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Energy-efficient green buildings may emit hazardous chemicals.
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.
(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.
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Are we running out of fresh water?
Water seems to be abundant on our blue planet. But extensive agriculture, high consumption and climate change are already causing regional scarcity. What future for water?
Two-thirds of the world is covered in water, containing over a billion trillion liters of water. So how could we have water shortages?
The vast majority of water on earth is saltwater and therefore not fit for human consumption. Only 2.5 percent of all water is freshwater. But more than two-thirds of that is locked away in ice caps and glaciers.
That leaves us with a very tiny fraction of water to drink, cook with, irrigate crops and feed livestock.
But water is a renewable resource that moves in a cycle. The amount of H2O on our planet will always remain the same, and won't run out as such.
The question is whether we will have enough clean water available for all citizens at all times.
Local water scarcity
According to a 2016 study by the University of Twente in the Netherlands, 4 billion people could face severe water shortages for at least a month every year.
In some regions, people are already severely affected by droughts and water scarcity. Millions of people in the Horn of Africa face hunger and illness after years of recurring drought. And Pakistan could run dry by 2025, a UN report suggests.
"Locally, the problem is very acute," Johannes Schmiester, a water expert at WWF Germany, told DW. "And all available numbers and observations suggest that the situation will become more severe."
Climate change is expected to intensify the situation. It alters weather patterns and water cycles around the world, causing shortages and droughts in some areas, and floods in others.
Extreme temperatures are also to blame for physical water scarcity. But in many cases experts as well point out "economic" water scarcity, due to how we manage our water supplies.
Groundwater is over-extracted; rivers and lakes are drying up or becoming too polluted to use.
To combat economic water scarcity, governments have to invest more in infrastructure for water supply and water storage, says Vincent Casey, a water expert at WaterAid.
"A big challenge is that water isn't always where you need it and when you need it most. So investment has to go into water storage and distribution, to ensure people always have access to safe water," he told DW.
Agriculture's thirst
One of the biggest water consumers is agriculture. Around 70 percent of all freshwater on the planet goes into irrigation of fields and feeding of livestock.
Farmers in some regions are already seeking to water their fields more efficiently. But researchers say this is not enough.
In Spain's tomato-growing region, farmers using the latest technology have managed to decrease their water consumption over the years. But in the industry as a whole - which produces a quarter of Europe's tomatoes - still needs more water than local water resources can supply.
As a result, the region faces water scarcity.
Researchers say the solution is to consider the entire geographical area and think in units of river basins. Can the local ecosystem sustain agricultural production?
"It's important to change perspective and consider whether local fresh water supplies can support certain industries," says Schmiester from WWF.
Growing demand
An additional strain on water management is our ever-growing consumption.
According to the World Health Organization, human beings need at least 20 liters (5.3 gallons) of freshwater per day to prepare meals and for basic personal hygiene. Laundry and bathing are not included.
Water consumption is much higher in industrialized countries, though - for example, the average person in Germany uses 140 liters per day. Flushing the toilet alone uses 30 liters.
Our indirect water footprint is even higher: 840 liters of water are required to produce one pot of coffee. And more than 8,000 liters go into a single pair of jeans.
Growing consumption calls for better reuse of water and more efficient production. The theme of this year's World Water Week addresses "water and waste," and how to reduce use and recycle water.
More than 3,000 experts will exchange ideas and develop solutions for waste water treatment and poor water management.
But Casey warns that technical solutions won't be a silver bullet for the global water crisis.
"It ultimately comes down to political decisions over allocations and effective governance of the resource. Solutions have to be devised in the countries where the problems are - and only then can water scarcity be solved," he concluded.
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The surprising effect of ocean waves on global climate.
Evidence mounts of the important role of sea spray in shaping Earth’s atmosphere.
August 22, 2017 — Breaking waves are the stuff of romance and poetry, but the spray they generate is serious business. Just ask Vicki Grassian, who thinks about what crashing waves mean for clouds and, ultimately, our ability to understand and adapt to our changing climate.
