POPs — Persistent Organic Pollutants
Screening for restricted persistent organic pollutants.
Three ways a substance can be listed.
The POPs Regulation controls persistent organic pollutants through three different mechanisms, depending on how the substance arises and whether any continuing use can be justified.
Waste containing POPs has its own rules.
Where a material or waste stream contains a POP substance above the concentration limit set out for it, standard waste disposal or recovery routes are not available. The POP content has to be destroyed or irreversibly transformed before the waste can be managed — it cannot simply be landfilled or exported without that treatment.
This has direct implications for long-life equipment and legacy materials, where components or coatings specified decades ago can turn out to contain a substance later added to the POPs Annexes, only becoming apparent at overhaul, refit or decommissioning.
The UK and EU POPs lists do not always move together.
Both regimes trace back to the same Stockholm Convention obligations, but they have diverged since EU Exit. A substance, exemption or concentration limit can differ between the two regimes at any given time, so a position that is correct for one market is not automatically correct for the other.
One substance group, several routes of regulation.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a very large group of substances, and they are being addressed through several different mechanisms at once rather than a single regulation. Some individual PFAS, including PFOA and PFHxS, are already listed under the POPs Regulation. Others fall within REACH restrictions for specific applications, and a broader REACH restriction proposal covering PFAS as a group is working its way through the EU process.
That overlapping picture makes PFAS one of the harder substance groups to get a clear position on — a single product can be affected by more than one regime at once, and the position can shift as restriction proposals and POPs listings move forward.
Keeping a POPs position current across GB and EU markets.
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