in sediments and water, and GC/high resolution(HR)-MS
method was introduced for dioxins analysis from around 1990. In 2002, MoE decided
to reorganize the environmental monitoring framework in order to respond to
the request of POPs convention, and re-started POPs monitoring by using more
sensitive GC/HR-MS method for the analysis of nine POPs chemicals (dioxins
and furans have already been monitored by the method; toxaphene is analyzed by GC/negative ionization-MS). The primary purpose of this reorganization
is to reveal present POPs levels in Japan as a basis to judge the
effectiveness of the measures/countermeasures taken by the Government for
POPs convention. MoE
also conducted efforts to support implementation of POPs convention and establishment
of regional framework for the convention. MoE hosted the
1st and the 2nd Workshops on POPs monitoring in East Asian countries in December
2002 and 2003, respectively. The
workshop was intended as a forum for the discussion and information exchange
on POPs monitoring among countries in the region, and the proceedings of the
1st workshop was distributed at the UNEP Chemicals workshop in Geneva, and also at INC-7 in Geneva. In January 2005, we had
a technical meeting with experts from several countries in Japan, and agreed
to conduct sampling in four countries: Republic of Korea, Viet Nam, Indonesia
and China. The project is now in trial phase, and we managed
with air sampling in several countries.
We continue to provide technical
support for sampling, support the analysis of samples collected in the region
by offering training for POPs analysis and contribute to data validation.