Having a road map and plan for protecting and restoring a lake and its watershed can be incredibly helpful. They can show how the lake is recovering and in what ways, and suggest additional work to help improve things.
Chemicals of Mutual Concern
The International Joint Commission (IJC) today released "Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs) in the Great Lakes", a report proposing a strategy for federal, state and provincial governments to reduce the adverse effects of PBDEs on the environment.
If you live in Canada or the United States and love the Great Lakes, there are lots of ways to get involved.
To assess progress toward improving water quality, scientists use ecosystem indicators to measure whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Flame retardants, made of up chemical compounds, have been widely used in an array of products since the 1970s.
The International Joint Commission (IJC), concerned by the lack of sustained funding for the number of monitoring sites, is recommending in a report released today that the Canadian and U.S. governments provide stable long-term funding to monitor atmospheric deposition of mercury in the Great Lakes…
To protect the health of the Great Lakes, governments ban the use of certain chemicals in products or come to agreements with manufacturers to phase out their use. The IJC’s Water Quality Board is exploring new problems that can arise when this happens.
A novel pilot program has documented successful reductions to toxic chemical discharges and emissions– including huge cuts in mercury and dioxins – from sources surrounding Lake Superior. The results provide a template for similar toxic reduction programs in other Great Lakes.
A recent article published in the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada titled “Protecting Our Great Lakes: Assessing the Effectiveness of Wastewater Treatments for the Removal of Chemicals of Emerging Concern,” highlighted the work accomplished by the IJC’s Chemicals of Emerging Concern multi-…