PFAS shows up in Haw River, Pittsboro water, but gets limited local attention
How the benzene tree polluted the world.
Deep in the Mariana Trench, at depths lower than the Rockies are high, rests a tin of reduced-sodium Spam.
NOAA scientists caught sight of it last year near the mouth of the Mariana’s Sirena Deep. It isn’t an isolated incursion, but it was nevertheless startling, the sight of those timeless golden letters bright against the deep ocean bottom.
Shortly after came news from another team of scientists who had found in the Mariana an innovation less familiar than shelf-stable meat, but far more significant. In the bodies of deep-dwelling creatures were found traces of industrial chemicals responsible for the rise of modern America—polychlorinated biphenyls.
PCBs had been detected in Hirondellea gigas, tiny shrimp-like amphipods scooped up by deep-water trawlers. Results from the expedition, led by Newcastle University’s hadal zone expert Alan Jamieson, were preliminary released last year and then published in February.
PCBs have been found the world over—from the bed of the Hudson River to the fat of polar bears roaming the high Arctic—but never before in the creatures of the extreme deep, a bioregion about which science knows relatively little.
How PCBs reached the Mariana is still under investigation. Jamieson and colleagues speculated on multiple, regional sources. A nearby military base. The industrial corridors along the Asian coastline. And the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where PCBs glom onto plastic particles caught in the current. Over time, the plastic degrades and descends into the depths, ferrying PCBs with them.
But the true origin of PCBs lies in another time and place, in Depression-era Alabama, and before that, 19th-century Germany at the pinnacle of German chemistry.
PCB production began in late 1929 in a factory east of Birmingham. The same era that gave us New York’s Chrysler Building, The Little Engine That Could, and eventually Spam brought mass-made PCBs to market.
General Electric and Westinghouse were early adopters. Both firms formulated PCBs into dielectric fluids, the insulating liquids added to capacitors and other electrical components to keep them cool and to prevent fires. With PCBs’ aid, the electric grid spread from the industrialized north into the rural regions of the Deep South and the American West. By mid-century, PCBs had a bird’s-eye view of any block in America with a utility pole and PCB-bathed transformer.
Soon PCBs were added to paints, caulks, plastics, even floor finishes and dish detergents. They were branded, and assigned names like Aroclor. That commercial products contained PCBs was never advertised, explained Ellen Griffith Spears, who wrote the definitive book on PCBs’ genesis.
PCBs slipped into the world, becoming ubiquitous while remaining anonymous. Until the mid-1960s, when the Danish-born scientist Sören Jensen detected PCBs in the bodies of pike taken from the waters off Sweden.
In the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, Jensen had been dispatched to look for DDT, one of the post-WWII pesticides whose increasing use Carson’s book had questioned. Jensen found DDT. But his data also signaled the presence of unexpected, yet chemically similar, contaminants. It took two years to determine the “ghosts” in his data were PCBs.
After that, everywhere Jensen thought to look, he found their fingerprints: in the feathers of archived white-tailed eagles, and in hair plucked from his own head, and others sampled from his wife and infant daughter. His conclusions, published in 1966, instigated a global investigation into the fate and toxicity of PCBs, research now carried forward (and into the deep oceans) by Jamieson and colleagues.
Today, PCBs are well-characterized pollutants—toxic, extremely persistent, and pervasive. All 209 variations of PCBs are known carcinogens. PCBs can alter liver function, and they can interfere with how humans reproduce, develop, think, and mount an immune response. Based on their cancer-causing potential alone, Congress voted to end American production in 1976 by attaching an amendment to the Toxics Substances Control Act (TSCA).
“ToSCA,” as the law was called, gave the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency, created six years earlier, the authority to regulate industrial chemicals. PCBs were the only class of chemicals called out by TSCA; about 60,000 others were grandfathered, meaning their use was never questioned.
Another three years passed before Congress’s limits on PCB production took effect. Four decades later, though banned, PCBs live on, including in tiny amphipods swimming in some of the deepest waters of Earth’s biggest ocean.
PCBs, now endemic to environments everywhere, belong to a class of chemicals called (depending on the era) halocarbons, organohalogens, or halogenated organic compounds.
Organic, in this instance, refers not to foods raised without chemicals but to compounds made with carbon. Halo- (or halogen) signifies the presence of one or more of the halogen elements, the most familiar being chlorine, bromine, and fluorine. From these starting materials, chemists can make an array of compounds. But so can nature. To date, there are more than 5,000 so-called biogenic or naturally-occurring organohalogens.
Nature’s versions are forged in volcanoes or near deep-sea vents where temperatures run high, and chlorine and bromine are abundant. Organisms in all kingdoms can make halocarbons, though in minute quantities and typically for highly specialized purposes such as self-defense or signaling mates.
There are many pathways to making such complex molecules. The Iowa atmospheric chemist Scott Spak keeps a running tally of the “recipes” that might yield a PCB. While there are no known analogs in nature, one does get to wondering whether nature—at some point, somewhere on the planet or deep in the cosmos—could have served up the right mix of raw materials, in the right order and under the right conditions to allow for PCBs’ spontaneous formation. It is conceivable, Spak concedes, though purely hypothetical. Such a discovery, should it even occur, wouldn’t explain PCBs’ global dispersion, nor absolve what humans made with impunity. But it does hint at the complexity of Earth’s chemistry, and the humility with which we still endeavor to understand it.
Into intricate ecological and biological systems human industry introduced PCBs in extraordinary volumes, and in evolutionary terms, rapidly—over the span of three or four human generations, said Spak. But the problem isn’t so much that PCBs are “unnatural,” though one could make that argument. It is that they are molecules nature recognized, familiar enough to be folded into its systems and to confuse them.
Human biology has not adapted to their presence. Species far older than us, microbes mostly, have evolved over millennia to coexist with, and even to synthesize and break down, specific types of biogenic halocarbons. Some strains of bacteria are capable of disassembling PCBs. Other species, such as the Atlantic tomcod, bottom-feeders in the Hudson, have even developed a genetic variation that allows for survival in PCB-polluted waters, though their livers are also loaded with the chemicals.
But for humans, research tracking the health effects of industrial PCB exposures, Spak said, is tantamount to watching evolutionary consequences playing out in real time.
While sunlight (and some microorganisms) break down PCBs over time, they can be stunningly stable when stored in sediment, glaciers and other so-called “sinks” like the deep ocean. And because PCBs are lipophilic (or fat-loving), they can also accumulate in the fatty tissue of marine life, and in the bodies of mammals like us. Depending on the total load, some measure of PCBs can last a lifetime, or pass between generations through cord blood or milk.
The chemistry that enabled humankind to engineer elements into such durable molecules and enduring pollutants dates to the early 19th century, to a time when the natural world was the chemist’s muse. As chemistry industrialized, chemists were drawn by profit, and later, into geopolitics. In time, chemistry became a tool for nature’s mastery, and—both knowingly and inadvertently—an engine for its alteration.
At the center of this transformation is an elegant molecule called benzene. It is the same carbon-rich compound that lends gas stations their curiously evocative aroma, and PCBs their structural integrity.
A molecule of benzene is comprised of six carbon and six hydrogen atoms. Ask a chemist what benzene looks like, and she will draw a hexagon. It’s a schematic of how benzene’s six carbons circle themselves, as if linked hand in hand, into a ring. The benzene ring.
Benzene rings are also abundant in nature. They were present in Earth’s prebiotic soup, and they float in deep space. Many human hormones have benzene rings. And so do many human-engineered molecules.
Chemical engineers approach benzene as a building block from which to make thousands of useful products, including aspirin, the plastic lid to your takeaway coffee, and the Legos children leave strewn across floors the world over. Though, it should be noted that benzene is rarely made intentionally. Benzene is incidental to other industrial processes, such as refining oil into gasoline, processing coal into coke, or in the making of ethylene, another widely used chemical building block. Which makes benzene an industrial by-product and also a common industrial pollutant, especially following industrial accidents, as happened after Hurricane Harvey struck the plants along Texas’s Gulf coast.
All of which means the benzene ring is something of a paradox. When incorporated into certain molecules, it is essential to life. But in other configurations, slight tweaks in the composition and arrangement of atoms render benzene part of a toxic, possibly carcinogenic molecule. And when on its own, there is ample evidence that benzene causes cancer.
Until the middle of the 19th century, building on the benzene ring wasn’t possible because, though benzene had been isolated, its structure still eluded chemists. So significant was the “discovery” of benzene’s ring of carbons that in 1890, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the German Chemical Society threw a party—the Benzolfest! It was “a festival of magnificence perhaps unparalleled in the history of science,” wrote one commentator.
It was held at Berlin’s City Hall in Germany. The emperor was invited. Dignitaries came. All of the era’s most preeminent chemists gathered in their finest attire. Augustus Hoffman, a bearded and towering figure in the field of organic chemistry, waxed poetic about benzene and the chemist, Friedrich August Kekulé, who had “pluck[ed] the heart out of its mystery.”
The benzene tree, as he called it, was “thronged with blossoms,” its branches heavy with fruit. It was “a blaze of color,” and it gave off “an almost overwhelming fragrance,” a fitting metaphor given benzene’s signature scent.
To Hoffman, the benzene tree was a “giant.” It soared “into the clouds to where the eye cannot yet follow it.” Up the tree scaled “no dearth of industrious workers,” all “busily striving to collect the harvest,” he had said, referring to how entrepreneurial chemists were converting benzene chemistry into industrial products. “Keen climbers have already clambered up to the third or fourth branch,” Hoffman continued, some chemists “working at a dizzy[ing] height.”
With new insight into molecular configurations, chemists, starting around 1865, could better anticipate the steps required to synthesize new molecules. With the benzene ring, “the number of organic compounds all at once,” Hoffman had noted, “increased to infinity.”
Among those in the tree’s farthest reaches was Gustav Schultz, in attendance that night. In 1881, Schutlz, with the chemist Hermann Schmidt, had described the synthesis of a PCB. The pair published the new molecule in a premier German-language journal. And then, like DDT, also achieved during this era, PCBs were left to languish for decades on dust-cloaked shelves of obscure chemical libraries. Their discovery advanced chemical knowledge but was otherwise of little practical value.
Hoffman was born into the fast-changing world of 19th-century Europe. He grew up in parallel with organic chemistry, and ascended to its highest ranks. Unlike inorganic chemists’ fascination with Earth’s metals and minerals, the first organic chemists studied molecules from living organisms, which were principally comprised of carbon.
Benzene was first isolated from the by-products left after making “portable gas,” which was rendered from fish or whale blubber to fuel lamps. In time, chemists learned to derive benzene and other carbon-rich materials from coal tar instead, a project central to Hoffman’s work and that of his student, Charles Mansfield.
A lump of coal, while not alive, is evidence of life once lived. It is the long-sequestered remnants of ancient flora, from an epoch when trees could grow as tall, or taller, than the one Hoffman had conjured. Coal tar, though, is what remains after human extraction and use. Wherever cities gasified coal to light 19th-century streetlamps, or converted coal into hotter-burning coke to smelt metals, coal tar piled up as waste. Hoffman, curious of its composition, set out to characterize it.
But when organic chemistry adopted coal tar as its primary feedstock, it wedded itself to the residues of industrialization. And so the field became one step removed from the thrum of life that had first inspired it.