In more than 20 years as a professor in the University of Iowa’s chemistry department, Grassian earned the title “dust queen” for her studies of how mineral particles make their way from land into the sky. The specialized tools and expertise required to study dust eventually drew her to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, where investigators have spent much of the past decade tackling a tantalizing question: How does the ocean affect Earth’s atmosphere?
At first glance, the answer would appear to be simple and obvious: Water evaporates at the surface of the sea, eventually rising to form clouds. Grassian, now distingished chair of physical chemistry at UC San Diego, focuses on a far more complex picture: Wave action creates microscopic particles suspended in that vapor, an amalgamation called aerosols.
Depending on their chemical makeup, aerosols influence the physical properties of clouds, such as their ability to absorb sunlight or trap heat — which makes aerosols of interest to anyone trying to understand climate.
Unfortunately, aerosols are hard to study. Just how hard can be seen at Scripps’ Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment, which Grassian co-directs with Kimberly Prather, distinguished chair in atmospheric chemistry at UC San Diego. The centerpiece of CAICE is a glass-walled flume of water the length of a bowling alley that creates breaking waves — a controlled source of sea spray. A number of instruments are attached to the flume, from a mass spectrometer that assesses aerosols in flight to barriers that capture particles in neutral substrates so they can be examined in detail.
“Sea spray aerosol was thought for a long time to be just salt — sodium chloride — and that’s not true,” says Grassian. “There’s a lot more that comes out of the water — viruses, bacteria, organic compounds, parts of cell walls — little ‘bio bits,’ if you will.”
Grassian’s and Prather’s research findings are valuable news for investigators such as Paul DeMott, a senior research scientist in the atmospheric chemistry program at Colorado State University, and Susannah Burrows, an atmospheric scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. DeMott and Burrows are part of the larger community working to better understand how clouds form in order to improve computer models aimed at understanding and predicting the effects of climate change, so that we can anticipate and prepare for whatever environmental conditions lie ahead.
Clouds are an obvious element of climate, but their ongoing formation has been extremely difficult to capture in mathematical formulas. Calculations have relied on the principles of hydroscopy, which governs how water molecules are attracted and held in any given environment. If sea spray is treated as nothing more than salt and water, however, the result will not reflect what is actually happening in the sky.
“We are providing insights and information that can help modelers,” says Grassian, who published compelling findings on this topic in an article in the journal Chem last spring. Among the details that her team has revealed is that sea spray contains amounts of organic material — such as Grassian’s “bio bits” — that vary with the amount of phytoplankton and bacteria in the original seawater.
Just a few weeks after Grassian’s paper, Prather and colleagues published their own set of major insights in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their findings drew a distinction between two key mechanisms for forming sea spray drops that can result in distinctly different chemical compositions for the aerosols respectively produced by these drops. It had been assumed previously that aerosols only emerged from “film” drops, created when bubbles rupture at the ocean’s surface, but this paper points to “jet” drops that appear after film drops break. The latter contain a distinct mixture of salt, microbes and other organic material that also becomes part of aerosols.
At the same time, an international team of investigators revealed in Nature Communications their own analysis of sea spray, which confirmed that there is far less salt in these particles than had been assumed and so quite a different ability to attract water for aerosols. This observation built on earlier work by this same team that showed surprising concentrations of calcium in these particles, regardless of whether they had been collected in laboratory wave tanks or aboard vessels on the high seas.
Such reevaluations of the chemical makeup of spray particles is offering climate modelers a welcome set of physical relationships to incorporate into their work. Without this information, warns Grassian, they could well overestimate how much water is being incorporated in aerosols as well as the ability of those aerosols to form clouds.
She adds that future models could even take into account the possibility of clouds formed with dissolved organic matter that can absorb sunlight or perhaps even react with sunlight to generate entirely new compounds in the atmosphere. For modelers, it will mean an already dauntingly complex set of calculations will become even more so in order to respect these new physical and chemical insights, but the outcome should be all the more accurate.
“There’s a lot of interplay at that air-ocean interface,” Grassian concludes. “Gases and particles go in and come out of the ocean, so what’s in the ocean is going to affect what gets into the air and vice versa.”
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Label salon products to disclose risks.
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient.
