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MANILA, Philippines -- The United Nations Environment Programme is studying nine more chemicals to add to its list of 12 banned hazardous chemicals, according to a press statement.
UNEP said most of the nine of chemicals were being used in consumer products, such as flame retardants in textiles and carpets, while some were for photo imaging and in fire-fighting foam and medical equipment.
UNEP sponsors the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), a treaty banning hazardous chemicals. Twelve chemicals -- dubbed the "Dirty Dozen" -- are on the Convention's list, including nine pesticides: aldrin, chlordane, DDT,
dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, and toxaphene.
"Five other substances have already been short-listed, and the POPs Review Committee has gathered in Geneva to assess four more for possible elimination," it said.
UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said that while chemicals have contributed to people's well-being in medicine, food stuffs, and agriculture and industrial processes, they also posed "real risks to humans and the wider environment."
"Eliminating, restricting, and accelerating a switch to better alternatives must be our goal," he added.
According to UNEP, every human being in the world carries in his or her body traces of POPs, which circulate globally through a process known as the "grasshopper effect" and include such chemicals as dioxins, furans, DDT and PCBs, agents that that can kill people, damage the nervous and immune systems, cause cancer and reproductive disorders, and interfere with normal infant and child development.
POPs released in one part of the world could, through a repeated process of evaporation and deposit, be transported through the atmosphere to regions far away from the original source. Though not soluble in water, they are readily absorbed in fatty tissue, where concentrations can become magnified by up to 70,000 times the background levels, the UNEP said.
Fish, predatory birds, and mammals in the food chain absorb them. When they travel, POPs go with them, it said.
The Philippines was faced recently with a terrible chemical spill problem when a passenger ship carrying tons of endosulfan ran aground. The toxic cargo had been taken out of the sunken vessel.