By the Benzolfest, organic chemistry was high technology, and the German Empire its Silicon Valley. The field was “the earliest pure science to have a massive impact on technology and on a national economy,” noted the historian Alan Rocke. Germany’s prowess in chemical manufacturing would embolden its nationalistic ambitions. But the war such nationalism inspired would seed the downfall of the German chemical empire, and the rise of a new kind of chemical industry on American soil.
The original chemical products plucked from the benzene tree had a very specific application: They were textile dyes, what turns humdrum fabrics into every hue imaginable. The first colorfast dye synthesized from coal tar had been an accident. A failed attempt by one of Hoffman’s students to make quinine—a hard-to-source malarial drug derived from the South American fever bark tree—led to the discovery in 1856 of a dye that could permanently stain silk a rich, red-purple mauve.
Hoffman was based in England, and it was his English student William Perkin who happened into the colorant. Perkin left the lab against Hoffman’s counsel to build a dye-works instead. His factory marked the first attempt to do organic chemistry at scale, wrote Simon Garfield in his history of this world-changing invention. Eventually, after multiple failed attempts, Perkin developed the multi-stepped process, and proceeded to the equally difficult task of convincing an established, but reluctant, textile industry to adopt his industrial dye.
In time, Garfield noted, a new class of chemists engineered the radiant color palette of Victorian fashion from the dregs of Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Dye-works sprouted across Europe, clustering along Germany and Switzerland’s swift rivers. In time, these ran foul—discolored and odorous. Neighbors complained. Researchers took note. Governments acted, but the coal-tar industry bloomed all the same.
By the close of the 19th century, German dyestuffs dominated the world market, though the first effects of acute exposures were already evident among the earliest generations of dye workers. By 1897, the term chloracne appeared in the German literature to describe a condition unique to chemical workers, “an industrial leprosy,” where the skin is pocked with painful, disfiguring lesions. Not long after, medicine documented new “aniline (dye) tumors” and “dye-workers cancer.” In time, chemists realized benzene, too, was more hazardous in factory quantities than in those used in a laboratory.
And yet, coal-tar chemistry flourished, spreading in multiple directions at once. Chemical innovation led to new dyes, and also to new drugs like aspirin, a synthetic version of a molecule once sourced from willow bark. New classes of pharmaceuticals followed. In time, coal-tar drugs transformed health care.
But coal-tar drugs and coal-tar chemicals thereafter diverged, at least in the popular imagination and in the eyes of states trying to manage these burgeoning technologies. To this day, and despite recent reforms to U.S. policy, drugs and industrial chemicals fall under the purview of separate laws administered by separate agencies. And they are held to separate standards of safety. Forgotten to history are their common origins and chemical ancestry.
Less than a century after the Benzolfest, scientists, led by Theo Colborn, synthesized the growing body of ecological research into a disquieting discovery. At trace levels of exposure, levels lower than workers’ acute exposures and equivalent to dosed drugs, many of these new classes of organic chemicals (including PCBs) could mimic, block, or disrupt the work of hormones, the biochemical signals that coordinate multicellular life.
Though Perkin missed the mark, making mauve instead, it was no accident that an English chemist sought a synthetic route to quinine. Malarial drugs were essential to colonial expansion into the tropics, one example of how organic chemicals are influenced by prevailing geopolitics and pressed to do the work of empire.
By the second decade of the 20th century, organic chemicals were moved to the front lines of global conflict. Mustard gas, picric acid, and TNT—all organic molecules—made for unimaginably destructive weapons. After Versailles, even peacetime users of organic chemicals were hailed as patriots and power brokers. Germany paid reparations with dyes, while the United States seized German chemical patents and industrial-plant designs as the spoils of war.
Before the Great War, few U.S. firms had ventured into organic chemicals. Only after fighting began, and the British embargo blocked import of German chemicals, did American companies leap into the unknown of organic chemicals production.
“Americans keenly felt their dependence on German chemicals,” wrote the industrial historian Kathryn Steen. Mastering how to make them domestically was motivated “partly because of the[se] shortages,” she added, but “primarily because of what [the chemicals] represented to Americans—the seemingly inferior industrial and scientific abilities relative to the enemy and rival.”
After the war, growing the nation’s capacity to manufacture chemicals became a national project. The founder of Hooker Chemical (later responsible for Love Canal, the nation’s first Superfund site) argued this point with regard to chlorine (a gruesome war gas). The same case was made for coal-tar chemicals in 1917 by John F. Queeny, the founder of Monsanto Chemical—the company that two decades later would take PCBs global. Factories that made drugs and dyes from coal, Queeny argued, could easily make the materials required by modern warfare. Ramp up peacetime production of coal-tar chemicals and a fleet of war-ready factories would be lying in wait. It would mark “the declaration of American chemical independence,” Queeny said.
For the general public, though, the new coal-tar chemicals were a harder sell.
Coal-tar chemicals smacked of artifice and, in their use as chemical weapons, seemed abhorrent, not the patriots industrialists had painted them to be. Chemistry had a postwar public-relations problem.
In the same editorial where Queeny equated national security with a robust chemical industry, he also pictured coal-tar chemistry as a thickly crowned tree. Like those that chart ancestry, Queeny’s tree arranged chemical products by family and parentage.
Semet-Solvay widely distributed a similar image. Their “coal products tree” rooted the company’s offerings in the nation’s bituminous coal beds. Along boughs of ammonia, tar, and benzene bloomed hundreds of products—Saccharin! Explosives! Mothballs! Perfume!—all promising mastery over nature’s unyielding cycles, its wild swarms and infestations, its off-putting odors and inconvenient secretions.
The collective conscience still carried residues of the real and symbolic horrors of chemical warfare, even at the height of the roaring twenties. Chemistry had a spectral presence, and it was evident in popular sentiment and the era’s literature. All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, and Goodbye to All That were postmortems on chemical warfare. All three were published (or translated) in 1929, the same year PCB production began far from the battlefields of Western Europe in Anniston, Alabama, on the lush, southern limits of Appalachia’s rolling hills.
Anniston was a planned, industrial utopia. But in reality, it was a segregated southern city populated by pig-iron and pipe foundries. PCBs were first made by Anniston’s Federal Phosphorus Company, in a plant that belonged to the son of a Confederate solider, a charismatic entrepreneur and a champion of the South’s revival.
Theodore Swann had gotten his start selling locomotives and later electricity. During World War I, he managed a munitions plant in Anniston, but then founded a factory to refine manganese for the steel industry, and when that failed, phosphorous, which is how Swann finally came into his fortune. His electric furnaces captured a pure form of phosphoric acid, which was sold to make fertilizer, detergent, baking soda and even soda pop.
Swann wasn’t a chemist, but a “boom man in a boomtown,” as one biographer put it, always looking for the next thing. And in the mid-1920s, what was on the rise were cars, American crude, and by extension organic chemicals. The success of these ascendant industries depended on better chemical technologies to make better fuels and better car parts. And Swann had seen it coming.
In the mid-1920s, at the invitation of an oil company, Indian Refining (later known as Texaco), he agreed to manufacture a benzene-based chemical called diphenyl (or biphenyl, in today’s parlance). Indian Refining needed a regular supply of diphenyl, a heat transfer fluid, to improve its oil-refining process. Except only one company made diphenyl, Eastman Kodak, and it was only available in small batches at the prohibitive price of $40 per pound.
The structure of diphenyl was simple: just two fused rings of benzene. But it required an entirely different chemistry, and experience and expertise that were in short supply at the time.
As Spears described in Baptized in PCBs, Swann assigned a team to the difficult (and hazardous) task, and issued them a deadline. Development proceeded by trial and error, with error sometimes resulting in explosions, including one that took off a wall and showered Swann’s men with fire, glass, benzene, and other shrapnel.
They eventually mastered diphenyl, a “magic fluid” that brought the nation to the brink of a new chemical age. Not long after, Swann’s chemists scaled another process to add chlorine onto the diphenyl backbone, creating a molecule so stable, it would travel the globe and accumulate in places surely unfathomable to Swann. Swann had financed the conversion of benzene into biphenyl, and now biphenyl into PCBs. The Anniston Works would soon produce 3,000 pounds of PCBs per day.
Production levels climbed higher by the year, as PCBs were put to the project of nation-building. They erected the bases and surveillance equipment that protected the new world order, while at home, PCBs were built into the schools, offices, and factories constructed to accommodate the postwar boom. PCBs would transform U.S. industry in a matter of decades and global ecology before the century was out.
In the United States, the first batches of PCBs, made at the close of the 1920s, likely left Anniston for Pittsburgh, home of H.H. Robertson Company. Robertson made prefabricated metal siding and roofing from which to erect factories, smelters, refineries and chemical works. The company, like Indian Refining before them, had asked for technical assistance. They needed a new protective coating for their metal sheeting, one that could prevent erosion and the spread of fire better than Halowaxes, or chlorinated naphthalene, one of the earliest classes of industrial halocarbons produced in the United States.
PCBs were unusually durable and durably useful. They were heat-resistant, non-conductive, and excellent as a weatherproof and fireproof coating. And because they were a value-added waste product, PCBs were economically viable.
Flame-resistant factory parts may seem like an insignificant side note, but Robertson’s Protected Metals, later called Galbestos, were instrumental in growing the nation’s manufacturing sector in size and scale. Factories were changing. Small, clustered, brick structures gave way to multistory, steel Goliaths. And these needed to withstand the elements, and to contain the fire and explosion risks that went along with the 20th century’s new methods for transforming nature’s resources into the mass-made materials of modern societies.
Four days after the stock-market crash of 1929, Swann’s firm filed a patent for PCB-laced transformer oils. Westinghouse and GE, like Robertson, would soon find PCBs indispensable, wrote Spears.
But despite these early successes, problems were mounting in Anniston. Within the first years of PCB production, those handling PCBs developed the same chloracne and other debilitating symptoms as dye workers a generation earlier. Three workers at Halowax who handled PCBs died from acute yellow atrophy of the liver (extreme jaundice), fatalities that were studied, but ultimately cast aside by company officials.
And though Swann’s company had weathered the worst years of the Depression, it wouldn’t survive the decade. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration had issued economic directives that, as Swann put it, leveled southern industry like Sherman’s March to the Sea. And he had been a profligate spender—living high in the Birmingham hills. But with shifting costs, and loans coming due, Swann went under. His rise to fortune and influence had been fast and somewhat famed. (He had even been profiled in Forbes.) His decline was equally precipitous. Swann sunk into debt, losing his mansion, and all claims to his many factories and technologies.
Queeny’s coal-tar drug company, Monsanto, was also flush from lucrative contracts with Coca-Cola, who bought their caffeine, vanillin, and saccharin. Monsanto took over PCB production in 1935, securing government contracts, growing sales through World War II, and shielding all along the suite of chemicals from regulation until the mid-1970s.
Chemical production in these intervening years soared, owning to the fact that U.S. firms switched their substrate from coal tar to the by-products of the new, advanced crude refineries. In the 1950s, Socony-Vacuum (later ExxonMobil) published the petroleum tree, emblematic of the flowering of American petrochemistry, at the time a “uniquely American phenomenon,” as industrialist Peter Spitz put it.