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Label salon products to disclose risks
By David KleinAugust 17, 2017
Imagine that your favorite hair product’s label read, “Warning: may cause infertility,” or listed “formaldehyde,” a cancer-causing embalming fluid, as an ingredient. Whatever our products contain, you and I remain blissfully ignorant of our exposure and risk because professional cleaning and salon products often do not label their ingredients (although our hair probably looks fabulous).
The Legislature is debating AB1575 and SB258, two bills to improve labeling for salon-grade nail polish, shampoos and hair coloring, cosmetics and skin cleaning products, as well as toothpaste, household cleaning products and automotive industry cleaning products. If you or your loved ones use these products, you should ask your representative to ensure the bills pass. Let me tell you why.
Unlike medications, commercial chemicals undergo little, if any, testing before being introduced into our world. Currently, 9.5 trillion pounds of commercial chemicals pass annually through the United States: enough to dump a new 14-ton sack of industry-grade mystery dust on each American’s pillow each night of each year. Though some may temporarily irritate the skin and lungs, many are endocrine-disrupting chemicals like diethylstilbestrol, or DES, that disrupt our hormone systems and cause disease even in low doses.
The story of DES is one well-studied, notorious example of chemical harms. It was prescribed during the Baby Boom era to prevent pregnancy miscarriage, and is now linked to infertility, obesity and cancer in women who were exposed to this drug in the womb. New data suggest that even the grandchildren of women prescribed DES bear higher disease risks. Chemicals like DES can change the ways that inherited genes are turned on and off, their negative effects to ripple through our genes for generations.
Though industry does respond to public concern, poor transparency remains problematic. Take bisphenol A, or BPA. We know that BPA negatively affects adult fertility and babies’ neurologic development, so “BPA-free” stickers helped companies market their products to safety-aware consumers. While we were looking for stickers, BPA was merely replaced with similar chemicals.
Similarly, the so-called “Toxic Trio” (formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate) found in numerous nail polishes prompted companies to claim their product was toxin free. A 2012 report by the California Environmental Protection Agency revealed that these claims were often false.
Some will complain that change is onerous. Surely, products often contain many ingredients, and chemical names read like over-hyphenated alphabet soup. It can be a confusing list. But this is not cause to conceal information. A legal requirement of disclosure will help to ensure the manufacture of safer, faithfully-labeled products.
Moreover, there are solutions. Small pictograms, such as a picture of a pregnant woman with an overlying “X,” will cut through the confusion and convey a message as clear as the modern skull and crossbones. In some cases, that may be appropriate too.
Keep our communities safe and informed. Tell your representative that you vote for transparency.
David Klein is a resident ob-gyn physician at UCSF.
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Lawsuit claims Poland Spring water isn't from a spring.
Is your bottle of Poland Spring water really from a spring? A lawsuit filed in federal court in Connecticut earlier this week alleges it isn't, calling the Nestle-owned brand label that reads "100% Natural Spring Water" a "colossal fraud."
By RACHEL LAYNE MONEYWATCH August 18, 2017, 2:42 PM
Lawsuit claims Poland Spring water isn't from a spring
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Is your bottle of Poland Spring water really from a spring?
A lawsuit filed in federal court in Connecticut earlier this week alleges it isn't, calling the Nestle-owned brand label that reads "100% Natural Spring Water" a "colossal fraud."
The complaint, which seeks class-action status, claims Poland Spring parent company Nestle Waters North America is actually selling water that doesn't meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration definition of spring water.
It also alleges water in Poland Spring-labeled bottles isn't "collected from pristine mountain or forest springs as the images on those labels depict." Rather, they contain "ordinary groundwater" collected from wells drilled in "saturated plains or valleys where the water table is within a few feet of the earth's surface."
None of the eight "natural springs" Nestle purportedly uses qualifies as a genuine spring under FDA rules, the suit further claims. "To feign compliance with FDA regulations, defendant has gone so far as to build or maintain phony, man-made 'springs' at all seven of its other sites," according to the complaint.
The "false and deceptive product labels" let Nestle overcharge consumers, the suit alleges.
