Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Toxic (Press) Releases

Good news about pollution?  The US EPA says so.  This Washington Post story makes it seem like the US made great strides in reducing toxic emissions in 2004.

The Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that chemical pollution released into the environment fell more than 4 percent from 2003 to 2004...The agency said releases of dioxin and dioxin compounds fell 58 percent; mercury and mercury compounds were cut 16 percent; and PCBs went down 92 percent. [Emphasis added.]

Now, the fall in dioxins in particular seemed like pretty big news.  But it also struck me as a bit suspicious.  So I looked into the numbers a bit. 

The EPA's Toxics Release Inventory Explorer is pretty simple to use, so it didn't take long to zero in on why, exactly, dioxin emissions fell so much. The basic scoop -- it's not so much that dioxin emissions fell in 2004, as that they spiked in 2003.  The nation's dioxin emissions (at least, those captured by the TRI) in 2004 were comparable to levels from 2000 through 2002.  The 58 percent "decline" was just relative to 2003, which was abnormally high.

Then the question becomes -- what happened in 2003?  Apparently, there was a single wood-preserving facility in Lousiana that was responsible for the 2003 spike.  (I don't know for sure, but I'd guess they landfilled a bunch of contaminated waste.)

So the national "good news" story about dioxins in 2004--a 58 percent decline in releases--turns out to be, if anything, a bad news story about 2003. Or, more properly, it's an artifact of the way the data are reported:  the dioxin "released" in 2003 was likely just transferred from one place to another, in a way that triggered EPA's reporting requirements.

The thing is, it took just a few minutes to figure out that the EPA's press release was, at least in part, full of hot air.  Obviously, reporters are under tremendous pressure to churn out stories.  But I do wish that basic fact-checking was a higher priority for them.  Bum facts passed off as "good news" should be recognized for what they are:  a form of toxic information pollution.

Closer to home, the news seems a little bit better for dioxin trends.  In Washington, Oregon, and Idaho combined, releases to air, water, and land have fallen from 163 grams in 2000 to 46 grams in 2004.  "Off-site disposal" -- transfers for storage or treatment -- has climbed a bit, though.  On net, 2004's total dioxin releases were a bit higher than 2002 and 2003, but have fallen by about a quarter since 2000.  And the three states combined now account for about 2 tenths of one percent of national dioxin emissions, as measured by TRI data.

That said, there are some facilities that escape TRI reporting requirements, and much of the dioxin releases from the region are now from activities such as backyard trash burning.  But the numbers, for the northwest at least, do seem modestly promising.

Sturgeon's General Warning

Sounds as though salmon aren't the only Columbia River fish in trouble:

A team of researchers that examined 174 sturgeon caught by commercial and tribal fishermen found male and immature females tricked by chemicals into thinking they are full of estrogen, a female hormone with feminizing effects. Male fish tainted with a cocktail of compounds including mercury and a byproduct of the banned pesticide DDT showed depressed testosterone levels, which could keep them from maturing enough to spawn.

A few sturgeon even had bizarre combinations of male and female sexual organs. [Emphasis added.]

All I have to say to that is:  eewww.  If that doesn't serve as a wakeup call about gender-bending pollutants, I'm not sure what will.

Last Stop in the Free Ride Zone

The market for electronics just got a little fairer. Starting January 2009, my fellow Washington residents will no longer be unfairly punished for my penchant for electoxics (you know – toxic electronics – like it?). That’s because the Washington State legislature just passed the most advanced producer responsibility law in the United States - ESSB 6428 – the Electronic Waste Recycling bill.

The bill basically says, “You can make and sell toxic electronic products, and you can buy them, but Washington's taxpayers are no longer going to foot the bill for cleaning up your mess.” Put more diplomatically, it establishes a “shared responsibility” model, where those who enjoy the benefits of the transaction (the producer and buyer) are those who pay for its negative impacts. Or, as dad used to say, “You gotta pay to play.” Or mom, more to the point, "Go clean your room."

This is how the Washington program will work:

• In every county in the state, consumers (including residents, schools, charities, small businesses and small governments) can drop off their old monitors, computers and TVs at convenient no-charge collection centers, including retailers, non-profits, and local waste facilities. Retailers will be required to let buyers of new equipment know about the recycling centers, and the Department of Ecology will maintain an informational website.
• Manufacturers can either finance and set up an independent program, or participate in a standard program if they don’t want to set up their own. Regardless, each manufacturer will have to pay their “fair share” of the overall costs of the program based on their share of the products being brought to the collection facilities.
• The Department of Ecology will establish the processing standards that manufacturers must meet, and provide general oversight and enforcement.

Washington’s law is a great example of a policy solution that gets prices to tell the truth (at least to stop lying through their teeth, anyway), and it gives manufacturers ample incentive to design products that put safety first, causing fewer problems down the road.

Imagine you’re a manufacturer of a super cool electoxic. There are lots of things that determine how you design your product – features consumers want, how it looks on the shelf, what price point you’re trying to hit, what will get CNET reviewers raving, cost of materials, etc. But what it costs to dispose of your product at the end of its "useful" life (which is less than 5 years for a typical electronic product) has never entered your equation. Nor has the cost of the myriad health impacts your product contributes to.

Now imagine that you’re actually responsible for collecting and figuring out what to do with your toxic components. Not only do you have to collect, but you have to disassemble the products to extract the toxic stuff, and pay for the safe disposal of every pound of toxic. Talk about a great incentive to innovate!

Now this law is by no means perfect, and there's still a lot to work out between now and 2009. But what I especially like about this approach is that it provides at least some pressure on both sides of the P&L for manufacturers. On the revenue side, demand for toxic products will drop because consumers won’t want to pay higher prices as the costs of recycling get passed on to them by the manufacturer. (Even better would be if buyers knew what share of the purchase price was going to pay for disposal of the toxics within. I can dream, right?) On the expense side, manufacturers will start to figure out ways to reduce their recycling and disposal costs, namely designing products that are easy to recycle and use fewer toxic components. And, because the manufacturers will be involved in the creation and management of the program, the feedback loop to the product design process will be much quicker than if they just had to pay an annual polluter fee like some other programs. 

E-waste legislation is the hottest sector of the nascent “extended producer responsibility” policy category. According to Washington Environmental Council, 19 other states plus New York City currently have electronic waste bills pending. If you’re interested in learning more about EPR, check out the Product Policy Institute.

Kudos to Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation, WEC, and all the others who got the WA bill passed – with huge bipartisan support to boot.

And please, can anyone think of a better name for “extended producer responsibility?” I love this stuff, but that name makes even my eyes glaze over.

Does Pollution Vanish in Sunshine?

Here's a bit of good news:  I was trolling through EPA's Toxics Release Inventory for some data on pollution trends, and came across this for King County, Washington, the home county of Seattle.

The upshot: since reporting requirements began in 1988, toxic air emissions from major facilities in King County have fallen by almost 90 percent.

