Two recently banned pesticides have all but vanished from the atmosphere around the Great Lakes, but others phased out decades earlier don’t seem to be going anywhere.
Marta Venier, an environmental chemist at Indiana University, and her colleagues used a unique long-term dataset collected by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has been sampling the air around the Great Lakes every 12 days since 1990. It measures the atmospheric concentration of hundreds of compounds, including pesticides, PCBs, and other persistent chemicals. They found that levels of two banned pesticides – lindane and endosulfan – can no longer be detected. Read more in CICNews.