The claims are without merit, a Nestle spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. "Poland Spring is 100 percent spring water" and meets FDA regulations that define spring water, as well as federal and state regulations governing spring water, according to the company, which also posted a response to the suit on its website.
The suit comes as Nestle seeks to expand in Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. Nestle Waters settled a 2003 lawsuit claiming Poland Spring's water wasn't sourced deep in the Maine woods, according to a Bloomberg News report at the time.
Nestle has run into trouble in other parts of the country as bottled water outpaces soda as the No. 1 drink in the U.S. and as it looks for new water sources. In California, the company faced protests over water collection because of that state's drought.
One Michigan community in April denied a Nestle request to build a new pumping station, according to an Associated Press report.
In North America, Nestle bottles or distributes 15 water brands that include Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Montclair, according to a fact sheet on its website. International brands include Perrier and S. Pellegrino. It also sells purified drinking water brand Nestle Pure Life.
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Washington state officials troubled by oilpatch secrets.
Washington State officials have privately complained about a lack of information — vital for an oil spill response — on the ingredients of the diluent used to help Alberta bitumen flow through Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline.
Washington state officials troubled by oilpatch secrets
By Stanley Tromp in News, US News, Energy, Politics | August 14th 2017
A panoramic view of Burnaby Mountain, with Kinder Morgan’s oil storage tanks on its southern slope. Across the border, Washington State officials have questions about the makeup of tar sands oil and the diluent that makes it mobile. Photo by Zack Embree
Previous story
Washington State officials have privately complained about a lack of information — vital for an oil spill response — on the ingredients of the diluent used to help Alberta bitumen flow through Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline.
The data is crucial for spill response planning as the company proceeds with a proposed $7.4 billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion that would triple the daily flow between Edmonton, Alberta and Burnaby, B.C. to 890,000 barrels. From the company’s Burnaby site, the oil would be shipped to Asian markets in tankers through Vancouver Harbour and then through the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait shared by British Columbia and Washington State.
The pipeline company has suggested in responses to National Observer that it has been transparent enough, publishing a list of 52 products that Transport Canada has approved for the pipeline, as well as components listed on crudemonitor.ca for various types of oil. It has told Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) it would quickly disclose ingredients in the event of a spill.
Yet officials in Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources voiced grievous doubts in internal memos dated January 2017. “What is frustrating is ... tar sand oil manufacturers’ lack of transparency on what is used for diluents and those diluent properties, which in my mind (alludes) to dishonesty,” wrote the state’s oil spill response coordinator.
The memos were obtained by National Observer through a request under the state’s freedom-of-information law, asking about the potential environmental impacts of the Trans Mountain project. The officials who wrote the memos did not respond to requests for comment on Kinder Morgan’s responses to National Observer.
Bitumen petroleum is too thick to flow in a pipeline at ground temperature, so it needs to be thinned with a light, volatile petroleum product called diluent. In general, diluents are either mixtures of light hydrocarbons, synthetic crude oil, or both. Typically, diluted bitumen (or dilbit) is 70 to 80 percent bitumen, and 20 to 30 percent diluent.
Canada’s spill response regime “a couple of decades behind”
The federal government supports the Trans Mountain expansion and has pledged a new “world class” spill response regime. B.C.’s New Democratic Party premier John Horgan has vowed to block Trans Mountain through “every means at his disposal” with his Green Party partners.
Despite the provincial government's opposition, Trans Mountain spokesperson Ali Hounsell told National Observer construction is proceeding this fall and “we congratulate” Horgan on his election win.
South of the border, worries date back to at least 2004, preceding Kinder Morgan’s expansion plan, when a study by the Washington State Department of Ecology concluded that a major oil spill would cost the state 165,000 jobs and $10.8 billion in economic impacts.
State ecology officials in the spill response section wrote to the Washington State governor in 2013 that, “B.C. lacks authority over marine waters, and their federal regime is probably a couple of decades behind the system currently in place in Washington State. When it is spilled, we are concerned that dilbit oil may be considerably more toxic and damaging, and far more difficult to clean up, than conventional crude from Alaska.”
