Government Watch
Poor air quality could lead to bad marks for the U.S. EPA.
public chapters, and will include issues not raised by the public. Both sections are expected to be released in draft form in November. The report will include indicators, which communicate information quickly and simply, says Peter Preuss, director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research, who is leading ORD’s role in the project. Like Wall Street’s economic indicators, these could illustrate the health of the environment and its impact on human health without reporting on everything. When used over time, the indicators can highlight changes and trends. Wetlands loss, for example, can indicate the health of a coastal ecosystem. Gathering the indicators was a collaborative effort involving most federal agencies, regional offices, state agencies, and outside groups that have compiled indicators. From their recommendations, EPA staff identified 120 to 150 indicators that might be appropriate. The goal is to trim these down to perhaps six for the public portion of the report. As many as 75 indicators might be included in the technical section, says ORD’s Assistant Administrator Paul Gilman. The agency reached a major milestone using indicators with the release in March of its National Coastal Condition Report, Nelson says, which used seven indicators to measure the health of the na-
Halting biodiversity loss The representatives of 166 countries agreed to voluntary guidelines designed to halt the loss of biodiversity, including recommendations on limiting access to genetic resources. The guidelines, developed during an April meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity at The Hague in the Netherlands, advise governments on how to set fair and practical conditions for those seeking genetic resources. In return, the businesses and scientific entities that want to use the resources must offer benefits, such as profits, royalties, scientific collaboration, or training to the governments and local communities involved. They also state that scientific uncertainty regarding invasive species doesn’t justify inaction if a threat is potentially serious or irreversible. They advocate prevention, eradication, and containment, and recommend specific measures such as border controls, quarantine controls, and information exchange between nations to address biodiversity loss. Four ecosystem biodiversity programs currently exist, concerning dry and subhumid lands, inland waters, marine and coastal environments, and agricultural land. The attendees agreed to a new forest biodiversity program with 12 goals including improving the understanding of how ecosystems function.
PHOTODISC
The U.S. EPA is developing a new way of doing business that includes the use of environmental indicators to gauge its progress, according to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman. In July, EPA staff will review a draft State of the Environment Report, designed to illustrate the general condition of the nation’s natural resources and its impact on human health, while providing a blueprint for areas that need more attention or scientific research. Once finalized, this first-of-its-kind report will reflect EPA’s “best effort to manage and be held accountable for environmental results,” Whitman said when unveiling the project in early May. At an EPA-hosted Science Forum on May 1–2, Kim Nelson, director of EPA’s Office of Environmental Information, called the new approach “a monumental undertaking for the agency.” “Rather than focus on individual areas of the environment” [as required by legislation,] the report will encourage EPA officials to “focus on the environment as a system, which it is,” she said. The indicator project can help drive future budget decisions, Nelson added, and will form the basis of a “virtual desktop” of environmental data comprising the many databases EPA and other agencies have collected over the years. The report is planned to be in at least two parts, with the first section written in a way that answers the top environmental concerns of the nonscientific public. To capture these, EPA staff analyzed surveys and literature provided by consumer and citizen groups. The second section, organized by EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), will be a much larger technical section providing the scientific foundation for the
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
EPA will indicate its environmental progress
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Environmental ▼ News tion’s coastal waters (see story below). The State of the Environment Report will attempt to do the same thing but in a much broader way. Each indicator will be chosen based on its utility to measure a national condition in the United States, so international conditions, and those reflecting issues on fine, geographic scales won’t be included, Preuss says. “We are sort of going through this in a breakneck pace,” to complete a draft of the project by November, says Preuss. Don’t expect the draft to be perfect, EPA officials add. The draft report should “start a national dialogue about environmental issues,” Nelson says, and is likely to include a “very large number of
transitional indicators,” Preuss adds. “I would think the public discussion would help define the indicators and the questions that we are to answer,” Preuss says. For about 30 years, the government has used environmental indicators to help gauge environmental health, notes Jim Reiser, study director for the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the National Research Council (NRC), who worked for the first Council on Environmental Quality in 1976 when it issued a list of ecological indicators. “But those never took hold,” Reiser says. Since then, hundreds of groups, including federal agencies, have developed indicators. When EPA’s project kicked off in