Two years later, in 1959, Goodrich-Gulf published the rubber tree, as symbolic to this era as Hoffman’s tree had been in his time. Advances in chemical engineering had obviated the need for natural latex, making rubber from oil rather than rubber trees. Drugs, sweeteners, flavorings, fertilizers, fabrics, and furnishings now all had synthetic equivalents. Chemistry, it seemed, had freed humanity from nature altogether.
When chemical trees finally disappeared from popular culture, what was lost was any connection of organic chemicals to their fossil-fuel roots, and of greater significance, to their molecular basis in carbon and the chemistry of life.
* * *
If you bore into the fat-rich bark of a thick-trunked tree, you’ll likely find PCBs, same as you’d find in deep-ocean amphipods, which makes trees like shrimp, and shrimp like us. PCBs are thought to be present in detectable levels in every person on the planet. Though everywhere, the implications are distributed unevenly. PCBs can concentrate, creating hotspots, including in Anniston and other factory towns and regions of the Arctic and subarctic, with significant implications for the indigenous communities living there.
Despite national and international curbs on their production, PCBs now congregate in the deep ocean, raising new concerns. In some areas of the Mariana, PCB levels registered 50 times higher than those found in crabs living in surface waters near heavy industry in China.
By the time the international community stepped in to end global PCB production, well over 1 million metric tons (about 3 billion pounds) had been manufactured worldwide. The 2001 UN Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants that resulted from these negotiations, but which the United States has yet to ratify, initially named DDT, PCBs, and 10 other chemicals (or classes of chemicals), all based on benzene.
“The challenge moving forward is to determine the physiological consequences of such contamination and understand knock-on effects on ecosystem function,” Jamieson and his colleagues concluded in the pages of Nature Ecology and Evolution. Except human activity may be altering the chemistry of the deep before we have had the chance to document it.
The problem is not limited to PCBs, but extends to the larger family of organohalogens to which they belong. In the early 1970s, PCBs were replaced by other organohalogens, one being polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs, molecules similar to PCBs, but made with bromine instead of chlorine. Soon after their introduction, PBBs got into cattle feed, poisoning the food supply and the people of Michigan, and saddling the state with a long-lived legacy. PBDEs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, followed as yet another alternative. These were used as flame retardants for two decades before a subsequent generation of Swedish scientists charted rising levels in breast milk.
Besides PCBs, amphipods living in the Mariana also harbor PBDEs, though the most prevalent commercial mixtures have been phased out of U.S. production and named to the UN Stockholm Convention as well.
The deep now archives nearly a century of chemical innovation, and documents the rise and fall of chemical classes, which industry develops and retracts in waves without seeming to absorb the larger lesson.
* * *
There are those who want a bright line to divide what’s natural from what isn’t as a means to make clear what’s safe. But with their origins in Earth’s deep carbon, and their enduring presence in life forms everywhere, such distinctions are murky at best. And yet, PCBs are part of a post-natural state in which industrial chemistry and ecology have become one and the same.
“Nature,” the organic chemist Pat Costner reminded me, “is a chemist, too” and the world its roiling, bubbling, reactive laboratory. Science has only begun to grapple with the complexity of our overlapping chemistries. Costner trained in organic chemistry at the peak of the chemical age. She took her first job as a bench chemist with Shell Oil in the 1960s, though she didn’t stay long. She turned her attention to organic pollution, particularly the chemical by-products industry never intended to make but released into nature anyway.
Her specialty became the family of benzene-based compounds called dioxins, perhaps the most poisonous products of the benzene tree. Some PCBs, she reminded me, are dioxin-like in their toxicity profile. And like dioxins, PCBs can also be inadvertent by-products, made incidentally during the manufacture of titanium dioxide, for example, or a shade of yellow organic inks and dyes reminiscent of the letters that spell out Spam. Try though we may, control over chemistries this complex is something of a chimera.
“We have been so clever at learning to play with atoms and molecules without ever thinking about what that they do once they are out,” she told me. “Put a complex molecule into the environment,” said Costner, “and it is going to undergo any number of transitions in hard-to-predict ways.”
The same is true when human-made molecules interact with the exquisite biochemistry of our bodies.
As the biologist Sandra Steingraber explains, the organs of the human system are designed to “shuttle around, break apart, recycle, and reconstruct carbon-containing molecules,” work orchestrated by enzymes and hormones. If carbon molecules come with add-ons like chlorine and bromine, the chemical makeup can influence whether the body stores the molecules, metabolizes them, renders them benign, or makes them inherently more dangerous.
But regulating organic chemicals for their biological activity has been political and controversial because carbon is not just the basis of our biology, but also deeply embedded in our economy.
One hundred and fifty years ago, when Hoffman and his contemporaries gathered to celebrate benzene, humanity’s collective relationship to carbon and nature had already begun to shift. Chemistry, which once mimicked nature’s molecules, had begun to manipulate them. All the more striking, then, is Hoffman’s fantastical tree. Just two years before his death, he rooted chemistry to the Earth. However high chemists might climb, however much industry might harvest, chemistry was grounded in the laws of nature. What goes around comes around. Nature travels in cycles.
But those in attendance that cold March eve, a decade before the new century dawned, could not have known that the branch of chemistry they honored—founded to study living matter!—would spawn an industry so prolific as to irreparably alter the chemistry of life itself.
The chemical innovations of Hoffman’s era would get swept into global conflict—and the American impulse toward maximum and unfettered production—casting PCBs and other fruits of the benzene tree far and wide, into the ocean deep and possibly the depths of time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
REBECCA ALTMAN is an environmental sociologist and writer based in Boston.
Cyanide glitters for some.
Talk about cyanide, and images of a lethal pill used by spies to avoid capture come to mind. Few people outside the gold mining industry know that sodium cyanide is used in most of the world’s production of the precious metal.
“It’s our insecure times that’s led to a ramp-up in gold demand.”
—Stefan Beraud, inorganic chemicals director, IHS Markit
The days of panning for gold nuggets in California and Alaska are long gone. The public’s enduring love affair with gold can be satisfied only by extracting tiny amounts from ores with a chemical like cyanide that binds to gold and separates it in a modern-day version of alchemy.
Though controversial because it is deadly if handled improperly, sodium cyanide is the most efficient—and some say the most environmentally safe—way to satisfy growing global demand for gold. More of it is now on the way, and much of it is destined for Mexico.
In February, a joint venture of Grupo Idesa and Evonik Industries’ CyPlus subsidiary opened Mexico’s first cyanide plant, a 40,000-metric-ton-per-year facility in Coatzacoalcos. Then in June, chemical maker Chemours said it would spend $150 million on a new plant in the state of Durango, Mexico. Both projects follow cyanide specialist Cyanco’s 2013 opening of a 55,000-metric-ton-per-year plant in Alvin, Texas, not far from the Mexican border.
Going for the gold
Crushed rock is mixed into a water slurry and treated with sodium cyanide, which complexes with gold in the ore. Electroextraction removes gold from the solution.
Credit: C&EN;/Shutterstock
While China is the largest user and producer of sodium cyanide, Mexico is a hotbed for new production because of a burgeoning precious-metal mining industry. “It’s our insecure times that’s led to a ramp-up in gold demand,” says Stefan Schlag Leon Beraud, senior inorganic chemicals director at the consulting firm IHS Markit.
Central banks have mostly given up on the use of gold to support paper currency, Beraud says. Instead it’s the financial industry and institutional investors who look to gold as part of a diversified portfolio. The glittery element serves as a hedge against inflation, deflation, and losses during time of war and political instability, he points out.
Much of the new gold production satisfies demand from the exchange-traded gold funds that have started up in recent years. Many of these funds are backed by physical stores of gold, Beraud notes. The demand has driven up gold prices over the past decade, making it profitable for operators even though they need to process as much as 1 metric ton of ore to extract a mere 2 g of gold.
Sodium cyanide is not used solely to extract gold from ore. The chemical has a host of other uses, including as a raw material for industrial chemicals such as cyanuric chloride, cyanogen chloride, and various nitriles.
But by far the biggest use is to extract gold. Global output of the gold-capturing molecule is growing at about 2% annually and will reach 1.3 million metric tons by 2020, Beraud estimates. Before the start-up of local cyanide production, Mexico imported 60,000 metric tons from the U.S. annually, he says.
Mexico is now one of the largest sodium cyanide consumers in the world, notes Frank Harenburg, managing director of CyPlus. All the new mine development in the country, helped along by a government more open to the investment, has made the country a larger consumer of cyanide than the U.S. and Canada combined, he says.
“We have a large sodium cyanide plant in Germany and export from there, but we also look to establish production facilities in countries where demand is large,” Harenburg says. Coatzacoalcos is in a region with a history of chemical production and a workforce familiar with handling chemicals safely, he says.
Talks with family-owned Grupo Idesa led to a partnership, Harenburg says. Their joint enterprise, CyPlus Idesa, generates hydrogen cyanide, a toxic gas, and combines it with sodium hydroxide to make a relatively safe-to-handle and easy-to-ship dry briquette form of cyanide.
Neither Chemours, which claims to be the world’s largest producer of dry sodium cyanide, nor Cyanco were eager to talk about their investments in the gold-complexing agent. That reluctance may be due to the dangers associated with the chemical if it is mishandled or spilled.
When a hazardous chemicals warehouse exploded in Tianjin, China, in 2015, fears were widespread that the sodium cyanide stored there could poison people nearby and contaminate the environment.
In 2000, a dam holding cyanide-contaminated water burst at Romania’s Baia Mare mining works. The tainted water flooded local rivers, including the Danube, and killed large numbers of fish. The Romanian spill led to the International Cyanide Management Code. Most of the world’s mine operators, sodium cyanide producers, and shippers have signed on to it.
As long as sodium cyanide is kept away from water and handled with care, it can be safely shipped to local mines, Harenburg says. “If it is spilled as a solid, it can easily be recovered,” he says.
After use, cyanide can be degraded to minimize the hazard it poses to people and the environment, Harenburg adds. Gold mines use a number of processes to turn cyanide into the less hazardous cyanate. Treatment options include hydrogen peroxide and peroxymonosulfuric acid, also known as Caro’s acid. Another alternative is the Inco process, which uses a combination of sodium metabisulfite and air to degrade the cyanide.
In use for more than 100 years, sodium cyanide is more effective than other processes at extracting gold from more types of ore, Harenburg says. The most infamous alternative is mercury, a neurotoxin that has mostly disappeared as a gold-extraction agent. Other options include ammonium thiosulfate and a combination of bromine and a cyclodextrin. They also involve their own hazards and difficult-to-handle waste streams, he says.
Still, everyone would like a safer alternative to cyanide, Harenburg acknowledges. One possibility is using bacteria to extract gold from ore. He says CyPlus parent Evonik is interested in this and other processes that are not yet ready for prime time. As Harenburg sees it, alternative extraction methods will likely be add-ons rather than replacements for cyanide.
For now, says Beraud of IHS, sodium cyanide is firmly entrenched, and “large gold companies have it under control.”
And control is the key. Gold is valued because it does not tarnish. If handled properly, cyanide should avoid tarnishing the precious commodity’s glittery reputation.
Will federal safety panel ban toxic flame retardants in household products?