Mind you, this isn't the complete story.  Not all facilities that pollute have to file reports with the EPA. Also, not all chemicals are covered in this graph -- some compounds have been added since 1988, and some potentially hazardous compounds aren't covered by reporting requirements. Plus, this doesn't cover emissions from cars, trucks, or other mobile sources. 

And the King County's pollution decline may be less impressive than it seems at first blush. Some of the decline may have been the result of "outsourcing" pollution to other parts of the state, or other parts of the world.  And perhaps most importantly, this line represents the total volume of pollution, not its total toxicity.  The toxicity might have fallen more slowly (or quickly, for that matter) than the volume -- but that's much harder to figure out.

Still, despite all those caveats, it's a pretty impressive feat, no?  Fifteen years of "sunshine" -- in which major facilities are required to face public scrutiny for how much they pollute -- and they manage to cut the annual volume of pollution to a tenth of its former level, even as the county's population and economy grew rapidly.  This gives me hope, and some confidence that  even further reductions in pollution are possible, if not inevitable. As the song goes:  "Please don't take my sunshine away."

Always Low Toxics? Well, Sometimes, At Least

A while back I wrote about all the "fake news" -- really, just corporate P.R. -- that comes into my email inbox as a result of our work on flame retardants in people's bodies.  Most of the news stories are really just press releases from companies touting the fact that they'd removed PBDEs and other hazardous substances from their products.  Any single press release, by itself, is hardly worthy of notice.  But viewed as a whole, the steady drumbeat of companies announcing that they'd managed to make their products less toxic seemed like an important, if unheralded, good news story.

So here's some more "fake news" that just came into my inbox that I thought might be worth mentioning:

Wal-Mart First to Retail Market with Notebook Computer that Restricts the Use of Hazardous Substances

Now, I'm not trying to toot Wal-Mart's horn; I'm sure that there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the company's business practices.  Still, the fact that Wal-Mart is selling computers that comply with Europe's toxicity standards strikes me as significant for two reasons.  First, Wal-Mart is such a major retailer that this might signal a significant boost in sales of less-toxic computer equipment in North America.  And second, the fact that it's being sold by Wal-Mart probably means that this computer meets the retailer's standards for cost efficiency -- which probably means that this computer not only meets European toxicity standards, but does so at little added cost compared with similar models.  And this second point -- that manufacturers can reduce hazardous materials in consumer products without adding major costs -- really does seem worthy of note.

All's Well that's Gladwell

Looking for something cool to read?  Try this article by Malcolm Gladwell in this week's New Yorker.  Gladwell discusses an unusual intersection of policy, politics, and mathematics--namely, social ills that follow the "power law," in which a relative handful of bad actors are responsible for the bulk of a problem.  Take, for example, pollution from cars:

Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that’s just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason—age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner—a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution. [Emphasis added.]

The problem, according to Gladwell, is that even if the lion's share of problem is caused by the statistical outliers, our solutions tend to treat everyone the same -- as if we're all equally responsible.  The patina of fairness may be reassuring to politicians.  But substantively, fairness doesn't always lead to the best outcomes.

We deal with emissions, for example, by requiring each car--even the cleanest models--to be tested every year or two.  For dirty cars, that's not often enough: a polluting car in need of repair can stay on the road for quite a while before anyone checks on it.  But for owners of relatively clean cars, the vehicle emissions test is just a time-wasting formality.  And all the while, it's easy enough to monitor a vehicle's emissions from the roadside as the car passes, which would let police pull over polluters as if they were speeders.  The technology's been around for decades.  All that's missing, apparently, is the political will, or maybe the creativity, to make it happen.

Of course, there's plenty of reason to be cautious here.  The most polluting cars tend to be owned by the most economically vulnerable among us; pulling them over for polluting would just add to their burdens.  But here, too, Gladwell's approach to "power law" problems might offer a solution:  offering free repairs, or letting the owner of a severely polluting vehicle trade it in for a non-polluting one at no cost, might well be cheaper than maintaining the existing vehicle inspection system.  Of course, it hardly seems fair to deal with this sort of problem by handing out clean cars or free repairs; that's a benefit that the rest of us certainly didn't get. But for some things, fairness and efficiency don't always go hand in hand; sometimes we have to choose one or the other.

Update:  Just to be clear, I don't know that I agree that .06 percent carbon monoxide is "negligible," as Gladwell says.  For any individual car it may be.  But there are an awful lot of cars out there, cumulatively producing an awful lot of CO.  Even if you could get rid of the outliers, I'm sure that people who live near highways and busy streets would be grateful to get those emissions down.

Puget Sound: Cruisin' For a Bruisin'

Washington's leaders have been making a lot of noise about cleaning up Puget Sound. Governor Gregoire wants to boost Sound restoration dollars by $42 million, or about 50 percent. It's earning the governor heaps of glowing media attention.

But the media has turned a blind eye to the astronomical number of cruise ships poised to foul local waters. A single line, Holland America, just announced that it will be increasing its cruises out of Seattle from 37 to 61. In 2006, according to the Port of Seattle, 200 cruise ships with enter and depart Puget Sound (roughly a 30 percent increase from 2005) and they'll ferry an estimated 735,000 people. Those cruise ships are potential ecological catastrophes, especially when their dumping practices are not actually, uh, regulated, as they are in California and Alaska.

What damage can a cruise ship do? According to WashPIRG:

In a day, a typical cruise ship of 3,000 passengers and crew produces 30,000 gallons of sewage, 270,000 gallons of other wastewater, and additional gallons of hazardous wastes, biomedical waste, oily bilge water, and solid waste.

You do the math. What I mean is: multiply each of those numbers by 200, then multiply again by the number of days each ship is in the Sound, and you'll find the potential environmental impact of just one year of the cruise industry. And the threat to Puget Sound is not just hypothetical. A Norwegian cruise line dumped 40 tons of human waste near Whidbey Island a couple of years ago. Oops.

At present, the cruise industry in Washington is governed with the lightest of hands--unenforceable memorandums of understanding, rather than genuine legislation. What's the solution? Real legislation to prevent dumping with real enforcement mechanisms. Levying a per-head remediation fee in advance of another "mistake" wouldn't be a bad idea either.

Adding to the list of insults, the cruise ships mostly burn low-grade dirty diesel--despite promises to the contrary--and it may be fouling the air in downtown Seattle with carcinogens. I'd welcome additional legislation regulating cruise ship emissions too.

Unfortunately there's scant reason to believe Washington will get real enforcement because the issue has been largely overlooked by the media (and hence it's invisible to most citizens). Perhaps too busy heaping praise on the Puget Sound clean-up proposals, Seattle's media outlets have pretty much ignored the cruise ship catastrophe. I could find only one mention of the Port's announcement to dramatically increase cruises in 2006--and that was buried in a boosterish article in the P-I's business section--and no mention of the additive environmental effects. Have I missed something? Or is it just being ignored?

(Hat tip to Dan over at the Seattlest blog, who's been throwing haymakers at the cruise industry lately. See here and here.)