Hounsell, of Trans Mountain, told National Observer that detailed investigations by government researchers, academics and industry have found dilbit just as safe to transport as other types of crude oil. She cited a company fact sheet called, Mythbusting: The Three Most Common Misconceptions About Diluted Bitumen.
The January 2017 internal memos from Washington State Natural Resources officials express a very different view.
“There is definitely a need for full disclosure and transparency regarding the products used to create bitumen and other crude oil diluents and their properties,” wrote the department’s habitat stewardship specialist. “Policy makers have a long way to go to require (let alone enforce) adequate mitigation.”
The Washington State oil spill response coordinator expressed acceptance of the need for oil in the current economy but added that “without unbiased research” governments cannot have an honest debate on many questions. Among the questions: "how fast the diluent will evaporate in real life conditions, how explosive is the air in an oil spill due to properties of diluent and how does this affect a response, how soon will the oil sink, how well will sinking oil be addressed if at all, how will sunken oil be tracked, what will be the impact of that oil on ecosystem(s), how will it be monitored and recorded, and how wil we gauge mitigation plans proposed to repair or at least compensate for damage?"
The documents connect the spill questions to the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The same oil spill response official asks, “Without these questions being answered to an exhaustive degree, how can the public be asked to accept these risks? ... How can we honestly say that we are ‘prepared’?
"The times of oil companies asking the public to trust them are over, as we still seek to understand the full implications of the BP oil spill.”
The official said those who propose "oil handling facilities" need to be held to "the highest bar": “The interest in all these projects will soon be invigorated and there will most likely be a push to build and seek answers later. We need to work together to hold proponents to answer these difficult questions before we concede to risks.”
Companies may hide behind commercial secrecy, officials said
The same official again raised the problem of commercial secrecy to a colleague:
“Decision makers do not have, nor seek, the level of information needed to make decisions based on cumulative impact review. Those that propose these projects provide the bare minimum and hide behind proprietary protection measures to keep discussion vague. Stovepiping allows for high-impact projects to move through review process even when clear significant harm is forecasted.” Stovepiping is a term used to describe the presentation of raw information without proper context.
Hounsell indicated Trans Mountain is transparent. “As you can see on the crudemonitor.ca website, there is a full listing of components for each type of synthetic, light and heavy crude products, and each varies.” When National Observer asked for a list of diluent ingredients to be used in the Transmountain pipeline, Hounsell sent a link to a list on its website of the 52 products the government approved for the pipeline. These range from “super lights” such as regular gasoline and Peace River Condensate to diluted bitumen products such as Borealis Heavy Crude, Access Western Blend, Cold Lake Blend, and Seal Heavy, each with their own formula.
A spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada said data on the chemical properties of dilbit can be found in the public domain by Googling the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for diluted bitumen, and by reading chapter eight of the National Energy Board’s 553-page report on the Trans Mountain project. He also cited www.crudemonitor.ca.
“I think it's fair to say Kinder Morgan is being transparent enough with the products they will be shipping,” said Peter McCartney, climate campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, referring to B.C. cities with the same concerns about Trans Mountain. “Where cities may be running into trouble it might be that they are unable to figure out exactly what's coming through at any time.”
Trans Mountain disclosures incomplete, say environmental groups
Other Canadian environmental groups said disclosures about Trans Mountain product are incomplete.
“Crudemonitor does not separate out the constituents - so Cold Lake Blend, which is a diluted bitumen, does not have one content list for bitumen and one for diluent - it's just a single list for dilbit,” said Kate Logan, an independent toxicologist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. “Diluent acts differently from crude oil. For one thing, it weathers off quite fast because it’s so light.”
Keith Stewart, head of Greenpeace’s climate and energy campaign, said in an email that “Kinder Morgan is obscuring the issue by saying that there are lists of things that could be in dilbit, but avoiding the issue of what precisely is in any given batch (and it will vary, depending on price and availability).”
Stewart added that concerns are about polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, that are in dilbit: benzene (a carcinogen), toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene – and that it appears all dilbit would contain these compounds to varying levels. (Naphtha, butane, hexane, hydrogen sufide, sulfur and nitrogen have also been noted in dilbit.) “It's tough to say exactly what will be in the pipeline at any given time, which may be the cities' frustration.”