Manufacturers long ago stopped adding a cancer-causing flame retardant to children's pajamas, but federal officials failed to ban the chemical during the late 1970s and as recently as five years ago it was the most widely used fire-resistant compound in household furniture.
Scientists and health advocates want the government to stop repeating the mistakes it made with the chemical, known as chlorinated tris.
On Wednesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission plans to vote on a petition that would ban tris and chemically related flame retardants from children's products, furniture, mattresses and household electronics. Many of the compounds have been linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility. A growing body of research suggests they can irreparably harm fetuses and young children by mimicking hormones during early stages of life.
"Every chemical tested in this class has adverse effects," Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, told the commission at a hearing last week. "Unless we approach this as a class, we are going to find ourselves in the same situation five years, 10 years down the road. The evidence has built to the point that all of these chemicals, and all future chemicals of this class, are going to escape into the environment and then into people."
Proposed by a coalition of health groups including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the petition targets chemicals highlighted by the Tribune's 2012 "Playing With Fire" investigation, which revealed how a deceptive campaign by the tobacco and chemical industries led to the widespread use of toxic, ineffective flame retardants in American homes.
Among other findings, the Tribune outlined how the chemical industry replaced some harmful flame retardants with chemically similar but largely unregulated compounds — a pattern known as "regrettable substitution" because the new chemicals often are just as worrisome.
With the Trump administration generally opposed to new business regulations, the commission's staff is advising the panel to reject the petition. Echoing arguments from the chemical industry, the staff review concluded there isn't enough evidence to outlaw an entire class of substances — a step the federal government has never taken without a direct order from Congress — and cautioned the agency doesn't have enough money or manpower to enforce a ban.
Three safety commissioners have told advocates they support invoking the commission's rarely used authority to ban the chemicals, known as organohalogens. All five members of the panel were appointed by then-President Barack Obama, though President Donald Trump will get his first opportunity to influence its agenda when Commissioner Marietta Robinson's term ends next month.
The chemicals at issue contain either bromine or chlorine — halogens that at high levels take the place of oxygen and slow the combustive reaction that creates and spreads fire.
Government and academic researchers have found the amount commonly added to household furniture fails to protect people from fire in a meaningful way. But because of their chemistry, many popular flame retardants spread easily and widely, persist in the environment and build up in the food chain.
Industry groups continue to promote the chemicals as lifesavers. "Fire risk is still a very real issue," said Robert Simon, a vice president of the American Chemistry Council, the industry's chief trade group. "This (petition) has the potential to undermine fire safety and compromise the fire safety of some products."
The safety commission vote comes as the Environmental Protection Agency struggles in the Trump era to follow through on promises made during a bipartisan overhaul of the nation's chief chemical safety law.
Elliot Kaye, a commissioner and former CPSC staff member, said last week that the panel could exempt certain chemicals later if future studies found they were safe.
"If at the end of the day, we look back at this decision and determine we made a mistake, I would far rather make a decision that is too protective of children rather than one that falls far short of that," Kaye said. "One can always say there is not enough information. There is always going to be doubt, whether it is a criminal case or civil case or a regulatory decision. In this case, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence."
Under pressure from retailers and the public, some companies already are moving toward safer alternatives for household products. "As you see new chemicals come on, I don't think you are going to see regrettable substitution in the future," said Thomas Osimitz, a private researcher who has conducted studies for chemical companies and serves on an industry advisory panel.
The safety commission's staff also concluded the market is changing fast, making the petition unnecessary. Yet academic scientists, advocacy groups and state regulators keep finding organohalogen flame retardants in recently manufactured products.
Any furniture-maker that still adds organohalogens to furniture must attach a warning label required under a California law prompted by the Tribune investigation. In July, the state agency that enforces the law reported that 22 percent of the furniture it sampled this year still contained the chemicals.
Electronics are another concern.
Rick Goss, a lobbyist for industry trade groups, testified last week that electronics manufacturers "have long moved past" a group of highly toxic organohalogens known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. But in a report to be released Wednesday, advocacy groups say a respected laboratory found organohalogens in the plastic enclosures of 11 of the 12 televisions it tested earlier this year.
Two of the TVs contained a PBDE known as deca that has been banned in five states, including Washington, where the nonprofit Toxic-Free Future and Clean Production Action groups purchased the products. Five of the TVs contained a chemically similar compound and eight contained another brominated chemical that researchers recently found in the placentas of pregnant women.
Samples from the television enclosures were tested by Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist and one of the first scientists who discovered that most human exposure to flame retardants comes from ingesting surprisingly large amounts of contaminated household dust.
Stapleton and several colleagues tracked how chlorinated tris, the carcinogen removed from children's pajamas nearly 40 years ago, later became the top flame retardant in upholstered furniture cushions. The chemical also was commonly added to nursing pillows, highchairs and diaper-changing pads, the researchers found.
Between 2014 and 2016, consumers sent Stapleton more than 1,100 samples of polyurethane foam from household products. About a quarter of the samples contained organohalogens, and chlorinated tris again was the one most frequently detected.
In 2012, testing by another lab commissioned by the Tribune found chlorinated tris and related chemicals in popular brands of baby mattresses, even though the safety commission had said manufacturers could easily comply with national flammability standards without using the chemicals.
"It's really important to close the door on these organohalogen flame retardants once and for all," said Eve Gartner, an attorney for the nonprofit group Earthjustice who helped prepare the petition.
Until last year, the EPA was hobbled by a law that allowed industry to put chemicals on the market without evaluating their safety and made it practically impossible to ban toxic substances after health hazards were documented.
Congress approved a new law intended to improve safety. But rules unveiled in June by the Trump administration included several business-friendly changes overseen by a former industry official who now holds a top post at the EPA.
Career staff at the agency pushed back in a memo that argued the administration's changes would effectively prevent the EPA from taking action when chemicals "present an unreasonable risk to health or the environment." Since then, the administration chose to fill the agency's top chemical safety post with a researcher who for years has helped the tobacco and chemical industries downplay concerns about their products.
Several researchers who testified or wrote letters in support of the safety commission petition see it as another opportunity to force the chemical industry to change.
"These chemicals are robbing our children and grandchildren of critical human potential," said Thomas Zoeller, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has shown how flame retardants and other halogens interfere with hormones during early brain development. "While these effects might not be visible on the faces our children, they are no less important to them individually or to our society."
mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @scribeguy
Energy-efficient green buildings may emit hazardous chemicals.
(Reuters Health) - Newly renovated low-income housing units in Boston earned awards for green design and building but flunked indoor air-quality tests, a new study shows.
Researchers found potentially carcinogenic levels of toxic chemicals in the remodeled homes before and after residents moved in. All of the 30 eco-friendly homes in the study had risky indoor air concentrations for at least one chemical.
“Even in green buildings, building materials contain chemicals that we’re concerned about from a health perspective,” said lead author Robin Dodson, a researcher at Silent Spring Institute in Newton, Massachusetts.
“We should not only think about the efficiency of the building but the health of the building,” she said in a phone interview.
The hazards seemed to come both from materials used to renovate the housing units as well as from occupants’ furnishings and personal-care products, the study found.
“Synthetic chemicals are ubiquitous in modern life,” said co-author Gary Adamkiewicz, an environmental health professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
“They’re in new housing, old housing, green housing, conventional housing and high- and low-income housing,” he said by email.
As reported in Environment International, Dodson, Adamkiewicz and colleagues collected air and dust samples from 10 renovated units before occupancy and from 27 units one to nine months after residents moved in between July 2013 and January 2014.
By testing the homes before and after they were occupied, investigators were able to trace the presence of nearly 100 chemicals with known or suspected health concerns to the renovation, the residents or a combination.
Both before and after occupancy, all the tested units had indoor air concentrations of formaldehyde that exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cancer-based screening level.
The researchers expected formaldehyde, which has been associated with allergy and asthma, might leach out of building materials, and they found evidence that it did. But because formaldehyde emissions remained high after occupancy, the research team suspected that residents also brought formaldehyde in personal-care products.
Researchers also believe that flame retardants, which are suspected of causing cancer and diminishing male fertility, had been added to the building insulation.
To their surprise, they found chemicals used in sunscreen, nail polish and perfumes being emitted from building materials, possibly because they had been added to paint or floor finishes, Dodson said.
Residents appear to have brought into the renovated homes a number of health-disturbing chemicals, including antimicrobials, flame retardants, plastics and fragrances.
Flame retardant BDE-47, which appeared after residents moved in, has been banned since 2005. Dodson assumes residents carried the compound into their homes, possibly in second-hand furniture.
Consumers could improve household air quality by using products free of fragrance and other seemingly innocuous but harmful ingredients, Dodson said. But the onus should not be on consumers, she said.
“Why are manufacturers even allowed to use these chemicals in their products?” she said.
Green building standards should be broadened to prohibit use of hazardous chemicals, she said.
Tom Lent, policy director of the nonprofit Healthy Building Network in Berkeley, California, said the study provides important clues about which hazardous chemicals are being released from building materials so that green buildings can be constructed to be both energy-efficient and healthy.
“There does not need to be a conflict,” Lent, who was not involved with the study, said in an email.
But the conflict between energy-efficient building and the need to reduce toxic indoor air emissions has existed for 15 years, Asa Bradman said by email. Bradman, associate director of the Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health at the University of California, Berkeley, was not involved with the study.
Adamkiewicz recently completed another study that suggests green buildings can be healthy, or at least healthier, he said.
He studied families who moved from old, conventional housing to new, green public housing units in Boston. The new buildings were designed to save energy and reduce exposures to indoor pollutants.
In the green units, adults wheezed and coughed less and suffered fewer headaches, he found, and children missed fewer school days and had fewer asthma attacks and hospitalizations.
SOURCE: bit.ly/2wZx8zN Environment International, online September 12, 2017.
Thirty years after Montreal pact, solving the ozone problem remains elusive.
ANALYSIS
Thirty Years After Montreal Pact, Solving the Ozone Problem Remains Elusive
Despite a ban on chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone hole over Antarctica remains nearly as large as it did when the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987. Scientists now warn of new threats to the ozone layer, including widespread use of ozone-eating chemicals not covered by the treaty.
BY FRED PEARCE • AUGUST 14, 2017
Did the Montreal Protocol fix the ozone hole? It seemed so. With chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-eating chemicals banned, many scientists said it was only a matter of time before the ozone layer recharged, and the annual hole over Antarctica healed for good.
But 30 years on, some atmospheric chemists are not so sure. The healing is proving painfully slow. And new discoveries about chemicals not covered by the protocol are raising fears that full recovery could be postponed into the 22nd century – or possibly even prevented altogether.
In mid-September, the United Nations is celebrating the protocol’s 30th anniversary. It will declare that “we are all ozone heroes.” But are we patting ourselves on the back a bit too soon?
The ozone layer is a long-standing natural feature of the stratosphere, the part of the atmosphere that begins about six miles above the earth. The ozone layer filters out dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and damage many life forms. It may have been essential for the development of life on Earth.
So there was alarm in the 1970s when researchers first warned that extremely stable man-made compounds like CFCs, used in refrigerants and aerosols, were floating up into the stratosphere, where they released chlorine and bromine atoms that break down ozone molecules. In the 1980s, Antarctic researchers discovered that these chemical reactions went into overdrive in the super-cold polar stratospheric clouds that formed over the frozen continent. They had begun creating a dramatic “hole” in the ozone layer at the end of each austral winter.