Toxic Cocktails

Two interesting -- and a bit disturbing -- pieces of toxics news today.

First, several news outlets are reporting on a new study, coming out of UC Berkeley, showing that mixtures of several environmental contaminants (in this case, pesticides) can be far more potent than higher concentrations of a single compound.  The problem is especially bad for frog populations -- which, as frog-watchers everywhere will tell you, are in particularly bad shape.

Second, there's this new report, put together by two breast cancer groups:

As many as half of all new breast cancers may be foisted upon woman by pollutants in the environment, triggered by such items as bisphenol-A lining tin cans or radiation from early mammograms, according to a review of recent science by two breast cancer groups.

No comments here, except that, perhaps--just perhaps--the former study might help explain the latter.

More Nails In The Coffin

Washington state's health and ecology agencies want to ban PBDEs.  Completely.

Bully for them.  Now, let's see what the legislature says.

(For more info on PBDEs, see here.)

Take That? Take Back (e-Waste)!

True to its state motto, dirigo, Maine is leading the nation in electronic waste management. Yesterday a law went into effect that requires TV and computer monitor manufacturers to take responsibility for the proper disposal of their products.

TVs and monitors need to be recycled because they contain toxic lead and mercury. But only a few states have e-waste programs where those who profit from the products also pay the disposal costs. In California, consumers pay a small fee at the time of purchase to help defray the cost of recycling later. In Maryland, manufacturers pay a fixed annual fee into a recycling trust fund.

While these are great starts, I suspect that neither of these programs covers the full costs of disposal. Maine's law is great because it places the full cost where it belongs: on makers and users of the product, instead of on general taxpayers. In this way it also creates powerful incentives  (read: market economics) for manufacturers to build products that use less toxic materials in the first place and that are easier to recycle at the end of their life.

Here in Cascadia e-waste producer responsibility is still in the works. British Columbia (pdf) intends to have a program in place by mid 2007. Washington has two bills in the current legislative session. And Oregon (pdf) had a bill in 2005 to charge consumers a fee up front, although the bill died in session. Stay tuned to find out what happens with e-waste recycling in the Northwest.

Christmas Lift

A year-end piece of good news about the Northwest's successful push in 2005 for cleaner cars, via a note yesterday from the Oregon Environmental Council:

"This afternoon, Oregon’s Environmental Quality Commission adopted the clean car standards by temporary rule. By acting before the end of the year, EQC has alerted automakers that they must provide cleaner, more climate-friendly cars to Oregonians starting with model year 2009. These new cars will consume less fuel and produce less pollution. They’ll cost less to operate. And they’ll reduce our dependence on oil."

The one hitch is that the EQC needs to make the rule permanent within 180 days, or it will expire. See more at www.cleancarsoregon.org.

Toxic Whales

BBC News reports that orcas are the most toxic-contaminated mammals in the Arctic. Fat samples recently taken from killer whales in a Norwegian fjord revealed startlingly high levels of pesticides, PCBs, and flame retardants.

Whales in the Arctic may be somewhat more susceptible because toxics often concentrate in the polar regions, but the Norwegian whales are a reminder that the southern resident orcas of Cascadia are also sickened by high levels of toxics. And unlike their Arctic brethren, the whales of BC and Washington are next door neighbors to millions of people and our heavy industry. All those increasingly banned and phased-out flame retardants persist in the environment where they can continue to poison both people and wildlife.

As we begin to plan for protecting the southern residents under the Endangered Species Act, perhaps we should consider testing the southern residents for toxics in a systematic way. The last time one of the southern residents was tested for PCBs (a dead whale that had washed ashore) it registered perhaps the highest levels of contamination ever measured in a killer whale--so high that the machines had to be re-calibrated. Not only would tests help us prioritize the most critical threats to orcas, but their levels of contamination may give us clues about how vigilant we ought to be about toxic-laden consumer products.

PBDEs: Another Nail

Some cheery news for Monday:  The Olympian, Washington's capital city newspaper, reports that the state departments of ecology and health are proposing further steps to eliminate PBDEs, a toxic flame retardant, from commerce.  And I imagine that some state legislators are paying close attention to those recommendations as they gear up for the legislative session next January.

Just to recap -- PBDEs are flame retardants used in furniture foams and plastics, but have some disturbing similarities to their chemical cousins, the PCBs.  Both classes of compounds have been found to affect neurological development in lab animals, and PCBs are known to cause developmental delays and deficits in children.  Scientists routinely find PBDEs in samples of food, housedust, and human breastmilk and body fat -- and levels in North America, where the use of the most troublesome forms of the compound has been concentrated, are the highest in the world.

Last year the Washington legislature funded a PBDE action plan for the state, but delayed action on a bill to actually remove compounds out of commerce.  Meanwhile, the manufacturer of the kinds of PBDEs most often found in people's bodies has stopped manufacturing the compounds, under an agreement with the US EPA.  Still, one type of PBDEs are still used widely in commercial electronics and other applications (though, apparently, many manufacturers have managed to remove all PBDEs from their supply chain).

Today's news means, in essence, that departments of health and ecology are leaning towards a more comprehensive ban of PBDEs.  As summarized by the Olympian:

The two agencies recommend that the Legislature:
• Ban the manufacture, distribution or sale of new products containing Penta or Octa [which are the most problematic forms of the compounds].
• Ban the use of Deca [the PBDEs that are still in widespread use] in electronic components, as long as safer fire retardants are available or if additional studies show that Deca harms human health.
• Consider a ban on Deca in products that don’t already contain it, but could in the future, including textiles and mattresses.
• Continue research on PBDE alternatives and monitor the levels of PBDE in the environment.

These are all good steps.  Of course, it would have been nice if the same level of caution had been exercised before PBDE contamination became so widespread.

When Fake News Is Real News

Because of our work on PBDEs -- the flame retardant chemicals that are showing up at alarming levels in northwesterners' bodies -- I've set up a Google alert that lets me know whenever something new is published that contains the word "PBDE".  I was hoping to keep abreast of new scientific findings, or maybe new policy developments that I might not otherwise get wind of.  But most of what I've gotten has been just P.R. announcements -- fake news stories, really -- from companies crowing that they've phased PBDEs out of their products. Just today, for example, Hewlett-Packard announced that they've already gotten rid of PBDEs from their plastic electronics casings, and are soon to phase out another brominated flame retardant.

Right now, I'd say that the industry P.R. makes up the large majority of the PBDE news that Google sends me in any given week.

At first, I found the stream of P.R. annoying.  But now I realize that, far from being junk, the steady drip of PR news has become a real story in itself.  It wasn't long ago that the electronics industry was begging for exemptions from PBDE phaseouts, saying that they simply didn't have any viable alternatives to the compounds.  But, apparently, the engineers have had a chance to do some tinkering, and are finding that they can get along well enough without them.

Which suggests that getting rid of PBDEs completely may be a lot easier than the industry lobbyists had predicted.  Which should come as little surprise.  Time and again, industrial engineers have shown that they've got the creativity to solve pollution problems quickly and cost effectively.  Sometimes, all it takes is to give their higher-ups a little kick in the pants.

