Environmental ▼ News Canada bans fluoropolymer stain repellents nated chemicals, according to officials from several countries that are watching with interest. A contingent of scientists believe that volatile fluorotelomer alcohols are being transported to remote locations where atmospheric reactions, microbial action, or animal metabolism convert them into nonvolatile, longer-chain perfluorocarboxylic acids. Much of this work comes from the labs headed by University RHONDA SAUNDERS
E
nvironment Canada, Canada’s environmental protection agency, has banned for at least two years three fluorinated polymers used as stain repellents. Regulators outside Canada are closely watching the move because it marks the first time any government has banned such chemicals. Canada acted on the basis of emerging science linking fluorotelomer alcohols—chemicals that are used to make stain repellents and that can be used as stain repellents themselves—to long-chain perfluorocarboxylates (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2004, 38, 215A–216A). These carboxylates have been found in Arctic animals (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 146A–152A) and include perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), which is under intense scrutiny by the U.S. EPA because it is often found in human blood and is linked to developmental effects in animals (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37, 201A–202A). The ban was initiated this summer after manufacturers asked to either begin or expand production of the three fluorinated polymers that contain telomer alcohols. Canada acted under the new chemicals provisions of the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act, but the action was only made public this fall. The ban lasts for two years, and then it can be made permanent or, if new information exonerates the chemical, it can be lifted, says John Arseneau, director general of Environment Canada’s risk assessment directorate in Ottawa. “Ours is a preventative program,” explains Arseneau. “In the face of emerging science, a growing body of data, and uncertainty about what these chemicals mean to the environment, we judged that it is time to take action.” Canada has moved furthest in the regulation of fluori-
Canada is temporarily banning three volatile fluorinated polymers used in stain repellents because they are suspected to be a source of long-chain perfluorocarboxylates. These compounds are bioaccumulating throughout the globe, particularly in the fragile Arctic.
of Toronto chemist Scott Mabury, Ford Motor Co. atmospheric scientist Tim Wallington, and Environment Canada scientist Derek Muir. “Environment Canada is quite up to date in its focus on the longer-chain perfluorocarboxylate acids, for which concentrations in Arctic animals are more than an order of magnitude higher than PFOA,” says Mabury, noting that this may reflect the carboxylate’s higher potential to bioaccumulate. Perfluorocarboxylate concentrations in Arctic ringed seals seem to be doubling as quickly as every four years, according to new data presented by Mabury’s student Craig Butt on November 18 at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and
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Chemistry meeting in Portland, Ore. Levels in polar bears are showing similar doubling times. Scientists believe that the telomer alcohols are constantly being released into the air during their manufacture, through their application, and when the finished products arrive in people’s homes. Stain repellents consist of a polyfluorinated chemical bound to a polymer. Often, some extra amounts of the unbound fluorochemical, or of some of the chemicals used to make it, remain as a residue. It’s also possible that the polymers are breaking down and releasing the chemical. Chemist Robert Buck with major fluorotelomer manufacturer DuPont supports the volatile degradation hypothesis, but he thinks it doesn’t exclude other explanations. Perfluorocarboxylates have been manufactured for various industrial applications, which could also be sources to the Arctic, he notes. However, getting nonvolatile carboxylates to the Arctic would require a novel global transport mechanism. DuPont is collaborating with academic scientists to produce an analysis of production data and a fate and transport model to evaluate this, he says. Meanwhile, EPA is targeting PFOA through its existing chemicals regulations. The agency expects to finish a human health risk assessment on PFOA this year that focuses on the chemical’s developmental effects. EPA has also filed three separate claims against DuPont for withholding information related to its PFOA manufacturing plant in West Virginia (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2004, 38, 264A–265A). In the latest claim, filed on December 6, the agency accuses DuPont of withholding data showing that a dozen people living near the plant have PFOA blood levels of more than 10 times the national average of 5 parts per billion. © 2005 American Chemical Society
In the EU, perfluorooctanyl sulfonate is the target of proposed regulations. An ¤800,000 research effort is now under way to develop new analytical methods for per-
News Briefs
fluorinated compounds, including fluorotelomers, and to investigate their properties, sources, and transport in Europe. —REBECCA RENNER
Healthy student housing
The University of South Carolina (USC) in Columbia is boasting that it has the world’s largest “green” dormitory. Opened in November, the dorm houses 500 students and is part of a 172,000-square-foot complex that includes an outdoor amphitheatre, a learning center partially powered by a 5-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell, and a turf roof. The new residence hall is expected to use 45% less energy and 25% less water than conventional student housing of a similar size, and it features the largest solar collection system for heating water on the East Coast. The building’s heating, venting, and air conditioning systems are free of ozone-depleting substances. The structure’s $30.9 million construction cost is the same as that of a conventional residence hall, according to university officials.