In its Gainford study, Trans Mountain provided PAH levels for two dilbit blends — Cold Lake and Access Western — and this data was summarized in the company report to the NEB. Logan counters that this data is inadequate because “these are just two of the dozens of products the pipeline is approved to carry, and again, there is no separate information for diluent and bitumen.”
Should trade secrets trump public health and safety?
The obtained Washington state officials' e-mails include a link to a recent study of the impacts on oceans of spilled bitumen and diluents.
“Even if we know the diluent contents, the quantity and formulas are still largely private,” said lawyer Eugene Kung of West Coast Environmental Law. “This is a big problem with fracking also, where companies claim their information is proprietary. There is certainly a place for trade secrets, but to what extent does that trump public health and safety? And should governments override that?”
“I do think that more transparency on the exact constituents of dilbit would help (perhaps a range for each constituent), but to me all of the diluent is dangerous, for it's all flammable and volatile, even though the exact amount of benzene in it may vary,” said Angela Brooks-Wilson, a physiology professor at Simon Fraser University. “To have the properties that make it a thinner for the bitumen, the diluent must be made up of smaller molecules, which because they are smaller give it the properties of volatility and flammability.”
Trans Mountain did not respond to followup questions on the specific contents of diluent as separate from bitumen, and the lack of PAH data for diluents.
The NEB’s final report on Trans Mountain noted that Environment Canada recommended that Kinder Morgan commit to providing spill responders “a specific suite of test data for all types of hydrocarbon products to be shipped” — before shipping — to help them plan a good response.
The NEB overrode that advice because the company had committed to give those parties “timely information on the physical and chemical characteristics of any product spilled” and it trains its own and external workers in spill response. The company also declined Environment Canada’s advice, because it was awaiting more research on the behavior of dilbit in water.
Specific diluent content typically not available to public
A 2015 U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report called Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines said specific content of diluents is typically not publicly available. "The individual selection of diluents varies depending on the desired outcome, the current cost of acquiring and transporting the diluent to the bitumen source, and other internal considerations of pipeline operators."
Does diluted bitumen differ importantly from other crude oils? In its submission to the NEB, Trans Mountain said that dilbit is “a stable, homogenous mixture that behaves similar to other natural crude oils when exposed to similar conditions and undergoes a weathering process."
By contrast, the National Academy of Sciences study said that many dilbit properties “are found to differ substantially from the other crude oils,” the key differences being the high density, viscosity and adhesion properties of the bitumen portion that affects how oil behaves in water under various weather conditions.
Trans Mountain told the NEB that the diluent and bitumen of dilbit should be considered as one blended product, not separately. But the NAS study disagrees, saying that after a spill, weather conditions alter the dilbit and “the net effect is a reversion toward properties of the initial bitumen.”
Governments have raised concerns about diluted bitumen secrecy before.
In July 2010 a pipeline operated by Enbridge burst and spilled over a three million litres of diluted bitumen into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. After several days, the volatile hydrocarbon diluents evaporated, leaving the heavier bitumen to sink in the water. The spill cost over $1.2 billion to clean up, with heavy environmental impacts. (In its website cited above, Transmountain calls it a “myth” that dilbit would sink in B.C. waters.)
Nine days before the Kalamazoo accident, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had warned that the proprietary nature of the diluent found in dilbit could complicate cleanup efforts. (The agency was commenting on the proposed Keystone XL dilbit pipeline.)
“Without more information on the chemical characteristics of the diluent or the synthetic crude, it is difficult to determine the fate and transport of any spilled oil in the aquatic environment,” EPA officials wrote. "For example, the chemical nature of diluent may have significant implications for response as it may negatively impact the efficacy of traditional floating oil spill response equipment or response strategies.”
At the NEB hearings on Trans Mountain's proposal, the City of Vancouver and others asserted that the evaporation of diluents, especially benzene, from a dilbit spill would be a health risk to spill responders. Kinder Morgan denied that in its 440-page final submission to the NEB, writing that critics supplied “misstated and misleading estimates about vapour concentrations (specifically, benzene) that are available for evaporation that may be encountered by people in the area.”
