New Great Lakes funding supports research into deposition and
impacts of toxic substances
The Great Lakes Air
Deposition (GLAD) program has announced more than $1 million in funding for new
research activities to identify and reduce atmospheric inputs of toxic
substances to the Great Lakes.
The nine research
projects are expected to significantly advance efforts to reduce toxic
substances in the Great Lakes. In particular,
it is anticipated that the 2006 suite of GLAD-sponsored projects will greatly
improve researchers’ ability to model the transport of persistent toxic
substances in the region’s atmosphere and the path of these chemicals
through the Great Lakes ecosystem.
Although concentrations
of many substances in Great Lakes water and
fish continue to exceed established risk thresholds, efforts to achieve further
reductions are limited by the difficulty of identifying and reducing remaining
sources of pollution, many of which reach the lakes through the atmosphere. The
GLAD program’s goal is to identify atmospheric sources of toxic
substances to the region’s waters and to determine the patterns of
emission, transport, deposition and accumulation of these substances within the
food chain. Continued advances in this area are needed to allow the formulation
of scientifically valid approaches for identifying and reducing toxic sources
to adequately protect the environment and human health.
With funding from the
GLAD program, researchers at the Ohio University, SUNY-Fredonia and the University of Michigan
will prepare models to determine the relationship of mercury emissions to
deposition within the region. Other research teams at the University of Minnesota
and Syracuse Research Corporation will develop multimedia modeling tools for
screening emerging chemicals and for assessing uncertainty in model
predictions, respectively.
Other funded projects
include work at Michigan
Technological University
to develop and apply improved techniques for measuring toxic substance
deposition. Measurements of mercury runoff from urban surfaces during rains
will be conducted at the University of
Toronto at Mississauga. A team at the University of Michigan
will determine the emission rates of flame retardant chemicals from buildings.
In addition, The Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services will lead
efforts to study the detrimental and protective health impacts from frequent
consumption of Great Lakes fish.
The GLAD program is
coordinated by the Great Lakes Commission in cooperation with the air quality
control agencies of the eight Great Lakes
states, and with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For
more information on the GLAD program or sponsored projects, visit www.glc.org/glad or contact: Jon Dettling,
Great Lakes Commission, 734-971-9135 or dettling@glc.org.