The ensuing panic resulted in the signing of the Montreal Protocol on September 16, 1987. It and its successors have phased out production of a range of man-made chlorine and bromine compounds thought to persist for the several years needed for them to reach the stratosphere. Besides CFCs, they include carbon tetrachloride, hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), and methyl bromide, a fumigant once widely used to kill pests.
So far so good. The amount of ozone-depleters in the atmosphere has dropped by more than 10 percent since peaking in the late 1990s. In response, the total ozone in the atmosphere has been largely unchanged since 2000.
Satellite imagery depicting the annual maximum extent of the ozone hole over Antarctica from 1979 to 2013. Credit: NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
But in the past five years, evidence has emerged that potential ozone-eating compounds can reach the ozone layer much faster than previously thought. Under some weather conditions, just a few days may be enough. And that means a wide range of much more short-lived compounds threaten the ozone layer – chemicals not covered by the Montreal Protocol.
These compounds are all around us. They are widely used as industrial solvents for tasks like degreasing and dry cleaning. And their releases into the atmosphere are increasing fast.
These new ozone-busters include dichloromethane (DCM), a common and cheap paint stripper, also used in foam-blowing agents and, ironically, in the manufacture of “ozone-friendly” alternatives to CFCs. With emissions now exceeding one million tons a year, the concentration of DCM in the lower atmosphere has more than doubled since 2004. Even so, it has not been regarded as a threat to the ozone layer, because its typical lifetime in the atmosphere before it is broken down in photochemical reactions is only about five months. It should, atmospheric chemists concluded, remain safely in the lower atmosphere.
But that view collapsed in 2015, when Emma Leedham Elvidge at the University of East Anglia in England examined air samples taken on board commercial aircraft cruising at the lower edge of the stratosphere. She found high levels of DCM, especially over the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and particularly during the Asian monsoon season, when strong updrafts fast-track air from the ground to the stratosphere. It seems they were taking DCM along for the ride.
Alarm bells are ringing about dozens of other short-lived ozone-destroying chlorine compounds accumulating in the atmosphere.
How much should we worry? Ryan Hossaini, an atmospheric chemist at Lancaster University, recently did the math. He calculated that DCM currently contributes less than 10 percent of the chlorine in the ozone layer. But on current emission trends, it could be That could delay the ozone hole’s recovery by 30 years, until at least 2095, he suggested.
Others share that concern. “Growing quantities of DCM are leaking into the stratosphere, where it is exceptionally effective in destroying the ozone,” says David Rowley, an atmospheric chemist at the University College London, who was not involved in the research. “The potential for DCM to affect the global ozone budget is profound.”
Alarm bells are ringing about dozens of other short-lived, potentially ozone-destroying chlorine compounds accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of fast-rising global manufacturing. They include 1,2-dichloroethane, a chemical widely used in the manufacture of PVC pipes. There are few atmospheric measurements of this compound yet, “but sporadic data suggest it is a significant source of chlorine in the atmosphere,” says Hossaini.
The risks of such chemicals reaching the ozone layer are greatest in the tropics, where manufacturing is booming in fast-industrialising countries such as China and India, and where, as luck would have it, atmospheric circulation patterns are favorable. The Asian monsoon can propel the gases to the stratosphere in as little as ten days, according to unpublished research seen by Yale Environment 360.
The movement of ozone-depleting chemicals through the atmosphere, shifting from the tropics and concentrating in Antarctica. NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
Thirty years on, the Montreal Protocol has not begun to come to grips with these chemicals, warns Rowley. “The naïve view until recently,” he says, “was that short-lived [chemicals] didn’t present a threat to stratospheric ozone. Wrong.”
Other loopholes in the protocol are concerning researchers as well. In 2014, colleagues of Leedham Elvidge’s at the University of East Anglia warned that three CFCs supposedly banned under the protocol were turning up in increasing amounts in the clean air blowing round the Southern Ocean and captured at Cape Grim in Tasmania. Johannes Laube, an atmospheric chemist at the University of East Anglia, calculated that global emissions of CFC-113a, once an important feedstock in manufacturing both refrigerants and pyrethroid pesticides, doubled in two years.
How come? It turns out that the Montreal Protocol never completely banned CFCs. “CFC-113a is covered by a loophole that allows industries to apply for exemptions,” Laube says. Confidentiality clauses in the treaty about these exemptions mean that “we simply don’t know if we have found exempted emissions, or if they are from some illegal manufacture somewhere. Either way, they are increasing fast, which makes this worrying.” Trade in banned ozone-depleting chemicals has declined in the past decade, but remains a problem, and has been documented particularly for hydrochlorofluorocarbons.
Scientists knew recovery of the ozone layer would take time because of the long lifetimes of many of the dangerous compounds we unleashed in past decades. But last year, Susan Solomon of MIT – who back in the 1980s became one of the world’s most celebrated scientists for uncovering the chemistry of the polar stratospheric clouds — declared that she had detected the first “fingerprints” of the hole closing. “The onset of healing of Antarctic ozone loss has now emerged,” she wrote.
“The signature of ozone recovery is not quite there yet,” says one expert.
But other researchers remain cautious. There have been some recent bumper springtime holes in Antarctic ozone. The 2015 hole was the fourth largest since 1991, peaking at an area larger than the continent of North America. It was also deeper than other recent holes and lasted longer. 2016 was also worse than average and 2017 is expected to be severe, too.
Solomon blamed 2015 on the Calbuco volcano in Chile, which ejected sulphur particles that enhanced the ozone-destroying properties of polar stratospheric clouds. But Susan Strahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center warns that the size of the hole in any given year is still dominated by year-to-year variations in the temperature of the stratosphere and the vagaries of meteorology. “The signature of ozone recovery is not quite there yet,” she says, adding that day will come, but we may have to wait until the 2030s.
Meanwhile at the other end of the planet, ozone losses over the Arctic may still be worsening. The Arctic is less susceptible to the formation of ozone holes than Antarctica, because the weather is messier. The stable air that causes the ultra-cold conditions where polar stratospheric clouds form in Antarctica is much less likely. But it does happen whenever temperatures get cold enough for polar stratospheric clouds to form.
A deep hole briefly formed over the Arctic in 2011. In places, more than 80 percent of the ozone was destroyed, twice the loss in the worst previous years, 1996 and 2005. In both the past two winters, researchers saw polar stratospheric clouds over parts of Britain, says Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey. But they were brief and did not lead to major ozone loss.
Shanklin says an important reason for the sluggish recovery of the ozone layer is global warming. As increased levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap more solar heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, less warmth reaches the stratosphere, which cools as a result. This trend has been evident for almost 40 years. A colder stratosphere improves conditions for ozone loss. Climate change “could delay the recovery of the ozone hole well into the second half of this century,” he says.
Protecting the ozone layer “presents a much greater industrial and political challenge than previously thought,” says one researcher.
Should we be frightened? Some of the crazier hype in the early days of the ozone hole – like blind sheep in Patagonia and collapsing marine ecosystems – proved nonsense. But the raised risk of skin cancers from the extra ultraviolet radiation streaming through the thinned ozone layer is real enough – particularly for reckless white-skinned sunbathers. The ozone layer is still as thin as it was 30 years ago.
The good news is that without the Montreal Protocol things would have been a great deal worse, says Martyn Chipperfield, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Leeds. The Antarctic hole would be 40 percent bigger than it is; the ozone layer over Europe and North America would be 10 percent thinner; the 2011 Arctic hole would have been Antarctic-sized; and we would be looking at about two million more cases of skin cancers by 2030, according to research conducted by Chipperfield and colleagues.
Even so, the idea that the Montreal Protocol is doing its job and the recovery is under way begins to look complacent. If emissions of uncontrolled ozone-depleting chemicals such as DCM continue rising, then the gains could be lost. The answer is obvious. “We should be looking into controlling DCM and other solvents, much in the same way as we did CFCs,” says Leedham Elvidge.
The World Meteorological Organization and other UN agencies overseeing the protocol acknowledge that DCM and other short-lived ozone depleting substances “are an emerging issue for stratospheric ozone,” but the government signatories have yet to take action to limit their emissions.
That would involve getting rid of a far wider range of chemicals than so far done under the protocol. Protecting the ozone layer “presents a much greater industrial and political challenge than previously thought,” says Rowley. Thirty years on, there is evidently still a lot to do.
Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the U.K. He is a contributing writer for Yale Environment 360 and is the author of numerous books, including "The Land Grabbers, Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World," and "The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming." MORE ABOUT FRED PEARCE →
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Moms most exposed to pesticides more likely to have preterm babies.
(Reuters Health) - Women exposed to the highest quantities of agricultural pesticides in California’s San Joaquin Valley while pregnant were at heightened risk of giving birth prematurely and delivering low-weight infants, a new study found.
Offspring of expectant mothers who lived near farms that applied the heaviest concentrations of pesticides were most at risk, the research showed. Mothers who lived in close proximity to agricultural operations using the highest percentage of pesticides - the top 1 percent - had an 11 percent increased probability of preterm delivery and a 20 percent increased probability of having a low birth-weight baby.
For most women, living near farms growing fruits, nuts and vegetables failed to increase the possibility of low birth weight and preterm delivery, the research found. But an examination of the areas exposed to the heaviest concentrations of pesticides applied showed magnified fetal vulnerability.
“There is a smaller subset that seems to be bearing the burden,” said lead author Ashley Larsen, a professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“Hopefully we can pinpoint how to reduce these very high levels,” she said in a phone interview.
Larsen and her team coupled birth certificate records for more than 500,000 San Joaquin Valley births between 1997 and 2011 with pesticide-use data to examine how exposure by trimester and pesticide concentration might influence birth weight and gestational length.
The San Joaquin Valley is California’s most productive agricultural region.
The new study found that women exposed to the top 25 percent of pesticide loads in the San Joaquin Valley had babies with no detectable effect. But those in the top 5 percent of exposures had increases in the range of 5 to 9 percent in adverse outcomes, according to the report in the journal Nature Communications.
Larsen said she would like to see educators and policymakers work with farmers to reduce extreme pesticide concentrations.
But Robert Gunier of the Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health in Berkeley, California, said he doubted such a change would reduce adverse birth outcomes.
Although he agreed that reducing pesticide use in the highest use areas could eliminate adverse birth outcomes, he said in an email:
“Unfortunately, combining all pesticides in the analysis obscures the relationships with specific pesticides or pesticide mixtures, preventing concrete policy changes.”
“I would bet that if a law was passed to limit pesticide use in high pesticide-use areas, the reduction would be for the most heavily used and often least toxic pesticides, and this would not eliminate adverse birth outcomes related to agricultural pesticide use,” he said.
Gunier, an environmental health researcher, was not involved with the new study.
Future studies should evaluate pesticide mixtures to identify substances of concern, he said.
Prior research on the effects of pesticides on birth outcomes has been inconclusive, the study’s authors write.
But the relationship between pesticides and premature birth and low birth weight has been observed in previous studies, Gunier said.
In 2013, he was involved in a study that found that exposure to methyl bromide, a fungicide used in cultivating strawberries, during the second trimester was associated with markers of restricted fetal growth.