Funding woes eroding stream gage network casts; drinking water management; irrigation withdrawals; timing of wastewater discharges and reservoir releases; water quality standards development; legal and treaty obligations on interstate and international waters; and infrastructure designs for dams, levees, bridges, and roads. Most of the monies for maintaining individual gages come from costsharing partnerships between the USGS and more than 800 state, local, tribal, and other agencies. “Every year, we lose and gain many stream gaging stations, but with state budget cuts and a tight federal budget, we may see more of a decline this year than in the past,” says Steve Blanchard, chief of the USGS Office of Surface Water. Most disturbing is that “we’re losing gages that have long periods of record, and the value of that data increases with the length of the record.” A gage costs between
Green facts and figures
MIKE NOLAN, USGS
A record number of U.S. stream gages, possibly as many as 70, could stop collecting data during the next fiscal year if no funding emerges to pay for their continued operation, according to officials with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Even more significantly, some of these gages have been in operation for decades. These cuts come as climate change, growing populations, and competing priorities for water, such as the preservation and restoration of aquatic habitats, are driving a need for more streamflow data, not less, say researchers. Currently, about 7400 USGS gages measure and record the quantity and variability of surface water flows nationwide, as well as water quality parameters, such as conductivity, temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and total chlorophyll. The data support a wide range of activities, including flood fore-
Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey rely on stream gages, such as this one on the Snake River in Wyoming, as an inexpensive means of identifying changes associated with future climate variations and changes in land and water use.
Almost 80% of the world’s remaining forests are in the developing world, and one-third of that forested area is in Russia and Brazil, according to the World Bank’s new Green miniAtlas. The new reference text is intended to highlight key environmental data for more than 200 of the world’s economies and to link the environment to the broader development challenges of improving health, raising productivity, and fighting poverty. “Concern for the environment is viewed by many as a rich-country luxury,” says Warren Evans, the World Bank’s director for environment. “It is not. Environmental degradation has the greatest impact on the world’s poorest people in the world’s poorest countries.” The text, which is available in English, French, and Spanish, can be purchased for $7 at http://publications.worldbank.org.
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Environmental▼ News $12,000 and $17,000 annually to operate, Blanchard notes. Although it is difficult to determine actual numbers, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, and New Hampshire are slated to lose the largest number of gages in fiscal year (FY) 2005, including some that have been churning out data for 80 years. Since 1990, approximately 640 USGS stream gages with records of more than 30 years have been discontinued, according to the agency. These historical records are particularly valuable for identifying the kinds of changes that occur with stream flows as a result of climate variation or changes in land and water use, says Sam Mabry, director of the land and water resources office within Mississippi’s Department of Environmental Quality. “We simply can’t use infor-
mation that we gather during any one year as intelligently as we could otherwise with continuous historical data to compare it with.” To curb the loss of stream gages, USGS developed in 2003 the National Streamflow Information Program (NSIP) to support a base of roughly 4400 stream gages deemed to be of such critical importance to the national network that their operation should be 100% federally funded. A 2004 review of the program by a U.S. National Research Council (NRC) panel concluded that “federal support of a base stream gaging network is recommended to ensure the long-term viability of this network for national needs and is justified because many national interests are served by providing streamflow information.” Blanchard estimates start-up costs of about
Pollutants persist in drinking water In the largest screen of organic chemicals in finished drinking water to date, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists found that a surprising number of the chemicals that enter a drinking-water plant serving a community outside a metropolis in the northeast United States also end up in people’s homes. Of the more than 100 chemicals screened—including pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, and household chemicals—22 were found in the finished water. Only one of these compounds, the cleaning solvent tetrachloroethene (TCE), is regulated. Parts of this research are being presented at national groundwater meetings, and a study will be published later this year. All the chemicals found in the finished water were at very low levels that do not appear to be harmful, says research hydrologist Paul Stackelberg with USGS. For instance, the average concentration of TCE in the drinking water was 0.03 micrograms per liter (µg/L). The EPA limit is 5 µg/L. However, Stackelberg warns that even a screen on this scale represents a fraction of the chemicals
that are in the environment and is missing any transformed products. He also notes that while these compounds were found at extremely low levels, they may have synergistic effects that increase their impact on human health. By testing at different points in one treatment plant, Stackelberg found that most of the chemicals were probably adsorbed to solids and later removed during sedimentation and filtration. Other compounds were undetectable after treatment with chlorine, although transformed products probably remained. Some of the chemicals showed marked resilience. Levels of the insect repellent DEET (N,N-diethylm-toluamide) in the raw water were about 0.13 µg/L, while the finished water had levels at 0.08 µg/L. The endocrine disrupter bisphenol A entered the plant at 0.1 µg/L and left at 0.02 ug/L. “I think the big question is not what remains in the drinking water, but what happens to these parent compounds,” says Ed Furlong, a research chemist with USGS. For