The B.C. NDP government declined to comment for now. B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver said, “I concur with the Washington State memos that state that spill responders cannot adequately respond to a spill without knowing the ingredients or formula of the bitumen and diluents.”
Editor's note: This article was updated at 10:50 p.m. ET to correct that diluted bitumen was spilled into the Kalamazoo River following the 2010 Enbridge pipeline rupture.
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Coal plants might be even more toxic than we thought.
An environmental disaster in North Carolina reveals that a rare, potentially dangerous compound is abundant in burned coal.
Scientists studying the aftermath of a massive coal-ash spill in North Carolina have discovered a byproduct of the fossil fuel that may pose human health risks.
Duke Energy Corp. announced in early February 2014 that drainage from a broken pipe was leaking coal-ash into the Dan River, which runs through Virginia and North Carolina. Within a few days, researchers at Virginia Tech realized the spill created an unusual opportunity to better understand how particles just billionths of a meter wide, notably arsenic, embedded themselves in an ecosystem. They published that work in 2015.
Then came the surprise.
Electron-microscope analysis of sediment samples revealed a strange-looking substance, streaked in a pattern that called to mind zebras, according to Michael Hochella, a distinguished professor at Virginia Tech concentrating in nanogeoscience.
“It was just scientific curiosity,” Hochella said. “What the hell is this stuff?”
Whatever it was and wherever it was from, it appeared downstream of the spill, not upstream. Eventually, they found it in coal ash and were able to reproduce it in a lab.
Air pollutants are the result of impurities in coal that, once burned, can become air- or water-borne hazards, including soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury, all of which are regulated in the U.S. This stuff kills or sickens people. Air pollution contributes to an estimated 3 million deaths every year, according to the World Heath Organization. Another estimate put that figure at 1.6 million alone in China, which is boosting natural gas use and renewables to reduce harm to public health from coal.
The newly identified material, made of titanium and oxygen, had been produced experimentally in labs as early as the 1930s, but it is extremely rare in nature. The Virginia Tech team sought out coal-ash samples from states, including Virginia and Illinois, and from as far away as China. Sure enough, they found “titanium sub-oxides” in 22 samples. They suspect that in the U.S., scrubbers mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency capture the material, reducing its prevalence. Dust analyzed from Shanghai sidewalks, streets and standing water contained the material, according to their research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Coal contains from 0.1 percent to 6 percent titanium dioxide, the same chemical that’s commonly used in sunblock, makeup, and paint. This substance has drawn scientific scrutiny in recent years for potential health hazards on the nano-scale.
Testing the titanium sub-oxides on zebrafish (the aquatic cousin of lab rats) showed it to be toxic when ingested; the toxicity was significant in tissue not exposed to sunlight. Analogous effects in small-to-large animals, including humans, “are likely to be found,” the authors concluded. Research will turn to that question next.
Searching for human health effects exposes a paradox between how science is conducted and what society allows industry to pump into air and water, according to James Kubicki, chair of the department of geological sciences at University of Texas-El Paso, who didn’t participate in the coal-ash study. It’d be unethical to test a substance on human subjects, because it might sicken or kill them. And yet, “in the real world, we’re doing that all the time,” he said.
The study doesn’t mention Duke Energy by name. Jeff Brooks, a spokesman for the company, contends that water quality near the coal-burning plant is good and local agriculture and wildlife weren’t affected by the spill. The company is conducting a widespread cleanup of its coal-ash facilities.
There’s still lots of work to do gathering evidence about the titanium sub-oxides’ prevalence and toxicity in humans. The authors of the new paper wrote that their work “has not been formally reviewed by EPA.”
Potential health effects are front-of-mind to the scientists, but the discovery may have another implication as well. Given how rare the new titanium materials are in nature, documenting where they turn up may give researchers a “tracer” for coal-burning and the production of coke, used in steel-making. If previous experience holds, they expect they’ll find the stuff all over the Earth, including Antarctica, half a world away from most of the world’s coal plants.
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