How 'Bout A Nice Tall Glass of Mercury

Yoiks:  A southern Idaho reservoir is contaminated with mercury at levels up to 180 times higher than those found in lakes in the northeast US.  From the Idaho Statesman:

"Nobody's ever seen a hot spot like this before," said Mike DuBois, an air quality analyst at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.

The likely culprit:  four gold mines across the border in northern Nevada, which emitted 15,000 pounds of mercury in 2002 alone.  Of course, the mines are patting themselves on the back for reducing their  mercury releases to just a couple of tons per year as of 2004.  But that's still a huge amount of mercury for just a handful of mines.  The 1,000-odd coal-fired electricity industry generators in the US emit a total of 48 tons of mercury each year; so those few Nevada mines make up a disproportionately large share of the nation's total mercury output.

And just in case you need a reason to care about this: mercury contamination early in life can knock a few points off a kid's IQ, which in addition to being grossly unfair, costs nearly $9 billion a year in lost earnings.

A Beacon in the Smog

I doubt that most residents of leafy suburbs paid a lot of attention to air quality when they chose their homes.  But it’s not hard to believe that, when suburban commuters return home from work each night, they breathe a little easier in the belief that they’ve escaped the smog and fumes of the city.

Only, maybe they haven’t.  At least, not in the greater Puget Sound, anyway.

The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency maintains a network of air monitoring stations throughout the region.  Some are in central Seattle, some in smaller cities, and some in suburbs and rural locations.  And--perhaps surprisingly--there doesn’t appear to be a decisive air quality advantage to living in the suburbs.  (See this pdf for more details.)

Or, to be a little more accurate:  air quality tends to be both highly variable and very localized.  Monitoring stations in the neighborhoods surrounding Seattle’s downtown tend to report that the air is pretty clean -– cleaner, in some cases, than at more suburban monitoring stations in Bellevue, Lynnwood, or Lake Forest Park.  On the other hand, the air in Seattle’s industrial zones can be pretty dirty; but then again, so can the air in Kent and Marysville.

The Beacon Hill monitoring station, a mile or so southeast of downtown Seattle, is worth a special mention. 

The Beacon Hill neighborhood is just to the east (i.e., downwind) of I-5, the heavily trafficked West Seattle Bridge, and the Port of Seattle; to the north it's bordered by I-90.  Given its location, you might expect the air quality on Beacon Hill to be pretty bad.  In fact, if you had to pick one residential neighborhood in Seattle that’s likely to have outdoor air quality problems, Beacon Hill might well be it.

But Beacon Hill’s air is, surprisingly, pretty clean. For fine particulate matter (i.e., soot, largely from diesel vehicles), it does moderately well: 3rd best of 7 regional monitoring stations by one measure, 7th of 16 by another, best among 5 by yet another.  It has less ozone than any other monitoring station in the region (not surprisingly, as concentrations of ground-level ozone are typically lower in city centers than in leafy suburbs and exurbs).  And its carbon monoxide levels were the lowest among 7 stations.  I'm not sure why Beacon Hill does as well as it does -- perhaps it's just a function of altitude and prevailing wind patterns. But whatever the reason, it's good news for the people who live there.

Clearly, the monitoring station results don't offer definitive proof that Beacon Hill residents have nothing to worry about from their air.  But it does mean that a move from Beacon Hill to, say, Lynwood or Bothell or Lake Forest Park or Marysville—all suburban locations—won’t necessarily buy cleaner air.

Three more points are worth mentioning here.  First, as we mentioned in this post, the air in your car is typically among the worst you’ll breathe all day.  Second, for most pollutants, indoor air is more polluted than outdoor air –- and most people spend 90% or more of their time indoors.  And third, outdoor air quality seems to have improved pretty substantially since the early 1980s; King County has had no “unhealthy” air quality days since 1999, and only 31 days in 6 years in which the air has been “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”  That’s not a perfect record, obviously, but it does represent a substantial improvement from where we once were.

To me, these facts suggest that at this point improving the air that you breathe depends, in large measure, on keeping yourself off the highway, and keeping hazardous products out of your home.  Obviously, clean outdoor air matters too -– it’s just that living in the suburbs doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get it.

Update:  I should mention that "A Beacon In The  Smog" is, or at least was, the official tag line of Grist Magazine.  Plagiarism, like imitation, is a sincere form of flattery.

Biomonitoring Bill Terminated

In California, Gov. Schwarzenegger just vetoed a bill that would have required the state to begin monitoring synthetic chemical pollutants in the bodies of California residents, and to explore the connection (if any) between such chemical "body burdens" and human health.

To me, what seems notable here is the reason the governor gave for the veto:

"While the intent of the measure is worthy...the bill will only provide a partial snapshot of chemicals present in tested participants without proper context of what the presence of (a) specific chemical means or how it interacts with other health factors.

Translation: it's better to keep flying blind than to start opening our eyes.   According to the Oakland Tribune, the governor has pretty much lifted this argument from the chemical industry's talking points -- so I'm sure it won't be the last time we hear it.

Of course, it's not quite true that we're flying blind here.  Plenty of people are doing biomonitoring, including the US Centers for Disease Control.  But those programs have pretty definite limitations -- biomonitoring studies by academics, state labs, and public interest groups tend to be one-off affairs, rather than long-term, coordinated efforts; and the CDC data provides a useful baseline for some contaminants, but doesn't look at chemical combinations or health effects.  Those are gaps the California program could have filled.  Too bad it was Terminated.

Good Air Day

This is pretty cool. Real-time air quality measurements for 17 locations around Puget Sound. At the moment, every monitoring station is showing good air quality. It'll be interesting to check back periodically as wintertime inversions trap pollution in the basin.

Anyone know of other web-based measurements like this one for other places in the Northwest?

UPDATE: Here's a clickable map of county-by-county air quality for Washington state. (Hat tip to the ever-vigilant Alan Durning.)

VOCs Populi, or that New Car Smell

Love that new car smell? You may not get that smell from the next new car you buy, and for good reason. Japanese auto makers are planning to reduce the new car smell that comes from fresh glue, paint, plastics because it contains volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Short-term exposure to VOCs like benzene and formaldehyde can cause headaches, nausea, and dizziness, while long-term exposure can cause cancer. Studies (pdf) show that most people get their most concentrated dose of VOCs in cars of all ages when caught in traffic or refueling, and the new car smell just adds to the problem. Because the smell generally dissipates after 6 months, it probably won't give you cancer. But, still, kudos to Japan for tackling another air quality problem.

Flame On!

Dumb headline (unless you're a Fantastic Four fan), but a serious subject.  A new chemical analysis, being released today by California EPA scientists at an international scientific conference in Toronto, shows that 30 percent of Northwest moms tested in NEW's 2004 toxics study had higher levels of the toxic flame retardants PBDEs in their bodies than of well-known chemical threats PCBs.  This study is a follow-up to the PBDE study of Northwest women that we did last year.

