CANADIAN PCB EMISSIONS INVENTORY

Sediment | PCBs in Use and in Storage | Fish Advisories | Accidental Spills and Releases | Surface Water | Air

PCB Emissions Due to Spills and Accidental Releases

While reports of spills are not publicly available, the 1999 Lake Superior LaMP report provides an estimate of emissions to the Canadian portion of the Lake Superior Basin. It assumes that 0.4 percent of PCBs in use are spilled annually (based on U.S. loss estimates), with a 99.7 percent efficiency of cleanup when spilled to land. It also assumes that 1.7 percent of spills take place to media such as water where recovery is only 50 percent, and that 7.2 mg/kg of PCBs spilled to land are lost to the atmosphere by evaporation. Based on these figures, the report estimates that 21.6 kg/yr of PCBs may be irrecoverably lost to the Canadian portion of the basin.

In 1983, Québec created the GERLED database (Groupe d'étude et de restauration des lieux d'élimination de déchets dangereux) to prepare an inventory of hazardous waste disposal sites. The current version of the database, the Répertoire des terrains contaminés, is available in French only at:http://www.menv.gouv.qc.ca/sol/terrains/terrains-contamines/recherche.asp#outil