[MedPartnership] PCBs Sound Management and Disposal [Experience Note]

PCBs are pollutants more specifically known as polychlorinated biphenyls. They are highly toxic, very long lasting (over 100 years) and bioaccumulative, and one of the most harmful persistent organic chemicals to be manufactured by man. PCBs have been proven to be damaging to the environment. They cause immunotoxicity, skin problems, reproductive alterations and cancer in humans and animals. PCBs were manufactured worldwide by a number of companies in many industrialized countries and were mostly used as cooling and isolating agents in transformers and capacitors and many more applications. This activity aimed to introduce environmentally sound management (ESM) to all stages of the "life-cycle" of electrical equipment containing or being contaminated with PCBs in four Mediterranean countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt and Turkey), providing training for more than 390 people, taking and analyzing more than 500 PCB oil samples, identifying more than 1000 tonnes and disposing of 931 tonnes of PCBs in order to support countries to meet obligations of the Stockholm and Barcelona Conventions

Project 2600: Strategic Partnership for the Mediterranean Large Marine Ecosystem--Regional Component: Implementation of agreed actions for the protection of the environmental resources of the Mediterranean Sea and its coastal areas

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