The study provides pretty unambiguous evidence that PBDEs have emerged as a major toxic menace.  And it suggests that, if recent trends continue, PBDEs could soon overtake PCBs as the most dominant "organohalogen" pollutant in people's bodies.

And an interesting -- and probably significant -- side note to the study was that there was no correlation between PCB and PBDE levels.  This suggests that they may get into people's bodies through different pathways.  At this point, the principle source of PCB contamination in people is food, particularly fish.  For PBDEs, nobody is sure; but a recent exposure modeling study from Canada suggests that ordinary housedust, containing minute quantities of PBDEs sloughed off from furniture and the like, may be the principle route of exposure in people. (More here.)

Some context is in order.  PBDEs are fire retardants that are added to furniture foams, industrial fabrics, consumer electronics, and a number of other products.  They're pretty good at preventing fires. But in recent years, scientists have noticed an alarming rise in the concentration of PBDEs in peoples bodies -- in their blood, in fatty tissues, and in breast milk alike.  Concentrations of the compounds appeared to be doubling every two to five years.  Ecologists have found similar rises in marine sediments and wildlife.  As it turns out, PBDEs didn't stay put in consumer products; minute quantities would leach out into the environment and ultimately wind up sequestered in living things, including people.

At the same time that this rapid rise was detected, new evidence was uncovered that PBDEs may have similar health effects as their close chemical cousins, the PCBs.  Tests on laboratory animals showed that a dose of PBDEs during a critical phase of early development could cause memory deficitis and behavioral aberrations -- effects very similar to those caused by PCBs.  The two chemicals may actually work together, either additively or synergistically, to cause harm.

Last year, Northwest Environment Watch commissioned an analysis of 40 breastmilk samples from Northwest moms, 10 each from Washington, Oregon, BC, and Montana.  The study found that the moms had among the highest median PBDE levels on record.  (Yoiks!) 

The problem isn't breastmilk per se; we tested breastmilk just because it was the most convenient way to get a biological sample that's high in fat, since PBDEs adhere to fat.  As far as I know, every epidemiological study that has looked at the issue has concluded that, except in extremely rare cases of PCB poisoning, breastfeeding is by far the best and healthiest choice for infants.  The major risk of PCBs appears to be during fetal development; and the benefits of breastfeeding may actually mitigate the potential harms caused by PCB or PBDE exposure in utero.  So, seriously, if you're a nursing mom, keep breastfeeding.  Please.  Really.

The bottom line of this study is that, even though PCB levels are still higher than PBDE levels, we may soon be approaching a point at which PBDEs are more of a concern than PCBs.  And from this I draw 3 lessons.  First, we should be paying close attention to PBDE levels in the coming years, to see whether PBDE levels continue to rise in people.  Second, we should be looking at ways of removing PBDE-laden products from people's homes. 

And third, we need to learn our lesson about the risks posed by untested chemicals.  In retrospect, it should have been obvious that PBDEs posed some risk -- their chemical structure is very similar to that of PCBs, dioxin and DDT.  So that alone should have triggered some elementary testing requirements before the compounds were used widely commerce.  But it didn't.  At some point, we've got to learn the lesson, and take steps to make sure this sort of chemical fiasco -- releasing potentially harzardous compounds without adequate testing -- doesn't keep happening again and again and again.

Smog Cops vs. Social Justice

And in other news from the remote sensing front, there was an interesting article in the LA Times last week about the South Coast Air Quality Management District's testing of an automated device that measures tailpipe emissions (free subscription required). The article explains that testing has begun for a remote sensing device that measures tailpipe emissions and photographs an offender's license plate for ticketing.

The technology has been around for some years now. And it's about time for deployment.

But it's also worrisome from a social justice perspective. The article fails to mention if the SCAQMD [we used to say "squawk mud"] program will ensure that the poor's only mode of transport is not eliminated if they cannot afford the full cost of retrofit. Sure, there are freeloaders that dilute their actions throughout society. But many of the polluting vehicles are the only cars the poor can afford in a transit-unfriendly town -- the under- or less-well employed often cannot rely on transit to get to work.

I know when I lived in Sacramento, another transit-unfriendly town, I could only take transit to a narrow range of choices. (Riding my bike 14 miles to work took, literally, one-third the time of transit, and I'm fit.) The same is true in LA. Not having a car in LA is not an option if you wish to feed your family.

There is not just one solution to reducing outstanding polluters. As Mark Hertsgaard found in Earth Odyssey, most people on the planet wish to decrease their pollution. They just can't afford to. They're too busy just trying to get by.

This new emissions device cannot be used as a blunt instrument: We must ensure it's used properly when it comes to our comparatively transit-friendly region.

Whales Say: Take the Bus

I'm a day late on this, but... new findings from Washington's Department of Ecology: cars, not industry, are becoming the biggest polluters of Puget Sound. That could mean that the future of iconic creatures like orcas, already highly contaminated, will depend on growth management that reduces driving.

A big city concerned with protecting ecosystems might want to seriously consider transportation alternatives as opposed to big ticket highway spending and re-building. Hint, hint, Seattle.

For Clean Air, Work Downtown

In our ongoing quest to discover how land use and urban form links to human health effects, I recently stumbled across something odd. It's a 2000 study of vehicle emissions per household in Puget Sound, authored by Larry Frank. I wanted to find out if there is a connection between air pollution and urban density. According to this study, there is, but in a way I didn't expect.

It turns out that the strongest land-use correlate to low household emissions is not residential density, but job-site employment density. That is, from a statistical standpoint, it matters less whether you live on Capital Hill or the Sammamish Plateau than whether you work in downtown Seattle or Bothell. The difference, I suppose, is that downtown Seattle and other places with high employment density are well-served by transit and are generally easier to get to with lower vehicle emissions than more far-flung workplaces.

Interestingly--this is only interesting if you're a geek; otherwise skip to the next paragraph--the drop in household emissions does not observe a linear relationship with employment density. For the lowest three quartiles of employment density household emissions are about the same (they're a little higher in the lowest density quartile), but then they drop off sharply at the beginning of the highest density quartile. This suggests that there's a threshold of employment density--perhaps the density at which transit, carpooling, etc become viable--after which emissions drop quickly.

It's also interesting, I think, that in this study residential density is less strongly correlated with lower household emissions. There is still a correlation--higher residential densities meant less vehicle emissions--but the difference, while significant, was relatively minor.

One reason perhaps emerges in another set of correlations. This study found that households located in census tracts with high employment density, greater mixes of land-use, and greater street network density--in other words, places with many characteristics of city living--actually generate more vehicle trips and more vehicle trips with a cold engine (which produces a disproportionate share of tailpipe emissions). Probably, this is because there are more services and amenities nearby and there's less incentive to "chain" trips together as a typical suburban commuter might on the way to or from work. Even so, the higher density households produce fewer emissions simply because the trips are not as long as for households in lower densities.

