The 21st Meeting of the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee (POPRC-21) to the Stockholm Convention on POPs highlighted the growing challenges of eliminating this group of dangerous chemicals from increasingly complex global supply chains. The Committee debated various aspects related to implementation, including the need for exemptions and revising indicative lists and how best to collect information on complex chemical groups.

According to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) summary report of the meeting, POPs are a set of chemicals that “are toxic, bioaccumulate, persist in the environment, and travel to remote areas.” Once useful industrial chemicals and pesticides, their regulation emerged as a need with the discovery of their negative impacts on human health. The Stockholm Convention manages POPs’ entire lifecycle, and POPRC provides scientific and technical advice to support the Convention’s lifecycle approach.

The POPRC’s original role was to identify new POPs using the Convention’s criteria and to recommend them for elimination or restriction, with additional work gradually added, including assessing the need for continued uses and addressing POPs in stockpiles, products, and waste.

POPRC-21 had only one draft risk profile on its agenda, yet members were unable to reach agreement, according to ENB. The Committee deferred the draft risk profile on polybrominated and mixed polybrominated/chlorinated dioxins and furans, “with further intersessional work to focus on collecting information related to the link between the long-range environmental transport and adverse effects on human health.” That means there will be no new POPs on the agenda for the next Conference of the Parties (COP), the ENB analysis of the meeting notes. “For the first time since COP-4 in 2009, the COP will have to focus on implementing existing POPs listings without adding any others to the Convention’s annexes,” it states.

POPRC-21 adopted several decisions, including:

• Recommending further intersessional work on the indicative lists of substances covered by several listings;
• Information sharing with the Global Monitoring Plan Coordination Group; and
• Improved data collection under Annex F to the Convention to better address growing concerns about POPs in stockpiles, products, articles in use, and waste.

The Committee also adopted Terms of Reference (ToR) for the review of specific exemptions for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), its salts, and perfluorooctane sulfonyl fluoride (PFOSF), and use of perfluorooctyl iodide (PFOI) for the production of perfluorooctyl bromide (PFOB).

“The POPRC will continue review of the ToR for conducting the review of the concentration limit and specific exemptions for medium-chain chlorinated paraffins (MCCPs) at POPRC-22 in 2026,” ENB writes.

Meeting back-to-back with the 21st meeting of the Chemical Review Committee (CRC-21) of the Rotterdam Convention, POPRC-21 convened in Rome, Italy, from 29 September to 3 October 2025. It was attended by 30 members and 109 observers from 56 entities. [ENB Coverage of POPRC-21]