Past, present and future trends of selected pesticidal and industrial POPs in Kuwait

Given the background of current global initiatives for controlling persistent organic pollutants (POPs), an overview of the scientific knowledge about the POPs issues in Kuwait is presented in this study. Both acute and chronic exposure to POPs can be associated with a wide range of deleterious health effects, including illness and death. POPs have drawn significant political and scientific interest in their fate and actions, particularly where local releases have resulted in dispersed contamination far from the source regions. These concerns inevitably led to the establishment of the Stockholm Convention (SC) on POPs. In recent years, Kuwait has carried out a wide variety of environmental research, in particular, on the monitoring of POPs in different matrices. The technological development facilitated to achieve the opposite monitoring of pesticidal and industrial POPs. The majority of these POPs are from a point source. Kuwait does not have pesticide manufacturing facilities and has not produced pesticides for POPs in the past. In the agriculture sector, Kuwait primarily imports pesticides for pest and disease control. This review encompasses the historical presence and current status of (pesticidal) organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and (industrial POPs) PCBs and PBDEs in Kuwait based on the export, import, consumption and usage. This research also contrasts pesticide and industrial POP data from various Kuwaiti environmental matrices with data from other parts of Asia, the EU, the USA and Africa.