There's a lesson here, maybe, for those of us interested in urban form as well as everyone who's interested in improving air quality. From a public health perspective, it may make more sense to concentrate jobs in dense nodes with good transit access than to worry about other land-use features. Maybe the best reform to reduce vehicle emissions is more office space downtown.

About the study: The study uses an exhaustive (heh, heh) methodology that calculates three types of emissions (NOx, CO, and VOC) that accounts not only for driving distance, but also for speed, travel time, and emissions from starting the car (adjusted for estimated engine temperature at start). Its findings are based on data from the Puget Sound Transportation Panel Travel Survey, which records travel for 1,700 households over a two-day period by giving each member of the household over 15 a diary for recording trips and their characteristics.

UPDATE 8/10/05: Here's a link to an abstract of the study. As far as I know, the full version is not online.

Sins of Emissions

Some news bits from the Oregon legislative session, which just ended:

As the Oregonian reports, the auto industry has been trying to head off an Oregon effort to adopt "clean-car" emissions standards by including language in the budget that would effectively prohibit DEQ from implementing the standards. (Clean-car standards, which Washington state just adopted, would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by some 30 percent and help drive the industry toward cleaner, more efficient design.) Governor Kulongoski has promised to counteract the move by using his veto power.

Meanwhile, the industry succeeded in effectively defeating a biofuels bill, which would have provided incentives for in-state production and use of renewable fuels such as ethanol  and biodiesel.

Automakers aren't exactly winning points for innovative thinking. From the Oregonian editorial:

The House Republicans who let this happen ought to have to spend the next election explaining why they would trade off Oregon jobs, Oregon agriculture and Oregon innovation all in a futile effort to extend a pollution tax credit and enable the auto industry to keep churning out cars that are less fuel efficient than those they made 20 years ago....

The auto industry has fought every advance -- seat belts, catalytic converters, air bags -- with this same argument about unacceptable costs. Every time its claims have been shown to be wildly inflated and wrong.

And in good news (mostly), the state did win a partial ban on toxic flame retardants known as PBDEs. Our study of PBDEs in Northwest women showed that the chemicals were found in relatively high levels in Oregonians; and a recent study of PBDEs in house dust found that Oregon samples had the highest levels of PBDEs.

Euro-Paean

A new study of flame-retardant chemicals called PBDEs (reported on here) found low relatively levels of the compounds in German breast milk samples -- about 2 parts PBDE per billion parts of milk fat.

In contrast, the median level in the Pacific Northwest was about 50 parts per billion, with levels ranging over 300 ppb for a tenth of the samples we analyzed. PBDE concentrations of well over 1,000 parts per billion have been detected in other North American tests. The big difference is that the kinds of PBDEs that are most readily absorbed by living things have mostly been used in the US and Canada. Now, undoubtedly, we'll be living with that mistake for decades.

One thing of note in the study: vegetarians had lower levels of contamination than people who ate meat, which is a pattern that hasn't been observed, to my knowledge, in the US or Canada. Typically, fat-soluble contaminants are found at higher concentrations in animal products than in vegetables, grains, and fruits. But it's unclear whether diet is a significant contributor to the high levels of PBDEs found in North America. Some researchers think that ordinary house dust, containing traces of the compounds that have leached from household consumer goods, is the more likely culprit.

Cost Plus

Health care has become such an expensive endeavor -- consuming roughly an eighth of all the money our economy generates -- that even small improvements in health can save a lot of money. A recent study, mentioned here in the Seattle P-I, looks just at the health costs -- care for asthma, cancer, lead pollution, and the like -- resulting from exposure to manufactured chemicals. And according to Dr. Kate Davies, the study's author, the costs are pretty sizeable:

Davies said the environmental health costs associated with children's conditions is roughly .7 percent of the state gross national product, while environmental health costs for adults equates to 1 percent of the local annual GNP.

Which means that the health costs of a polluted environment rack up to about, oh, $4 billion a year or so in Washington State alone, at least by this estimate.

I'm not sure how much sway cost-benefit analyses should hold over environmental policy. Not only does the classic cost-benefit framework tend to sidestep fairness (why should I pay if someone else benefits?), but perhaps more importantly, cost-benefit analyses can overvalue short-term & concrete costs and benefits, while undervaluing the long-term and nebulous ones. Still, cost-benefit analysis can be an important tool if used wisely. And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that if lead, for example, had been required to pass through a rigorous cost-benefit analysis before it was added to paint and gasoline, there's no way we'd still be paying the costs today.

Dust Up

For years now, scientists have known that US and Canadian residents have elevated levels of PBDEs -- a flame retardant known to impair development in lab animals -- in their bodies, compared with European and Asian counterparts. (See, for example, our own study of PBDEs in northwesterners.)

The problem is that nobody's been sure of how the compounds get into us. Some speculated that food was the main exposure route -- and pointed to studies that found the compounds in common foods taken from grocery store shelves. Others suspected that house dust was the real culprit -- and that people were inhaling dust containing traces of PBDEs that had been sloughed off from degrading furniture foams or other consumer items.

Now, one research team claims to have an answer to the food v. dust controversy. Their conclusion: most of the PBDEs in people's bodies comes from house dust.

As far as I can tell, this is based on a computer model; but the model is based on actual measurements of PBDEs both in foods and house dust.

Still, it's probably too soon to call this definitive. But to me, it certainly suggests that -- in addition to banning the compounds outright -- there ought to be more efforts directed at getting PBDE-laden products out of people's homes.

Waiting to Inhale

People who move to the suburbs may think they’re fleeing the polluted air of the city.  Of course, there’s a tradeoff: by living in low-density suburbs, they spend more time in their cars. And as it turns out, the air inside your car may be just about the dirtiest you’ll breathe all day.

Last year, researchers in Sydney, Australia released a study (pdf) that measured the levels of benzene (a carcinogen) and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs), as well as asthma-inducing nitrogen oxides, among people who commute by car, bus, train, bike and foot.

The verdict? Car commuters breathed the worst air, getting the highest doses of benzene and other VOCs. Even bus commuters were exposed to lower levels of VOCs than car commuters (though bus riders breathed higher levels of nitrogen dioxide). Train commuters had the least exposure overall, with cyclists and walkers coming in second-best.

One reason for the difference is that motorists are breathing exhaust, both from their own vehicles and from nearby traffic. As the authors of the Sydney study note, driving on congested freeways puts motorists in a "tunnel of pollutants." By contrast, other travel modes reduce ambient exposures: trains tend to run on isolated tracks, buses often take express lanes, walkers and bikers may travel on quieter streets.

The US census says that 87.9% of Americans commute by car, truck, or van, and the National Household Transportation Survey shows that people who live in sprawling suburbs spend about 68 minutes per day in their cars--about 50 percent more than people who live in more compact urban neighborhoods.

So, to some extent, if you want more fresh air it may be smarter to move closer to downtown, rather than farther away.

