Excerpt from eurekalert.org

The road to a Caribbean free of the world’s most notoriously harmful, cancer-causing chemicals has been opened by a seven-year, $9 million UN effort funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

In a region where the environmentally-sound management of chemicals and hazardous waste has been challenged by limited resources, the GEF project for the “Development and Sustainable Management Mechanism for POPs in the Caribbean” has established inventories of POP chemicals, created management mechanisms for demonstration sites, trained hundreds of personnel, and fostered new national programs, including legislation, to help the countries meet their commitments and obligations under an international convention. The outputs of the project have also inspired changes in general public behavior towards waste management.

Known as POPs, Persistent Organic Pollutants are long-lasting, accumulative chemicals including Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are slow to degrade and can gradually migrate as far north and south as the Earth’s poles.