EnvironmentEU: Amendments to the Regulation for persistent organic pollutants

Recently, a Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Annexes IV and V to Regulation (EU) 2019/1021 of the European Parliament and of the Council on persistent organic pollutants was published.

This Proposal for a Regulation amends the annexes that deal with waste in the Regulation (EU) 2019/1021 (the POPs Regulation). These annexes set limits for persistent organic pollutants in waste and determine, together with provisions in Article 7 of the Regulation, how waste that contains POP substances has to be managed in the EU. Generally, wastes meeting or exceeding the Annex IV limit must be treated in such a way that the POP substances are destroyed or irreversibly transformed, subject to exceptions. The proposed amendment proposes to list and introduce limits for 3 POP substances and to lower the existing limits for 5 substances already listed.

Regulation (EU) 2019/1021 of the European Parliament and of the Council 1  on persistent organic pollutants (‘the POPs Regulation’) implements the commitments of the Union under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (‘the Stockholm Convention’), approved by Council Decision 2006/507/EC 2 , and under the Protocol to the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution on Persistent Organic Pollutants (‘the POPs Protocol’), approved by Council Decision 2004/259/EC.

The problems caused by POP substances are related to their intrinsic physical and chemical properties, to how and where they have been used, and to the adverse effects that their progressive release has on the health of human beings, of ecosystems and on the services these provide. In one way or another, all POP substances are recognised to have adverse, generally long-term effects upon living organisms. They persist for a very long time in the environment and in our bodies and can be transported unchanged to almost any remote point of the globe, far away from where they were produced or used.