Nukes in the Northwest

The Pacific Northwest is no stranger to the ill-effects of nuclear production and waste storage. And according to this article in today's New York Times, the region is about to see even more of it. Idaho National Laboratory, near Idaho Falls, is slated to manufacture 330 pounds of plutonium-238, at an estimated cost of $1.5 billion and 55,000 drums of hazardous waste.

To my mind, the truly worrisome aspect of the project is this:

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any details.

UPDATE: An editorial in the Idaho Statesman arguing that the Department of Energy should justify its plan to produce plutonium in Idaho.

Pollute the Rich

Feeling guilty about driving your car? If you've been ranting at too many of Clark's recent posts, then I've got a sales pitch for you...

For the low, low price of $160 you can turn your Hummer H2 into a zero emissions vehicle. It's easy. All you need is a TerraPass.

Now here's the fine print: it won't actually reduce the emissions from your tailpipe, or turn your gas-guzzler into a sipper. What the pass does is buy smog allowances from the Chicago Climate Exchange where companies buy and sell pollution credits. By buying up a few credits, you reduce their supply (and presumably raise their price), and you thereby indirectly reduce the amount of pollution from other people. 

Yes, it's weird. And disturbingly similar to the Catholic practice in the Middle Ages of allowing rich believers to buy indulgences to expiate their sins. And perhaps even more disturbingly, the program so far has attracted mostly drivers of fuel-efficient vehicles. According to the article on CNN.com, SUV drivers aren't very interested because they don't feel guilty in the first place.

From Poison to Precaution

As our study of the toxic flame retardant chemical, PBDE, in human breast milk showed, industrial chemicals added to consumer products have a way of getting into human tissue. Worse, we rarely know the health effects of such exposures before these toxics are widely released into the environment.

There's a principle of sustainability that says producers should prove safety first, before a product goes to market. It's called the Precautionary Principle. (We welcome your thoughts about this principle here).

The city of of San Francisco, just south of Cascadia, recently passed an important ordinance advancing precaution, according to Saturday's Chronicle:

The law, which goes by the cumbersome name of Environmentally Preferable Purchasing for Commodities Ordinance, requires city departments to buy products that do as little harm as possible to people and the Earth.

By instantly creating greater demand for products designed for sustainability and human health, the city of San Francisco provided additional incentive for producers to take greater responsibility for their products.

For more about the precautionary principle, including programs in Seattle and Portland, go here. Also see a particularly interesting policy model called REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of CHemicals) being explored in Europe.

PBDE-Free Shopping

Because NEW has done a study on the high levels of PBDEs in northwesterners, people often ask us about what they can do to protect themselves and their children from the toxic flame retardants.

A good new resource on this topic is Green Guide's handy clip-and-save Smart Shoppers PBDE card (pdf). The card gives general tips on avoiding toxics in your diet and--most useful--lists computer and furniture companies that have chosen not to use PBDEs in their products, including Intel, Motorola, IKEA, and Lifekind. (Green Guide also has a good article summarizing the risks of PBDEs.)

It's worth keeping in mind, though, that ultimately the best way to avoid PBDEs--which have been found in everything from dust to grocery store food--is to phase them out of all new products and get rid of old PBDE-laden products. They are so ubiquitous that exposure isn't a choice. So consumers need to pay attention to policy as well, as the mothers from our study know well. (To see what your region is doing to phase out PBDEs, go here.)

Global Warming or Genetic Warming?

Because of growing concern about the effects of global climate change, nuclear energy seems to be gaining a new lease on life. Of particular note: some enviros have switched sides and now support, at least in principle, moving toward more nuclear power. (See Alan Durning's most recent remarks on the viability of nuclear power here).

Today's news from Hanford provides some counterpoint. The Seattle P-I reports on a new study (pdf) from the Seattle-based Government Accountability Project (GAP). Here's the gist:

Radioactive dust in a Tri-Cities attic and plutonium-tainted clams in the Columbia River are red flags signaling that contamination from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is in the environment and moving into the food chain....

And,

Government officials know that radioactive groundwater is still flowing to the river tainted with radiation. It's still in the soil at the 586-square-mile reservation and has been detected in tumbleweeds that roll across the desert site.

What concerns [GAP] is the presence of the radioactive and other dangerous chemicals moving from the soil and water and into plants and animals offsite that can spread the contamination, increasing the risk of exposure for people.

But perhaps the most astonishing revelation of the article is this:

DOE officials and their contractors said the watchdog group's results were not surprising....

Oh well, then. Now I feel much better!

Even though technology has come a long way since the wild west days during which most of the damage was done at Hanford, this news should trouble us, given nuclear energy's new allure, for two reasons: first, the problem of waste storage apparently has still not been solved (see, for example, "Areas Requiring Attention" from this report (pdf) from the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board); and second, we would be depending on the same "officials and their contractors" to assure our safety that have been doing such a wonderful job at Hanford.

For a broader critique of nuclear power, see Jim Harding and Denis Hayes' excellent op-ed in yesterday's P-I.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

I missed this last week:  Washington State University scientists have found that exposure to toxic substances can have effects that span generations.  From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article:

The standard view of heritable disease is that for any disorder or disease to be inherited, a gene must go bad (mutate) and that gene must get passed on to the offspring.

What [WSU researcher Michael] Skinner and his colleagues did is show that exposing a pregnant rat to high doses of a class of pesticides known as "endocrine disruptors" causes an inherited reproductive disorder in male rats that is passed on without any genetic mutation..."It's not a change in the DNA sequence," Skinner explained. "It's a chemical modification of the DNA."

What, in particular, was the problem that was passed from generation to generation?  Apparently, the predilection for low sperm counts.

[Skinner's] lab was studying testes development in fetal rats, using a fungicide used in vineyards (vinclozin) and a common pesticide (methoxychlor) to disrupt the process. A researcher inadvertently allowed two of the exposed rats to breed, so the scientists figured they'd just see what happened.

The male in the breeding pair was born with a low sperm count and other disorders because of the mother's exposure to toxins. No surprise. But the male offspring of the pair also had these problems, as did the next two generations of male rats.

So what this all means is that, in theory at least, if your great-grandparent was exposed to an environmental toxic, it's possible that you could be feeling the effects.  Ouch.

Flaming Out

This is truly bad news: a new study (reported in Environmental Science and Technology, here) has found the highest levels of PBDEs--flame retardants that are added to furniture and fabrics--ever recorded in people.  A 34-year old man had 9,000 parts of PBDE per billion in his fat; and a 23 year old woman had over 4,000. 

In our study of Northwest moms, the highest  PBDElevel we found was 321 parts per billion.  Another PBDE study had a high level that was just over 1,000 parts per billion.  But 4,000 and 9,000 are pretty much unheard of.

And just by way of comparison -- in Northern Europe and Japan, you might find highs in the low teens, or perhaps even lower.  (In case you're curious, the reason our levels are so high is that the vast majority of the particularly dangerous penta-PBDEs--the ones that are most readily absorbed by people--have been used in North America, particularly in the furniture industry.)

