Regional Workshop on the Environmentally Sound Management polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCBs)

Venue: Hilton Alexandria Corniche

Address: 544 El-Gaish Rd, Alexandria Governorate 21611

Background: The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), which entered into force on 17 May 2004, focuses on eliminating production, use, and trade of POPs and thus reducing their negative impact on human health and the environment.  One obligation under the Convention is for parties to eliminate the use of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in equipment (e.g. transformers and capacitors) by 2025 and to make determined efforts towards the environmentally sound management of waste PCBs by 2028.Under the Basel Convention ,each party is required to take appropriate legal administrative and other measures to implement and enforce the provisions of the Convention, including appropriate national/domestic legislation to prevent and punish illegal traffic(art. 4.4 and 9.5).

 Working Language: English &Arabic

 Organizer: BCRC-Egypt with the assistance of BRS Secretariat 

 Meeting Objectives:

• To provide an overview on PCBs
• To present the procedures for inventory and auditing
• To present the procedures for sampling and analysis
• To present the health hazards of PCBs
• To represent a successful clean-up case study

Target Audience:  The workshop targeted the National technical officials responsible for or involved in hazardous Waste Management. 8 participants from 7 Arab countries attended this workshop: Republic of Djibouti, Arab Republic of Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanese Republic, Kingdom of Morocco, Palestinian Authority and the Republic of Sudan.

Outcome:

• The participants gained experience about the procedures of inventory and auditing of PCBs.
• The participants became well aware of the health hazards of PCBs
• After being presented a successful clean-up case study that took place in Egypt, the participants requested to have the strategies and procedures so that they can apply it in their countries

Recommendations: 

• The importance of specialized training programs in the field of analyzing PCBs
• Renovating the labs that deal with the analysis of PCBs and supplying it with advanced machinery.
• Inventory and ranking of the labs in the Arab region in accordance to the United Nations Environmental Program
• Suggesting the possibility of specialized training sessions to inform about the safe disposal of the pollutants using the Phytoremediation( the green clean-up of the environment), which was confirmed as successful experiment
• Specialized training sessions for workers in the fire department as they are exposed to dealing with exploding generators
• Awareness programs for the youth and the children to inform about PCBs, how they can be dealt with, their health hazards and the international agreements in the field
• Formulating a regional database with the experts in the field of analysis/ treatments/environmental management
• Suggesting a project for detecting and analyzing PCBs in the countries that lack technical experience in the field

Conclusive Remarks

Meeting Documents

Photo Gallery