SOURCE: go.nature.com/2iJEEcX Nature Communications, online August 29, 2017.
Australia emits mercury at double the global average.
A report released this week by advocacy group Environmental Justice Australia presents a confronting analysis of toxic emissions from Australia’s coal-fired power plants.
The report, which investigated pollutants including fine particles, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, also highlights our deeply inadequate mercury emissions regulations. In New South Wales the mercury emissions limit is 666 times the US limits, and in Victoria there is no specific mercury limit at all.
This is particularly timely, given that yesterday the Minamata Convention, a United Nations treaty limiting the production and use of mercury, entered into force. Coal-fired power stations and some metal manufacturing are major sources of mercury in our atmosphere, and Australia’s per capita mercury emissions are roughly double the global average.
In fact, Australia is the world’s sixteenth-largest emitter of mercury, and while our government has signed the Minamata convention it has yet to ratify it. According to a 2016 draft impact statement from the Department of Environment and Energy:
Australia’s mercury pollution occurs despite existing regulatory controls, partly because State and Territory laws limit the concentration of mercury in emissions to air […] but there are few incentives to reduce the absolute level of current emissions and releases over time.
Mercury can also enter the atmosphere when biomass is burned (either naturally or by people), but electricity generation and non-ferrous (without iron) metal manufacturing are the major sources of mercury to air in Australia. Electricity generation accounted for 2.8 tonnes of the roughly 18 tonnes emitted in 2015-16.
Mercury in the food web
Mercury is a global pollutant: no matter where it’s emitted, it spreads easily around the world through the atmosphere. In its vaporised form, mercury is largely inert, although inhaling large quantities carries serious health risks. But the health problems really start when mercury enters the food web.
I’ve been involved in research that investigates how mercury moves from the air into the food web of the Southern Ocean. The key is Antartica’s sea ice. Sea salt contains bromine, which builds up on the ice over winter. In spring, when the sun returns, large amounts of bromine is released to the atmosphere and causes dramatically named “bromine explosion events”.
Essentially, very reactive bromine oxide is formed, which then reacts with the elemental mercury in the air. The mercury is then deposited onto the sea ice and ocean, where microbes interact with it, returning some to the atmosphere and methylating the rest.
Once mercury is methylated it can bioaccumulate, and moves up the food chain to apex predators such as tuna – and thence to humans.
As noted by the Australian government in its final impact statement for the Minamata Convention:
Mercury can cause a range of adverse health impacts which include; cognitive impairment (mild mental retardation), permanent damage to the central nervous system, kidney and heart disease, infertility, and respiratory, digestive and immune problems. It is strongly advised that pregnant women, infants, and children in particular avoid exposure.
Australia must do better
A major 2009 study estimated that reducing global mercury emissions would carry an economic benefit of between US$1.8 billion and US$2.22 billion (in 2005 dollars). Since then, the US, the European Union and China have begun using the best available technology to reduce their mercury emissions, but Australia remains far behind.
But it doesn’t have to be. Methods like sulfur scrubbing, which remove fine particles and sulfur dioxide, also can capture mercury. Simply limiting sulfur pollutants of our power stations can dramatically reduce mercury levels.
Ratifying the Minamata Convention will mean the federal government must create a plan to reduce our mercury emissions, with significant health and economic benefits. And because mercury travels around the world, action from Australia wouldn’t just help our region: it would be for the global good.
Thirty years after the Montreal Protocol, solving the ozone problem remains elusive.
Despite a ban on chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone hole over Antarctica remains nearly as large as it did when the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987. Scientists now warn of new threats to the ozone layer, including widespread use of ozone-eating chemicals not covered by the treaty.
BY FRED PEARCE • AUGUST 14, 2017
Did the Montreal Protocol fix the ozone hole? It seemed so. With chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-eating chemicals banned, many scientists said it was only a matter of time before the ozone layer recharged, and the annual hole over Antarctica healed for good.
But 30 years on, some atmospheric chemists are not so sure. The healing is proving painfully slow. And new discoveries about chemicals not covered by the protocol are raising fears that full recovery could be postponed into the 22nd century – or possibly even prevented altogether.
In mid-September, the United Nations is celebrating the protocol’s 30th anniversary. It will declare that “we are all ozone heroes.” But are we patting ourselves on the back a bit too soon?
The ozone layer is a long-standing natural feature of the stratosphere, the part of the atmosphere that begins about six miles above the earth. The ozone layer filters out dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the sun that can cause skin cancer and damage many life forms. It may have been essential for the development of life on Earth.
So there was alarm in the 1970s when researchers first warned that extremely stable man-made compounds like CFCs, used in refrigerants and aerosols, were floating up into the stratosphere, where they released chlorine and bromine atoms that break down ozone molecules. In the 1980s, Antarctic researchers discovered that these chemical reactions went into overdrive in the super-cold polar stratospheric clouds that formed over the frozen continent. They had begun creating a dramatic “hole” in the ozone layer at the end of each austral winter.
The ensuing panic resulted in the signing of the Montreal Protocol on September 16, 1987. It and its successors have phased out production of a range of man-made chlorine and bromine compounds thought to persist for the several years needed for them to reach the stratosphere. Besides CFCs, they include carbon tetrachloride, hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), and methyl bromide, a fumigant once widely used to kill pests.
So far so good. The amount of ozone-depleters in the atmosphere has dropped by more than 10 percent since peaking in the late 1990s. In response, the total ozone in the atmosphere has been largely unchanged since 2000.
But in the past five years, evidence has emerged that potential ozone-eating compounds can reach the ozone layer much faster than previously thought. Under some weather conditions, just a few days may be enough. And that means a wide range of much more short-lived compounds threaten the ozone layer – chemicals not covered by the Montreal Protocol.
These compounds are all around us. They are widely used as industrial solvents for tasks like degreasing and dry cleaning. And their releases into the atmosphere are increasing fast.
These new ozone-busters include dichloromethane (DCM), a common and cheap paint stripper, also used in foam-blowing agents and, ironically, in the manufacture of “ozone-friendly” alternatives to CFCs. With emissions now exceeding one million tons a year, the concentration of DCM in the lower atmosphere has more than doubled since 2004. Even so, it has not been regarded as a threat to the ozone layer, because its typical lifetime in the atmosphere before it is broken down in photochemical reactions is only about five months. It should, atmospheric chemists concluded, remain safely in the lower atmosphere.
But that view collapsed in 2015, when Emma Leedham Elvidge at the University of East Anglia in England examined air samples taken on board commercial aircraft cruising at the lower edge of the stratosphere. She found high levels of DCM, especially over the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and particularly during the Asian monsoon season, when strong updrafts fast-track air from the ground to the stratosphere. It seems they were taking DCM along for the ride.
Alarm bells are ringing about dozens of other short-lived ozone-destroying chlorine compounds accumulating in the atmosphere.
How much should we worry? Ryan Hossaini, an atmospheric chemist at Lancaster University, recently did the math. He calculated that DCM currently contributes less than 10 percent of the chlorine in the ozone layer. But on current emission trends, it could be That could delay the ozone hole’s recovery by 30 years, until at least 2095, he suggested.
Others share that concern. “Growing quantities of DCM are leaking into the stratosphere, where it is exceptionally effective in destroying the ozone,” says David Rowley, an atmospheric chemist at the University College London, who was not involved in the research. “The potential for DCM to affect the global ozone budget is profound.”
Alarm bells are ringing about dozens of other short-lived, potentially ozone-destroying chlorine compounds accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of fast-rising global manufacturing. They include 1,2-dichloroethane, a chemical widely used in the manufacture of PVC pipes. There are few atmospheric measurements of this compound yet, “but sporadic data suggest it is a significant source of chlorine in the atmosphere,” says Hossaini.
The risks of such chemicals reaching the ozone layer are greatest in the tropics, where manufacturing is booming in fast-industrialising countries such as China and India, and where, as luck would have it, atmospheric circulation patterns are favorable. The Asian monsoon can propel the gases to the stratosphere in as little as ten days, according to unpublished research seen by Yale Environment 360.
The movement of ozone-depleting chemicals through the atmosphere, shifting from the tropics and concentrating in Antarctica. NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
Thirty years on, the Montreal Protocol has not begun to come to grips with these chemicals, warns Rowley. “The naïve view until recently,” he says, “was that short-lived [chemicals] didn’t present a threat to stratospheric ozone. Wrong.”
Other loopholes in the protocol are concerning researchers as well. In 2014, colleagues of Leedham Elvidge’s at the University of East Anglia warned that three CFCs supposedly banned under the protocol were turning up in increasing amounts in the clean air blowing round the Southern Ocean and captured at Cape Grim in Tasmania. Johannes Laube, an atmospheric chemist at the University of East Anglia, calculated that global emissions of CFC-113a, once an important feedstock in manufacturing both refrigerants and pyrethroid pesticides, doubled in two years.
How come? It turns out that the Montreal Protocol never completely banned CFCs. “CFC-113a is covered by a loophole that allows industries to apply for exemptions,” Laube says. Confidentiality clauses in the treaty about these exemptions mean that “we simply don’t know if we have found exempted emissions, or if they are from some illegal manufacture somewhere. Either way, they are increasing fast, which makes this worrying.” Trade in banned ozone-depleting chemicals has declined in the past decade, but remains a problem, and has been documented particularly for hydrochlorofluorocarbons.
Scientists knew recovery of the ozone layer would take time because of the long lifetimes of many of the dangerous compounds we unleashed in past decades. But last year, Susan Solomon of MIT – who back in the 1980s became one of the world’s most celebrated scientists for uncovering the chemistry of the polar stratospheric clouds — declared that she had detected the first “fingerprints” of the hole closing. “The onset of healing of Antarctic ozone loss has now emerged,” she wrote.
“The signature of ozone recovery is not quite there yet,” says one expert.
But other researchers remain cautious. There have been some recent bumper springtime holes in Antarctic ozone. The 2015 hole was the fourth largest since 1991, peaking at an area larger than the continent of North America. It was also deeper than other recent holes and lasted longer. 2016 was also worse than average and 2017 is expected to be severe, too.
Solomon blamed 2015 on the Calbuco volcano in Chile, which ejected sulphur particles that enhanced the ozone-destroying properties of polar stratospheric clouds. But Susan Strahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center warns that the size of the hole in any given year is still dominated by year-to-year variations in the temperature of the stratosphere and the vagaries of meteorology. “The signature of ozone recovery is not quite there yet,” she says, adding that day will come, but we may have to wait until the 2030s.
Meanwhile at the other end of the planet, ozone losses over the Arctic may still be worsening. The Arctic is less susceptible to the formation of ozone holes than Antarctica, because the weather is messier. The stable air that causes the ultra-cold conditions where polar stratospheric clouds form in Antarctica is much less likely. But it does happen whenever temperatures get cold enough for polar stratospheric clouds to form.
A deep hole briefly formed over the Arctic in 2011. In places, more than 80 percent of the ozone was destroyed, twice the loss in the worst previous years, 1996 and 2005. In both the past two winters, researchers saw polar stratospheric clouds over parts of Britain, says Jonathan Shanklin of the British Antarctic Survey. But they were brief and did not lead to major ozone loss.