November 2001, “it became evident very quickly that many of the things that people were using as indicators were really poorly put together data sets,” Preuss says. To access the quality and usefulness of these indicators for the report, the group sent out a “fairly intensive quality questionnaire” asking those who recommended the indicators how the data were collected, and whether the collection methods were used across the United States. The next step was to ask several panels of scientists who work outside of EPA to review the 150 or so indicators. The final report and future chapters will be available on EPA’s Web site. On the basis of this success,
U.S. coastal waters graded poorly was degraded. For instance, the mean for the Southeast was 15%, which was the best score. No waters received a “good” rating. Ecological conditions were found to be less favorable in western waters and even worse in the Great Lakes region, Overall Great Lakes Good Fair Poor
Overall national coastal condition
Good Fair O2
O2
Good
Fair
Overall Northeast
Poor
Poor
O2
Ecological health Water clarity Dissolved oxygen**
Overall West
Coastal wetlands
Good Fair Poor
Eutrophic condition Sediment
O2
Overall Gulf Good Fair O2
Overall Southeast Poor
Good Fair Poor O2
Benthos Fish tissue
nental United States are unfit for either human recreation or aquatic life. The Southeast fared the best with an overall rating of fair on a scale ranging from good to fair to poor. Generally, EPA analysts gave waters a “poor” rating if the mean conditions for seven indicators showed that greater than 20% of the estuarine area in a specific region
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with coastal waters in the Northeast and Gulf of Mexico coming in dead last. EPA’s seven basic indicators used to assess ecological conditions are water clarity, dissolved oxygen, coastal wetlands loss, eutrophication levels, sediment contamination, benthic condition, and contaminant accumulation in fish tissue. Wetland loss and eutrophic and
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / JULY 1, 2002
benthic conditions turned up the poorest scores nationwide, whereas water clarity and dissolved oxygen concentrations rated highest. The report goes into lengthy explanations as to what qualifies as a good, fair, or poor ranking for each indicator. Waters were scored as “poor” for the contaminant accumulation in fish indicator if more than 10% of fish sampled had tissue residues greater than U.S. Food and Drug Administration and international criteria, or more than 20% of those sampled had tissue residues greater than EPA guidance values. Waters earned a “good” rating for this indicator if less than 2% of the waters had poor fish tissue condition, and “fair” if 2–10% had poor tissue conditions. Leading sources of impairment include the usual culprits—namely, wastewater treatment plants, urban and agricultural runoff, atmospheric deposition, industrial discharges, land disposal of wastes, and sewer overflows. Because of a lack of data, however, the national assessment does not include conditions for the estuarine waters of Alaska—encompassing nearly 75% of the U.S. total—Hawaii, or U.S. island territories. The report can be accessed at www. epa.gov/owow/oceans/nccr. —KRIS CHRISTEN EPA: NATIONAL COASTAL CONDITION REPORT FACT SHEET
In the first federal report card rating the ecological condition of U.S. coastal waters, scores ranged from fair to poor depending on the region. The scores, included in the U.S. EPA’s National Coastal Condition Report, show that as much as 44% of estuaries in the conti-
is. “[EPA] must be in an increasingly mad dash to get something out by November,” Orians says. Nevertheless, Orians called this a more scientific approach for judging EPA’s performance. “We shouldn’t judge EPA’s success in terms of the number of fines that have been collected; we should ask how are they doing in relation to achieving their environmental objectives.” That is what the indicators project is all about, he adds. —CATHERINE M. COONEY
More than just dioxins in food The first extensive look at chemical contamination pathways in aquaculture systems points to fish meal and oils as primary sources of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in farmraised fish. The study, published in this issue of ES&T (pp. 2797–2805), turned up a wide range of POPs, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants, and organochlorine pesticides in farmraised and wild European Atlantic salmon, aquaculture feed, and fish oils. High levels of PCBs and evidence of recent usage of the pesticide DDT in the fish samples suggest that dioxins are not the only contaminants in foods that regulatory bodies should be concerned about. “In most of the EU deliberations, there is concern with dioxins in food,” says the lead author of the study, Miriam Jacobs of the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. “There have been discussions that levels of dioxins are decreasing in food. PCBs are far, far greater than the dioxins’ content,” she says. In the United States, regulatory bodies are also focusing on dioxins in foods. At the request of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Academies has formed a committee to investigate the implications of dioxins in the food supply (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 93A–94A). A report from that committee is expected next spring. Chemicals in the U.S. food sup-