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$100 million to build and fully develop the NSIP infrastructure, with an additional $100 million needed annually for operations and maintenance. However, current federal funding stands at $14.2 million. Nor is there any sign that the funding will improve. USGS has suffered from years of stagnant and declining budgets, and the federal FY ’05 budget will be no different. The omnibus appropriations bill that Congress approved in late November for the Department of the Interior, home of the USGS, contains a further 2.5% cut for the stream gage program; this lowers the fund to $13.9 million. For more information, the NRC report, Assessing the National Streamflow Information Program, can be accessed online at www.nap.edu/ books/0309092108/html. —KRIS CHRISTEN
example, a recent paper found that the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole becomes chlorinated during water treatment (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2004, 38, 5607–5615). “Chlorine and ozone love to react with certain compounds, especially anything with a benzene ring or a double bond,” says Susan Richardson, a research chemist with EPA in Athens, Ga. “This is an area with a lot of room for research.” Drinking water usually resides in the pipes for 8–10 days before it is used. Stackelberg simulated this process by storing finished water in jars with sodium hypochlorite and then testing it over multiple days to see whether residual pollutants degraded in the presence of the disinfectant. Some chemicals, such as tylosin and diazinon, degraded over time, but the antiepileptic drug carbamazepine, found at about 0.03 µg/L in finished water, showed little reactivity. Of the 58,000 community water plants in the United States, about 8500 serve large metropolitan areas, like the one Stackelberg studied, says Alan Roberson, director of regulatory affairs for the American Water Works Association. The facility Stackelberg studied has a
cilities feeding into New York City do not use this step. Furlong says that a current study is looking at pollutants in a drinking-water plant that uses ozonation. “I think the next big step is to see what happens inside a plant to these parent compounds,” he says. —PAUL D. THACKER
Cleaning up school bus emissions
PHOTODISC
A unique school bus retrofit project that uses a new technology and remote sensing verification aims to reduce children’s exposure to harmful diesel exhaust soot. The Newark, N.J., program will install the novel pollution control devices, which are expected to cut diesel fine particulate matter (PM) emissions in half, on 46 buses by this spring, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
New Jersey is using an inexpensive, off-theshelf technology to improve the air inside diesel school buses, which can expose children to far higher levels of air pollution than ambient air.
Scientists have linked soot particles from diesel exhaust to respiratory illnesses, such as asthma and bronchitis, as well as to lung cancer, heart disease, and premature death. The U.S. EPA has classified diesel emissions as a likely carcinogen, and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) estimates that diesel emissions are responsible for 70% of the cancer risk arising from air pollution. A 2004 study by the Institute of the Environment of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that spikes in black carbon concentrations aboard
school buses exceeded 40–50 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3), far higher than the ambient concentrations of 1–2 µg/m3 away from Los Angeles traffic. Some 24 million American children spend an average of 1.5 hours every weekday riding buses to and from school, according to EPA. Diesel fuel powers nearly 90% of the roughly 450,000 school buses on U.S. roads today. The $200,000 New Jersey project involves the first large-scale demonstration of a particulate reactor: a diesel catalytic converter manufactured by Environmental Solutions Worldwide, Inc., and verified last fall by CARB and EPA for 50% or greater PM reductions. Public Service Enterprise Group, Inc., an electric power company based in Newark, is funding half of the project’s cost, and an anonymous source is providing the other half, according to DEP. This technology could give financially strapped school districts the best return on their investment dollars because it offers higher emissions reductions than conventional diesel oxidation catalysts, which remove about 30% of PM, says Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, an environmental group. The particulate reactor costs $3500 per bus, whereas each oxidation catalyst runs about $1500. Diesel filters can remove 60–90% of PM, but they each cost around $7000 and they require ultralow-sulfur fuel, which isn’t yet widely available. Installing the reactor involves simply swapping out the muffler, explains Paul Moynihan, a project
News Briefs Mercury in environmental journalists
More than 27% of conference attendees who volunteered hair samples for a mercury biomarkers study had concentrations that exceeded the U.S. EPA recommended levels, according to a Harvard University study. At the Society of Environmental Journalists meeting held last October in Pittsburgh, 260 people, mostly residents of the United States, donated hair clippings for mercury analysis. The median mercury concentration was 0.5 parts per million (ppm), and the highest level discovered was 10.2 ppm. EPA considers concentrations less than 1 ppm in the hair a low risk for adverse health effects. From analyzing self-reported diet surveys, the study’s authors say that the number of fish meals consumed in the prior month was the strongest predictor of mercury levels in the hair. The full paper is available at www.hsph. harvard.edu/water/SEJHgStudy.pdf.