Shanklin says an important reason for the sluggish recovery of the ozone layer is global warming. As increased levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap more solar heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, less warmth reaches the stratosphere, which cools as a result. This trend has been evident for almost 40 years. A colder stratosphere improves conditions for ozone loss. Climate change “could delay the recovery of the ozone hole well into the second half of this century,” he says.
Protecting the ozone layer “presents a much greater industrial and political challenge than previously thought,” says one researcher.
Should we be frightened? Some of the crazier hype in the early days of the ozone hole – like blind sheep in Patagonia and collapsing marine ecosystems – proved nonsense. But the raised risk of skin cancers from the extra ultraviolet radiation streaming through the thinned ozone layer is real enough – particularly for reckless white-skinned sunbathers. The ozone layer is still as thin as it was 30 years ago.
The good news is that without the Montreal Protocol things would have been a great deal worse, says Martyn Chipperfield, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Leeds. The Antarctic hole would be 40 percent bigger than it is; the ozone layer over Europe and North America would be 10 percent thinner; the 2011 Arctic hole would have been Antarctic-sized; and we would be looking at about two million more cases of skin cancers by 2030, according to research conducted by Chipperfield and colleagues.
Even so, the idea that the Montreal Protocol is doing its job and the recovery is under way begins to look complacent. If emissions of uncontrolled ozone-depleting chemicals such as DCM continue rising, then the gains could be lost. The answer is obvious. “We should be looking into controlling DCM and other solvents, much in the same way as we did CFCs,” says Leedham Elvidge.
The World Meteorological Organization and other UN agencies overseeing the protocol acknowledge that DCM and other short-lived ozone depleting substances “are an emerging issue for stratospheric ozone,” but the government signatories have yet to take action to limit their emissions.
That would involve getting rid of a far wider range of chemicals than so far done under the protocol. Protecting the ozone layer “presents a much greater industrial and political challenge than previously thought,” says Rowley. Thirty years on, there is evidently still a lot to do.
ICL says level of damage caused by desert spill still unknown.
Potash and fertilizer producer Israel Chemicals (ICL) said on Sunday it cannot estimate the level of damage caused to the company or the environment by a spill at its fertilizer plant in Israel's Negev desert.
Large amounts of highly acidic wastewater poured into the desert on Friday when a wall of an evaporation pool partially collapsed at the Rotem Amfert facility, according to Israel's Ministry of Environment.
Some of the tens of thousands of cubic meters were diverted to another pool, but much of the wastewater made its way to a river bed that snakes through the desert, causing "severe ecological damage", the ministry said.
ICL, which has exclusive rights in Israel to mine minerals from the Dead Sea, said it was working with authorities to contain the spill.
"The company cannot estimate the full impact of the incident at the Rotem factory, including the environmental and financial impact, and whether it will lead to legal proceedings," it said in a statement.
The ministry said it ordered ICL to stop using a series of evaporation pools at the factory and it was considering opening a criminal investigation into the incident.
ICL, controlled by holding company Israel Corp, produces about a third of the world's bromine and is the sixth-largest potash producer.
The Rotem factory manufactures phosphate-based products, leading to downstream derivatives such as phosphoric acids, fertilisers, specialty chemicals and phosphate salts.
ICL said it has requested to use an alternative pool as a temporary fix and that it is working with help from outside experts to find short and long term solutions.
(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
Brain-eating amoeba positive test sites identified, meeting scheduled.
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Update: Brain-eating amoeba positive test sites identified, meeting scheduled
Bonnie Bolden , bbolden@thenewsstar.com Published 5:34 p.m. CT June 29, 2017 | Updated 3 hours ago
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This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Brain-eating amoeba in a north Monroe water system will be the topic of discussion in a Saturday town hall at Sterlington High School.   Â
Two locations on the North Monroe Water System, the 700 block of Guthrie Road and the 400 block of Holland Drive have tested positive for Naegleria Fowleri Amoeba, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals announced Thursday.Â
DHH state health officer Dr. Jimmy Guidry will be on hand Saturday at 10 a.m. to answer residents' questions about the positive tests. Â Â
According to DHH, tap water is still safe to drink but residents should avoid getting it up their noses. The amoeba occurs naturally in freshwater. Naegleria fowleri causes a disease called primary amebic meningoencephalitis, which is a brain infection that leads to the destruction of brain tissue. In its early stages, symptoms of PAM may be similar to bacterial meningitis.
DHH notified the water system and local officials Thursday afternoon. North Monroe Water System is managed by Greater Ouachita Water Co.Â
State Rep. Jay Morris, R-Monroe, said there will be a town hall meeting to address the issue 10 a.m. Saturday at Sterlington High School.
Samantha Fowler, a DHH press officer, said the water system had the required amount of chlorine in the water at the time of the test. DHHÂ asked that the system convert to the free chlorine disinfection method for 60 days to ensure any amoeba are eliminated.
"Greater Ouachita Water Company has and is meeting all EPA and DHHÂ requirements for chlorine residuals and is compliant with the Safe Water Drinking Act. DHHÂ informed us that the drinking water is safe to consume, but also emphasized residents should take precautions. DHH is in the process of posting the notice on their website with clear instruction as to proper precautions. Please visit the DHH website at http://dhh.louisiana.gov for further information,"Â Phillip McQueen, secretary for GOWC, said in a news release.
McQueen said GOWC, working together with water management firm Severn Trent Environmental Services, will implement an aggressive treatment protocol to resolve the issue. About 3,000 customers are on the system.
"This is a serious matter, and we are aggressively responding to it. We will initiate a chlorine burn, and we will closely monitor the system until we are certain the problem has been addressed," McQueen said.
"Greater Ouachita Water Company and Severn Trent place water quality and meeting your expectations as our No.1 priority. Providing you clean, safe drinking water is at the heart of our commitment to you and your family."
GOWC also battled the amoeba in the North Monroe Water System in late 2015.
DHH routinely has tested for this amoeba since 2015. It conducts sampling of public drinking water systems for Naegleria fowleri each summer when temperatures rise and has collected a total of 540 samples for this amoeba since 2013.
The water system will notify residents when the amoeba has been elimated. For more information, visit http://www.ldh.la.gov/index.cfm/page/1696.
A Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals news release contributed to this report.
Follow Bonnie Bolden on Twitter @Bonnie_Bolden_ and on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1RtsEEP.
Precautionary Measures for Families
According to the CDC, every resident can take simple steps to help reduce their risk of Naegleria fowleri infection. Individuals should focus on limiting the amount of water going up their nose. Preventative measures recommended by the CDC include the following:
DO NOT allow water to go up your nose or sniff water into your nose when bathing, showering, washing your face, or swimming in small hard plastic/blow-up pools.
DO NOT jump into or put your head under bathing water (bathtubs, small hard plastic/blow-up pools); walk or lower yourself into the water.
DO NOT allow children to play unsupervised with hoses or sprinklers, as they may accidentally squirt water up their nose. Avoid slip-n-slides or other activities where it is difficult to prevent water going up the nose.
DO run bath and shower taps and hoses for five minutes before use to flush out the pipes. This is most important the first time you use the tap after the water utility raises the disinfectant level.
DO keep small hard plastic/blow-up pools clean by emptying, scrubbing and allowing them to dry after each use.
DO use only boiled and cooled, distilled or sterile water for making sinus rinse solutions for neti pots or performing ritual ablutions.
If you need to manually top off the water in your swimming pool with tap water, follow the guidance below.
DO ensure that the filter is running and top off your pool by adding water directly into the skimmer box. The hose should not be submerged into the skimmer box or pool water. Hold the end of your hose in the air at least two inches above the flood-level rim of the skimmer box. This can be accomplished by securing the hose to a heavy object such as a chair or cinder block above the skimmer and ensuring the hose will run into the skimmer box without the hose being submerged.
DO NOT top off your pool by submerging the hose in the body of the pool.
DO keep your swimming pool or hot tub adequately disinfected before and during use. Adequate disinfection standards are listed below.
For pools, keep pH levels from 7.2 to 7.8. If you are using cyanuric acid-free chlorine, use between two and 10 parts per million. If you are not using cyanuric acid-free chlorine, keep chlorine levels at one to three parts per million.
For hot tubs and spas, keep pH levels from 7.2 to 7.8, and keep either free chlorine levels from two to four parts per million or free bromine levels from four to six parts per million.
Residents should continue these precautions until testing no longer confirms the presence of the amoeba in the water system.
From 2015:
Presence of amoeba found in North Monroe Water System
Brain-eating amoeba update: DHH sets Sterlington meeting
Hundreds flood DHH meeting with water concerns
Greater Ouachita starts chlorine burn
Monroe to take measures against ‘brain-eating amoeba’
Water system clear of brain-eating amoeba
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Infamous Michigan chemical plant cleanup gets $9.7M from EPA.
ST. LOUIS, MI -- A major Michigan Superfund site is getting nearly $10 million from the Environmental Protection Agency this year to start cleaning up the toxic leftovers from an infamous chemical plant that made now-banned pesticides and fire retardants.
The EPA will spend $9.7 million to begin work in a polluted field along the Pine River in St. Louis where Velsicol Chemical Co. once operated a factory that manufactured DDT, among other compounds.
The money is a drop in the bucket of what's needed to clean up the entire site, but local advocates are thrilled anyway because it's a sign that remediation efforts are moving.
"We were looking at another construction season without much happening," said Jane Keon, chair of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. "Now, we're looking at a lot of activity."
The factory was demolished and buried in 1982; placed under a clay cap that did not keep the massive chemical contamination underneath from leaching through the soil and groundwater into nearby neighborhoods and the adjacent river.
Today, the 52-acre former factory site is a toxic field behind a fence. The citizen task force has been pushing the EPA to begin cleaning up the plant site for years. The town would like to reclaim the land for public use someday.
The EPA has spent money in the past cleaning up toxic sediment in the river, nearby residential soil and installing a groundwater treatment system around the site perimeter. However, this new funding represents the first actual remediation money for cleaning up the toxic plant site -- the main cache of underground pollution.
That's significant because once a Superfund cleanup starts receiving funding, the agency generally keeps allocating some on a regular basis to continue remediation.
This fall, the EPA says it will start in-situ thermal treatment on the site, which involves sticking electrified rods into the ground to boil off buried chemicals. The work is expected to last about 18 months.
Keon said the cleanup will occur on 10 acres on the west side of the factory site, where its believed Velsicol had a dredge pond for dumping chemical waste.
What can't be burned underground will be captured as a liquid and gas, and transported to a hazardous waste landfill, Keon said.
About 250 different chemicals are buried on site. One of the most concerning is 1,2-Dibromo-3-chloropropane (DBCP), formerly used in a now-banned pesticide called Fumazone. The chemical causes sterility in males who inhale it.
"That's why they want to deal with it underground, so it's not released into the air," Keon said.
Keon credited the EPA Region 5 team with finally getting agency headquarters to send money to St. Louis. Money for Superfund sites across the country is competitive due to limited amounts available after Congress let the tax on polluters that paid for cleanups expire in 1995. Taxpayers pick up the tab on Superfund sites now.
Long term funding for the site is a question under the Trump administration, which is seeking a 30 percent cut in EPA's Superfund budget in 2018. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has defended that budget proposal, even though he's called Superfund a major priority.
