Mini Series Part 2 – Dispatches from The Chemical Edge

Wake up and smell the smog... To this day, when most people think of pollution they think of belching factories, thick plumes of sulphurous smoke, poisonous flows into streams and lakes and, of course, vehicular emissions. These types of pollution are all too widespread, affect the least affluent among us the most and should, indeed, … Continue reading “Air Fresheners” And Many Other Common Chemicals Cause Smog, Are More Toxic Than Traffic Emissions: The Stunning New Study in Science That Finally Puts Regulation of Everyday Toxics On The Agenda →

Solutions

We know how to address this problem…

apply the same approach to consumer chemical smog as we do to traffic emission smog: Reduce it at the source.

In the United States and in Canada, governments agreed long ago that individual and voluntary solutions were useless when it came to smog control and that legislation and policy to achieve social solutions were the only way to go.

Reducing vehicular – “tail pipe” – emissions, by law, such that manufacturers were obliged to improve the emissions technology of their vehicles was a fundamental decision – and improvements on emissions, including shifts to electric vehicles – continue to be mandated by law.
In addition, on the social scale, came closings in many jurisdictions of coal-fired power plants and, in many Canadian provinces and municipalities, banning the cosmetic use of pesticides – a less than adequate, but still major step to improving air pollution.

The principles – legislated mandatory requirements – and the steps – to down-regulate and eventually eliminate identified toxic chemicals – that we took with vehicular emissions we now need to take with consumer chemicals. We should already have acted with the identified culprits long ago, when we understood how harmful they were even without any input from the sun, or interaction with other materials. But if we did not then, now there is no further excuse.

We need:

Plain language, full-disclosure labeling of all products, to show the health effects of the chemicals used, must become the law. With such labeling, there will be massive market rejection, enough to create monetary incentives to drop the toxics.

Strict health-related legislation to eliminate classes of identified toxic consumer chemicals – this is the co-terminus second step, accompanied by public subsidies to help develop alternative, benign chemicals where needed.

Can we all send our politicians a message to get the lead out – figuratively and literally? There is no more time to waste, that is the import of the McDonald/NOAA study.

From The Article in the Journal SCIENCE

Air pollution evolution

Transport-derived emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have decreased owing to stricter controls on air pollution. This means that the relative importance of chemicals in pesticides, coatings, printing inks, adhesives, cleaning agents, and personal care products has increased. McDonald et al. show that these volatile chemical products now contribute fully one-half of emitted VOCs in 33 industrialized cities (see the Perspective by Lewis). Thus, the focus of efforts to mitigate ozone formation and toxic chemical burdens need to be adjusted.

Abstract

A gap in emission inventories of urban volatile organic compound (VOC) sources, which contribute to regional ozone and aerosol burdens, has increased as transportation emissions in the United States and Europe have declined rapidly. A detailed mass balance demonstrates that the use of volatile chemical products (VCPs)—including pesticides, coatings, printing inks, adhesives, cleaning agents, and personal care products—now constitutes half of fossil fuel VOC emissions in industrialized cities. The high fraction of VCP emissions is consistent with observed urban outdoor and indoor air measurements. We show that human exposure to carbonaceous aerosols of fossil origin is transitioning away from transportation-related sources and toward VCPs. Existing U.S. regulations on VCPs emphasize mitigating ozone and air toxics, but they currently exempt many chemicals that lead to secondary organic aerosols.

*SCIENCE 16 Feb 2018: Vol. 359, Issue 6377, pp. 760-764 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq0524
“Volatile chemical products emerging as largest petrochemical source of urban organic emissions” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6377/760 . By Brian C. McDonald, Joost A. de Gouw, Jessica B. Gilman, Shantanu H. Jathar, Ali Akherati, Christopher D. Cappa, Jose L. Jimenez, Julia Lee-Taylor, Patrick L. Hayes, Stuart A. McKeen, Yu Yan Cui, Si-Wan Kim, Drew R. Gentner, Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz, Allen H. Goldstein, Robert A. Harley, Gregory J. Frost, James M. Roberts, Thomas B. Ryerson, Michael Trainer

Coverage of the Article

From the Washington Post’s coverage of the study

“These results have important implications for how and what emissions we regulate,” said Brent Stephens, an expert on indoor air and the built environment at the Illinois Institute of Technology…. “We have traditionally focused on transportation and industrial emissions to the outdoor environment. [Volatile chemical products] are now relatively more important emission sources, and they come from both indoor and outdoor sources (and some primarily from indoor sources), although we don’t regulate the vast majority of indoor environments.”

Stephens noted that proposed budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency loom large in this context, because the agency conducts much relevant work on atmospheric chemistry and air quality.

“We typically think of outdoor air pollution as an outdoor problem,” Stephens added. “But this study demonstrates (quantitatively) that it’s more complicated than that.”

From Science Daily’s coverage of the new study

The new study …focused on volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that are derived from petroleum. These are a diverse array of hundreds of chemicals that easily vaporize and make their way into the atmosphere. Some VOCs can be harmful when directly inhaled — molecules released by bleach and paint make people lightheaded, for example.

Beyond their immediate effects, VOCs react with other molecules in the air, such as oxygen and nitrogen oxides, to generate ozone as well as fine particulate matter. (Those nitrogen oxides come, in large part, from vehicle exhaust.) High levels of fine particulate matter, or soot, make it hard to breathe and contribute to chronic lung problems (SN: 9/30/17, p. 18). And while ozone high in the atmosphere helps shield earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, at ground level, it mixes with fine particulates to form breath-choking smog.

Over a period of six weeks, the researchers collected air samples in Pasadena, located in the notoriously smoggy Los Angeles valley. They also evaluated indoor air quality measurements made by other scientists. The team traced the molecules found in these air samples to their original sources using databases that show the specific volatile organic compounds released by specific products.

Consumer products that emit VOCs have an outsized effect on air pollution, the team found. By mass, people use about 15 times more gasoline and diesel compared with products ranging from soaps, shampoos and deodorants to air fresheners, glues and cleaning sprays. And yet these everyday products were responsible for 38 percent of the VOC emissions, the researchers found, while gasoline and diesel emissions accounted for only 32 percent. Consumer products also contributed just as much as fuels to chemical reactions that lead to ozone and fine particulate matter. The emissions from consumer products also dwarfed those from the production of oil and gas, called upstream emissions.