Honda named greenest brand in 2004
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has ranked Honda as the 2004 “Greenest Automaker” and dubbed General Motors “Public Polluter #1” in a report that compares vehicle emissions of the six largest U.S. auto manufacturers. The nonprofit research group’s analysis found that Honda vehicles sold in 2003 emitted less than half of the industry’s average smog-forming pollutants and only 82% of the average greenhouse gases. “When the rubber meets the road, only Honda really stands out,” says the report’s coauthor, David Friedman. He claims that every automaker has the technology to improve environmental performance but that they fail to modernize because upgrading cuts into profits. The full report is available at www.ucsusa.org/documents/ autorankings2004.pdf.
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PHOTODISC
final carbon filtration process which further cleans the water of organic pollutants, but Roberson says some drinking-water plants do have this step. “Around 80% of the drinking-water facilities in the Midwest have a carbon filtration step to remove pesticides, such as Atrazine,” he says. For instance, fa-
Environmental▼ News manager for MJ Bradley & Associates, the consulting firm coordinating the project. Additional retrofit equipment includes crankcase ventilation filters designed to reduce oil drips and oil aerosol emissions from diesel engines. New Jersey’s DEP is using remotesensing technology, which can monitor the vehicles’ emissions on the road, to collect detailed information on each bus’s PM, NOx, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, and CO2 emissions before and after the retrofits. So far, the remote-sensing data show a clear difference in emission levels of PM, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons from the buses already retrofitted when compared with baseline vehicles, and PM re-
ductions are consistent with the verified performance levels of 50%, Moynihan notes. A further onboard portable emissions testing system will be installed on several of the buses to provide real-time emission profiles during operation. Other retrofit projects are under way across the country, helped in part by EPA’s fledgling Clean School Bus USA program. For 2003 and 2004, the agency provided $5 million in grants each year to clean up the exhaust from 10,000 school buses, according to an EPA official who requested anonymity. The program’s 2005 appropriation was upped to $7.5 million, but that is still just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed, says
Patricia Monahan, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ transportation program. In fact, the 2004 grant proposals submitted to EPA totaled nearly $55 million, the agency official acknowledges. EPA’s new diesel rules will make much cleaner school buses available starting in 2007. However, “The rules will only affect new diesel engines, and school bus fleet turnover is slow,” Monahan explains. “Because school districts just don’t have the money for new vehicles, they often keep them for 20–30 years, and consequently the full impacts of EPA’s clean diesel regulations won’t be felt for several decades.” —KRIS CHRISTEN
magnesium cations, adds Grant Abbott, chief geologist at the Yukon Geological Survey. Researchers have shown for the first rainfall and ponds in which tailings Because mineral carbonation time that tailings, the mountains of are sometimes stored, Dipple says. was so prevalent in the tailings of rubble left after mining for nickel and Atmospheric CO2 forms carbonone mine, Dipple estimates that asbestos, absorb significant amounts ic acid in water, and as the water the mine may be fixing tens of of CO2. The unexpected discovery, evaporates it reacts with metallic thousands of tons of CO2 per year. made at mines in Québec, Mining companies could British Columbia, the boost carbon fixation at Yukon Territory, and Austhe mine to roughly 1 miltralia, could help mines lion tons per year by inearn credit for what is controducing more water, sidered the most permalowering the pH, and innent form of greenhouse creasing the surface area gas sequestration. of the tailings, he specu“We were examining lates. tailings to characterize If costs can be lowered them as a feedstock for an to about $8–10 per ton, industrial reactor for CO2 mining companies could sequestration but found set up reactor sites that that the tailings were alcould absorb nearly 1 bilready reacting directly lion tons of CO2 per year, with the atmosphere,” which is one-third of the says Greg Dipple, a geglobal carbon sequestraologist at the University tion target set by policy Sasha Wilson of the University of British Columbia helped discov- makers, Dipple says. Work of British Columbia. The er that the mountains of rubble left over from nickel and asbestos surprising discovery, preis under way to determine mining, such as this site at Clinton Creek in the Yukon Territory, sented November 23 at the may be taking up tens of thousands of tons of CO . how to accelerate carbon 2 Yukon Geoscience Forum sequestration for the lowin Whitehorse, came after scientists cations, such as magnesium(II), to est cost, but field experiments are used isotopic tracers to show that atprecipitate stable carbonate minerstill a couple of years away, he adds. mospheric CO2 was the precursor of als, he explains. Serpentine-group However, Abbot warns, “Mineral the carbon-containing compounds minerals, found in tailings from carbonation sounds promising as a in the rocks. white asbestos (chrysotile) and form of carbon sequestration, but it The sequestration reaction renickel mines, are the most abunall depends on the CO2 credit marquires water, which comes from dant and widespread source of ket.” —JANET PELLEY GREG DIPPLE, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Mine tailings soak up greenhouse gas
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