Through bankruptcy, Velsicol shed its liability for St. Louis long ago. The company is now owned by Arsenal Capital, a private equity firm.
The $9.7 million will also pay for designing a cleanup plan for a part of the site where Velsicol manufactured DDT, a pesticide once widely used to control malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Also funded this year is planning for a waste pit where Velsicol burned chemicals across the river, which is a separate Superfund site altogether.
The factory closed in 1978 after Velsicol poisoned about 9 million people in Michigan though a colossal logistics failure. In 1973, instead of delivering a cattle feed supplement, Velsicol contaminated the state food supply with Firemaster, a flame retardant -- causing one of the largest chemical poisonings in the western world. Researchers say many in Michigan still have elevated blood levels of polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) from consuming contaminated meat and dairy.
Velsicol leveled the factory and clay-capped the site, but the river later required a 10-year, $100 million removal of 750,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment.
In 2015, the EPA removed tons of DDT-contaminated soil from a neighborhood near the plant after birds that had eaten polluted worms began dropping from the sky.
Also in 2015, St. Louis began getting drinking water from nearby Alma after a DDT breakdown product was discovered in local wells. Part of the 2017 EPA funds are paying for water mains into the city from new wells 10 miles outside of town.
Total cleanup in St. Louis could cost between $300 million and half a billion dollars.
How sea sponges make toxic flame retardants.
Toxic flame retardants previously used in mattresses and furniture are also produced by South Pacific sea sponges that manufacture the chemical with the help of bacteria, scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography revealed in a new study.
The finding is the latest chapter in a story of how natural organisms generate chemicals normally associated with industrial laboratories. And it offers clues about how the chemicals, associated with developmental problems in children and other health risks, could be entering our food supply.
“I can’t believe that a chemical we make, and that the Stockholm convention has told industry they need to curtail production of, that nature makes the same thing,” said Bradley Moore, a senior author of the study and a professor at the Scripps Center of Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine. “Why does your sponge need to be flame-retardant? It’s sitting at the bottom of the ocean. That’s crazy talk.”
The sea creatures crank out the chemicals, called PDBEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, in astonishing quantities; up to 10 percent of the sponge tissue consists of the toxic compounds, scientists said. But they weren’t sure how or why the sponges produce these toxins.
As it turns out, it’s symbiotic bacteria that make the chemicals, synthesizing them within the sponge tissue, scientists from Scripps and other universities concluded in a study published in March in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
Tracking natural sources of PDBEs could help scientists understand the chemical’s role in the food web and learn how it makes its way into human diets. That could eventually lead to food guidelines that help consumers avoid exposure to the chemical in fish or other seafood, such as certain types of algae.
These chemicals, linked to health problems ranging from cancer to learning disabilities, could paradoxically also lead to advances in medicine, Moore said. Because some medications use bromine, understanding the enzymatic reactions that create the toxic compounds could help drug researchers build pharmaceutical ones.
Researchers and their graduate students dove for the sponges off of Guam, and then sequenced the DNA for the entire organism, including the microbes it harbors. The results pointed to the bacteria as the ones manufacturing the toxic chemicals. Scientists don’t know why they make these chemicals, but suspect it could serve as defense for the sponges.
“Someone swimming by or crawling by may not want to have a mouthful of brominated chemicals,” Moore said.
The discovery provided a new clue to a mystery that began half a century ago, when researchers realized that the sea sponges were little factories for the compounds.
“Toxicologists quickly realized that these are extraordinarily toxic molecules, and they resembled the flame retardants that we were adding to our consumer products,” said Vinayak Agarwal, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech University, who worked on the study as a post-doctoral researcher at Scripps.
Those compounds have been used as flame retardants in products ranging from sleepware to couches to electronics. But they’re powerful hormone disruptors that bind to the thyroid and can cause developmental problems in children, so one class of the chemical has been banned, and another is being eliminated from consumer goods. The Environmental Protection Agency outlawed one group of PDBEs in 2004, and in 2015 California changed its fire safety regulations to phase out another type that had previously been required in furniture.
Meanwhile, the South Sea sponges continue to fabricate the noxious compounds. Only marine life generates this type of chemical – terrestrial organisms don’t use bromine as a building block, Argawal said. PDBEs are found widely throughout the oceans, from sediments to whales, and likely enter our diets and our bodies through seafood we consume.
Research has revealed concentrations of the chemical in fish tissue and even in human breast milk. The common wisdom has been that these contaminants show the signature of industrial pollution and plastic contamination in the ocean.
But sponges and other organisms may also be contributing. And given how ubiquitous the toxins are the ocean, scientists wonder whether other organisms make these chemicals too. They think that other free-standing marine bacteria may be producing PDBEs throughout the ocean, Moore said.
“We’re trying to join the dots of this puzzle and find the producers of these molecules,” said Agarwal said. “Then we can make our way up the food chain, and discover how these molecules travel to us, and if there is anything we should do to reduce our exposure.”
Public demand is overwhelming gene banks’ public service.
Public Demand is Overwhelming Gene Banks’ Public Service
Federally funded agricultural gene banks work to safeguard crop diversity and provide seeds and cuttings for research, breeding, and education. But too many public requests are hindering their work.
BY VIRGINIA GEWIN | Agroecology, Technology
04.27.17
This year, in the six weeks spanning late winter and early spring, the U.S. gene bank that stores vital, sometimes rare, collections of fruit varieties received around 280 requests for cuttings. Like many farmers and gardeners looking for unique wine grape, plum, peach, persimmon, olive, and walnut trees, these savvy folks went straight to the source. But most of their requests were turned down.
“We approved only 50 of them,” said John Preece, research leader at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository based at University of California at Davis. “Our gene banks have become overwhelmed by orders from the hobbyists and home gardeners in recent years,” Preece added.
The mission of the U.S. gene bank system is to conserve the germplasm—the seeds or tissues that conserve crop genetics—and provide them for research, breeding, and education. The 19 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gene bank facilities located around the country, collectively, store 570,000 unique samples of 15,000 plant species that make up the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) (each facility safeguards different collections of regionally appropriate plants). It serves as the backbone of national efforts to safeguard food security and maintain the agricultural economy. Increasing requests from the public, however, are putting a strain on the system.
The bulk of filled requests come from plant breeders or researchers searching for specific crop traits of interest. Other requests come from farming or gardening associations interested in multiplying seed to distribute among their users. Increasingly, however, requests are coming from home gardeners. Some requestors can be rude—occasionally threatening—demanding access to seed as a taxpayer right. People who submit fraudulent requests deliberately misrepresent their intended use, often to simply secure free seed. There are even social media posts offering advice on how to word a request to get it filled.
Plant shoot tips are frozen within droplets of cryoprotection solutions on foil strips. The strips are plunged into liquid nitrogen slush that is formed by placing liquid nitrogen in a vacuum. (Photo courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service.)
Annual demand for germplasm has doubled since 2005. The gene banks that house fruits and veggies are, not surprisingly, the top targets of public requests. “The percentage of requests that we [NPGS] really cannot fill overall has grown, system-wide, to roughly 30 to 50 percent of those received—which surprised me,” said Peter Bretting, the USDA-ARS senior national program leader for plant germplasm, based in Washington, D.C. “If we fill 7,000 requests, and there are another several thousand we process, review and make decisions on; it has a cost—namely the extensive use of personnel’s time.”
The High Costs of ‘Free’ Plant Requests
All those requests add up. “I would estimate the time required to handle this issue [at our gene bank] probably costs an equivalent of $100,000 annually in staff salary and benefits,” said Candice Gardner, research leader at the USDA-ARS North Central Plant Introduction Research Unit at Ames, Iowa, which banks 1,700 vegetable, oilseed, and ornamental samples and receives around one-third of the total requests.
“To me, the real cost is in the work we could be otherwise doing,” she said. The NPGS budget, currently around $40 million per year, to maintain viable seed for distribution hasn’t kept pace with increasing requests. Only limited quantities of each seed sample are available.
The spike in requests is due to a number of factors. Online since 2011, the GRIN database (for Germplasm Resource Information Network), is easy to query, says Kim Hummer, the research leader at the Corvallis, Oregon-based National Clonal Germplasm Repository, the gene bank that stores berries, pears, hazelnuts, and hops.
New food trends also spark interest in older varieties. For example, the cider-making craze catalyzed searches for vintage cultivars of pears. At the same time, Hummer says, research requests have spiked as well—for example, for disease-resistant strawberry varieties in California, since growers can no longer use methyl bromide there as a pesticide.
“While we have specific heritage-type material or wild species, we don’t have the latest, greatest new cultivars out there,” said Hummer. “Homeowners usually have a different need than what gene banks can fulfill in most cases,” she added.
Alternatives to Gene-Bank Requests
When individual requests are denied, Hummer and Preece point people to other groups or local nurseries and garden centers, which can usually provide appropriate plants for homeowners. Not long ago, in fact, Preece explained to members of the California Rare Fruit Growers, an amateur fruit-growing organization, that he can no longer accept individual orders. He did, however, agree to fill one big order for the organization—up to 25 items each year—which they can propagate and exchange among the group.
Technician April Stanley retrieves specimens from a liquid-nitrogen freezer. (Photo courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service.)
A number of online tools—including PickACarrot.com or the University of Minnesota’s Plant Information Online directory—exist to help interested parties locate sellers of heirloom or unusual cultivar seeds.
Luckily, however, the number of seed sources is also on the rise to help meet the growing demand. Arizona-based Native Seeds/SEARCH is one of the most visible in the greater Southwest. “We have had a pretty consistent increase in the demand for our seeds,” explained Native Seeds’ conservation program manager Nicholas Garber. “We have had a considerable expansion in our programs, offering seed in larger quantities to small farmers, likely due to the increased demand for heirloom varieties in food markets.”
Graber recommends that people interested in locally appropriate seeds learn to grow and save seeds themselves, and familiarize themselves with seed libraries. In the last five years, up to 500 seed libraries have been founded around the U.S.
Likewise, organizations like the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, based in Ketchum, Idaho, serve as venues to trial, identify, and propagate seed that will grow in the region. “We’re doing the research to find which grains work for our region,” said director Bill McDorman.
A few years ago, he conducted a nationwide search of grains that might grow well in the Rocky Mountain West. The seed he requested via GRIN, combined with that from other Rocky Mountain seed stewards, totaled roughly 100 varieties, which are now part of their Heritage Grain Trials program. “We’re increasing those seed so other gardeners have access to them,” said McDorman. So far, he says, they have around 35 people signed up to grow out small samples so that farmers can receive 20-pound bags of seed in a couple of years.
McDorman thinks the explosion in local food is now evolving into greater awareness about the use of locally adapted seed. The way he sees it, the NPGS conserves the seed so that organizations like his are able to field trial varieties to re-adapt varieties to, for example, changing climate conditions.
“We’re really excited to see people interested in the plant materials that we strive to preserve for all people for all time—it’s a grandiose long-term view of conservation that we are dedicated to,” said Hummer.
Gene bank staff want to be loved, says Preece. Just not loved to death.
Top photo: Plant physiologist Gayle Volk inspects garlic plants growing in culture. Shoot tips of garlics were cryopreserved because these plants represent the greatest genetic diversity in the collection. (Photo courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service.)
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