The headline above demonstrates what passes for environmental cleanup and improvement in Woolwich Township particularly between polluters and politicians.
These results are from the recently released 2025 Biomonitoring Report. DDT and metabolites (mostly DDE) in fish tissues are above the CCME (Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment) Guidelines of 14 ng/g for several reaches in the Creek on the Lanxess (Uniroyal) property. The guideline is 14 ng/g and the concentrations in Shiners and Bluntnose Minnows averaged between 50 and 70 ng/g, well above guidelines.
PCB concentrations in fish tissues were all below the CCME Guidelines except for the upstream reach which is interesting. What is just upstream from the former Uniroyal that could have discharged PCBs in the past?
Dioxins and furans concentrations in fish tissues were above the CCME Guidelines of .71 pg/g TEQ (Toxic Equivalency) downstream but below them upstream from Lanxess/Uniroyal. The downstream composite samples were around 1.6 pg/g which also indicates a decrease from concentrations that were higher in the early 1990s but have been stable over the last five years. Now this result similar to the others allegedly can not be "...directly or statistically compared with historical MECP tissue data..." due to differences in sampling, fish species assessed and other reasons which I find very convenient and dubious.
Somewhat strangely the dioxin and furan tissue concentrations in Shiners are higher in 2025 than they were in 2020. One excuse given is that the fish (shiners) averaged a little larger in the 2025 sampling than the earlier one.
All in all this study proves that doing nothing is cheaper than actually cleaning up and that eventually when you stop polluting, concentrations of toxic Persistent Organic Pollutants (Dioxins/DDT/PCBs etc.) tend to decrease over decades.
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