Government▼Watch Guarding Ontario’s water supply of surface water or groundwater and ship it outside the watershed. The action comes on the heels of several high-profile battles over water taking by bottlers and a mining company in Ontario, says Theresa McClenPHOTODISC
To conserve its water resources, the province of Ontario slapped a oneyear moratorium on new and expanded water withdrawal permits, according to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. Provincial officials also pledged to draft new rules that charge water-bottling companies and other users for withdrawals from its watershed, marking the first such fees in North America. Charging for water withdrawals is an important step to promote conservation, says Julian Zelazny, director of the non-profit State Environmental Resource Center. Several U.S. states are also considering regulating water withdrawals as officials respond to increased degradation and quantity due to increasing population and development, he adds. Ontario’s moratorium, issued in December 2004, exempts public water supplies, fire fighting, and agriculture but otherwise applies to all commercial users, including bottling companies and concrete manufacturers that extract more than 50,000 liters per day
aghan, counsel with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, an environmental organization. Proposing new rules on water taking was one of the recommendations resulting from the provincial investigation into the deadly bacterial pollution of drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2000, 34, 336A), says McClenaghan, who is also a mem-
ber of an expert committee providing advice on the rules. Due next year, the rules will be part of a comprehensive source water protection framework that addresses quantity as well as quality. They will aim to ensure that water withdrawals don’t exceed the annual supply of water that recharges aquifers and surface waters. Permits will have to address the water budget for the impacted watershed and must be consistent with drinking water source protection plans, both of which are under development, she adds. Most U.S. states and Canadian provinces do not regulate water withdrawals. Only a handful issue permits, and a few collect charges to cover administrative costs. Ontario’s action gives it a leg up among the eight states and two provinces in the Great Lakes basin, which must comply with new international water conservation standards due in June, McClenaghan says. The water standards, implementing the binational Great Lakes Charter Annex 2001, prohibit net loss of water from the Great Lakes system and require that withdrawals improve the water resource, she says. —JANET PELLEY
Ink dries on Rotterdam Convention The Rotterdam Convention on trading hazardous chemicals became legal on February 24, five years after it was written. So far, most of the Parties of the Convention are developing countries. The EU has also ratified it, while the United States and the United Kingdom have signed but not ratified. Government officials started to address the problem of trade in hazardous chemicals back in the 1980s by establishing a voluntary Prior Informed Consent (PIC) procedure. The procedure required exporters of specified hazardous substances to obtain PIC from importers. In 1998, governments decided to strengthen the procedure by adopting the Rotterdam Convention, which makes PIC legally binding. However, it required ratification by 50 countries before it could enter into force. The ratification of the convention by Armenia last November marked the 50th country. PIC has worked very well so far, and 165 countries have been voluntarily participating, says Jim Willis of the convention’s secretariat at the United Nations Environment Programme.
© 2004 American Chemical Society
The convention gives importing countries the tools and information they need to identify potential hazards and exclude chemicals they cannot manage safely. The convention’s guidelines aim to protect importers with labeling standards and information on potential health and environmental effects. How the convention’s requirements will be enforced has yet to be decided, Willis says. He adds, “The secretariat currently checks that notifications are being appropriately submitted by the designated national authority of each country. This will continue.” The convention covers 5 industrial chemicals and 22 hazardous pesticides. Since September 1998, five additional pesticides, including monocrotophos and parathion, have been added to an interim list to await approval for inclusion on the Convention’s final list. Many more substances will be added in the future, Willis notes. The first meeting of the Parties to the Convention will take place in Geneva in late 2004. For further information, check the Rotterdam Convention website at www.pic.int. —MARIA BURKE
MARCH 15, 2004 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ■ 109A
