Assessment of Persistent Organic Pollutants in the Atmosphere of Latin America

A Decade of Global Atmospheric Monitoring Delivers Mixed Report Card on the Stockholm Convention

“…Passive air samplers (PASs) can broaden the geographical scope of POPs monitoring by overcoming some of the financial and logistical constraints of active air sampling (AAS) techniques. Numerous monitoring efforts based on PASs have been implemented on a national, regional and continental scale − (for a comprehensive overview see) with a few such efforts having ambitions for truly global coverage. − While most PAS networks have so far produced primarily information on the spatial variation of POPs, PASs deployed consistently at the same site for several years can provide information on temporal trends that match those obtained with AAS techniques. , Time trends of atmospheric POPs that relied on PAS have been reported for single sites and networks of local, regional − and continental scale. ,, While the Global Atmospheric Passive Sampling (GAPS) network has also furnished temporal trend information for selected POPs, those efforts so far relied either on a limited number of consecutive sampling years , or on the analyses of selected noncontinuous sampling years. , …”