Just as significantly, half of the people in the study were more contaminated by PBDEs than by PCBs -- which are class of now-banned flame retardants that have been among the dominant persistent pollutants in human bodies since at least the 1970s.  PCB levels have been declining since then, albeit slowly, while PBDE levels have been rising for several decades.  Now, the lines have crossed -- and in North America at least, PBDEs appear to be the dominant organohalogen pollutant in people's bodies.

Now, I'm especially disappointed by this news because I had harbored a hope that PBDE contamination trends had started to level out a bit.   Of course, there haven't been all that many studies in the US, but from what I'd been able to see, levels in 2003 or so seemed comparable to levels from the late 1990s.  But this study--which in addition to having the two very highly contaminated individuals, also had the highest median and mean levels of any study to date--makes me believe that we may not have topped out yet.

The problem, you see, is that there's tons of PBDEs still in people's homes -- in furniture, carpet pads, and the like -- that are going to serve as reservoirs for contamination for decades.  From ES&T:

Although two of the PBDE formulations that are known to result in human exposure, Penta and Octa, were banned in Europe last year and discontinued in the United States this year, the researchers interviewed for this article say that it will take years, perhaps even decades, for these actions to be reflected in decreasing human body burdens. This is partly because people tend to keep potential sources of the Penta and Octa formulations, such as furniture and mattresses, for extended periods.

Sobering news indeed -- and, perhaps, reason to consider ramping up efforts to get PBDEs out of people's homes.

Vancouver, BC's Freeway Dreams

Editor’s note: The following essay is by blog contributor (and former Vancouver city councillor) Gordon Price, a reprint from his "Price Tags" newsletter and Business in Vancouver. (See the Price Tags version for accompanying images.)

Why is the Provincial Government going to spend $3 to $5 billion on a strategy which it acknowledges will not work? If, as everyone seems to say, we can't build our way out of traffic congestion, why are we desperately trying to do so?

Gordon Campbell chose Earth Day to pledge a new Pitt River Bridge and interchange at the Mary Hill Bypass. Said the press release: "(The bridge) will reduce congestion and pollution caused by idling vehicles, helping to improve air quality in the Fraser Valley airshed."

Improved air equality (leaving aside greenhouse gases) can only be achieved if the traffic keeps moving. Once it begins to congest again, air quality gets worse. So in fact the premise for the improvement must be that, yes, we can build our way of our congestion.

Even though we say we can't.

"I'm one of those people who actually believes that you cannot build your way out of congestion," Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon told the Vancouver Board of Trade in a speech just last month. Gordon Campbell said as recently as March: "I know this: you can't ever build yourself out of a transportation problem."

And yet governments, both regional and provincial, have announced the greatest commitment to road-building in the Lower Mainland in recent history. Add it up: the Golden Ears crossing, a twinning of the Port Mann Bridge, a widened Highway 1, new perimeter roads, upgraded interchanges - and more to come as the Gateway Program is implemented.

A huge loop consisting of the new bridges and widened roads will be constructed to join up both sides of the Fraser. It will greatly facilitate movement for short trips around the ring, particularly to serve the development that will cluster around the interchanges. (Check out the new 200th Street interchange where it's already happening.) Logically, new development along the arterials will be complementary - in other words, big boxes, industrial parks, single-use residential developments, strip malls and shopping centres, all organized around abundant free parking. The growth both served and generated by the new roads and bridges will be designed almost exclusively on the assumption that everyone will drive almost everywhere for everything.

The result will turn the routes meant to handle through traffic, particularly the Trans-Canada Highway, into the main streets of suburbia. It will commit the fastest growing part of the GVRD to the automobile and truck, and to a future dependent on the price of oil.

Ironically, just as Vancouver is getting international credit for creating a livable, compact urban form, just as it is winning awards for its sustainability planning, just as it is about to host the World Urban Forum, we are committing huge resources to expand an oil-intensive transportation system that will only encourage the kind of sprawling growth that will clog up the transportation infrastructure we are building to handle the growth generated by the previous investments.

If this expansion is to make any sense at all, the government is obliged to demonstrate how a widened road or new bridge will be prevented from filling up to the point of congestion, which it will most certainly do if the road is seen as a free good. The government may have a model in mind which works, even if for political reasons they haven't articulated what it is, since it probably involves tolls.

In what may have been a moment of excess enthusiasm, Kevin Falcon said last week on CBC that if tolls make sense on a widened Highway 1, the government will consider them. In fact, the project doesn't make sense unless there are tolls - or some constraint on excess use.

Would the government take the risk? Given the Premier's history as chair of the regional district and his willingness to entertain new policy initiatives (not to mention the Liberal's platform "to lead the world in sustainable environmental management, with the best air quality ... bar none") maybe he would. He's certainly saying the right words: "You have to design your way out (of a transportation problem). You've got to design a community around trying to make sure (people) don't have to move as much."

That is the basis of the regional plan that Campbell was instrumental in creating when he chaired the GVRD. It's part of a vision that has served us since the 1970s and is now in danger of being dismantled by leadership south of the Fraser which does not wish to be constrained by mushy notions of sustainability.

But it is also the plan - and ultimately the future of the livable region - that is in danger of being buried under layers of new asphalt.

- Gordon Price

In Battle of Frightening Abbreviations, PBDEs Overtake DDT

A recently published study of Puget Sound fish found that concentrations of flame retardants known as PBDEs are now higher than those of the pesticide DDT. Quoting from the Vancouver Sun:

"That's pretty staggering," said marine mammal toxicologist Peter Ross. "For the first time, a new chemical has emerged to challenge the dominance of PCBs and DDT."

Now, in some ways, this shouldn't be too surprising -- DDT levels in the environment have gradually fallen since the compound was banned in the 1970s, but PBDE levels have skyrocketed over the past decade or so as more and more of the compounds were added to consumer products.  In fact, PBDE levels in the Northwest are pretty high among humans too, as this 2-minute Flash animation and our PBDE report from last September demonstrate. 

Question of the Day

This blog now has a readership of several hundred impressive, smart, and informed people. Together, we know a tremendous amount about a lot of things. I'm hoping we can turn it into a collaborative research tool: a rudimentary "wiki." (Wikis: defined and exemplified.)

Today's New York Times has a revealing article on the gasoline additive MTBE. This chemical was a much-heralded air pollution preventer: it makes gas burn cleaner. Unfortunately, it also proved a pernicious polluter of water. It finds even tiny holes in fuel storage tanks, leaks out and quickly permeates aquifers. At just 1 part per billion, it gives water an awful taste. It's also a suspected carcinogen.

The NYT article has information on MTBE in much of the United States, but nothing on the Northwest. The question of the day is, How big an issue is MTBE in Cascadia? How many water supplies are contaminated? How badly? What are the trends? Is it getting better or worse? How many people are affected? How? What about wildlife? What are Cascadians doing about MTBE? What's the history of MTBE in the Northwest? What, specifically, is going on in each part of Cascadia: southeast Alaska, British Columbia, nor