ply are monitored as part of FDA’s ongoing Total Diet Studies (TDS), which date back to the 1960s, according to Richard Canady of FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. As part of the TDS program, levels of pesticides, industrial chemicals, radionuclides, toxic elements, nutrients, and folic acid are measured in food each year. In 1999, 17 dioxins/furans were added to FDA’s TDS list, and this year, three dioxin-like coplanar PCBs were added. Although dioxins are much more potent and toxic than PCBs, in terms of their ability to bind to the aryl hydrocarbon (Ah) receptor, that is only one route of toxicity, Jacobs emphasizes. Many PCBs and polybrominated flame retardants are weak endocrine disrupters and can act through the estrogen and thyroid receptors, she says. With the help of Adrian Covaci and Paul Schepens of the University of Antwerp’s Toxicological Center in Belgium, Jacobs analyzed both wild and farm-raised British and Norwegian salmon samples, aquaculture feed, and fish oils used to supplement the feed. High levels of PCBs (145–460 ng/g lipid) and moderate levels of PBDEs (1–85 ng/g lipid) and organochlorine pesticides (DDTs = 5–250 ng/g lipid) were found in both the farm-raised and wild fish. Contamination was generally highest in fish, followed by aquaculture feed, and then oils. For comparison, during the Belgian food crisis of 1999, in which
Government Watch Seeking an innovative attitude U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman is urging her staff to go beyond regulations to tackle environmental problems that aren’t covered by current law. The approach, spelled out in a new, long-term innovation strategy, is designed to address outstanding issues such as reducing the high cost of repairing or replacing the nation’s deteriorating water infrastructure, and controlling unregulated pollutants, such as greenhouse gases and nonpoint source pollution. The scheme, unveiled by Whitman on April 24, names 14 “key actions,” nearly all voluntary, that agency staff should take. It commits the agency to a meeting between state, tribal, and local officials to discuss how best to replace the nation’s deteriorating water systems, and to a voluntary program for farmers aimed at controlling nonpoint source pollution. The strategy notes that the agency’s structure, based largely on legal requirements, should exist alongside “a more innovationfriendly culture”. Innovation will be promoted as part of daily work by rewarding “innovative individuals”. Although the Clinton administration adopted the same suite of tools in a variety of pilot projects that never got off the ground, the Bush administration has narrowed its focus to a few priority problems and has elevated successful strategies. One critic says it won’t go very far without a legislative mandate. Most employees see their primary responsibility as following the laws passed by Congress, one economist says. Innovating for Better Environmental Results is found on the Web at www.epa.gov/innovation/strategy.
PHOTODISC
EPA staff will continue to gather environmental databases in all the government agencies. “Our hope is to provide a virtual desktop so managers can access all of this information,” Nelson says, including databases on climate, energy use and production, and demographics. Gordon Orians, professor of zoology, University of Washington, who chaired the 2000 NRC report on ecological indicators, praised the agency’s undertaking while noting how huge the indicator project
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Environmental ▼ News Concentration (ng/g lipid)
140 Salmon (n = 13) Feed (n = 8) Fish Oil (n = 5)
120 100 80 60 40 20 0 HCB
HCHs
DDTs
PBDEs
Marker PCBs
Source: Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 2797–2805.
Median concentrations of hexachlorobenzene (HCB), hexachlorohexanes (HCHs), total DDTs, total PBDEs, and seven marker PCBs in European salmon, aquaculture feed, and fish oil samples are shown above. The seven marker PCBs are recommended by the International Cooperation for Exploration of the Seas as reliable predictors of PCB contamination and included in many EU regulations.
animal feed was contaminated with PCBs and dioxins, total PCB levels in chickens were as high as 10,000 ng/g lipid (10 ppm). The U.S. government currently requires further testing of a food when levels of PCBs are >0.1 ppm, because of concern over dioxins in food. When there are high levels of PCBs, there are often high levels of dioxins. The aquaculture industry commonly supplements feed with marine fish oils to increase the levels of omega-3 fatty acids. These oils are healthy from a nutritional standpoint, but they are likely to contribute to POPs’ contamination in farm-raised fish. Not all fish oils, however, are high in POPs. In general, researchers have found that
fish oils obtained from the southern hemisphere have less POP contamination than those from the northern hemisphere. “There are big differences depending on the source of the fish meal. Fish oils from around the Baltic Sea have much higher levels of POPs than those from Peru,” Jacobs says. That same trend has been seen by other researchers investigating fish meal fed to chickens, pigs, and sheep, she adds. The aquaculture study has insufficient samples to compare levels of POPs in wild fish with those in farmraised fish. In addition, “It wasn’t clear whether the wild fish were truly wild or whether they were farm escapees,” Jacobs says. Although
there is a strong likelihood that one of the wild samples was truly wild, because it had much lower fat levels and a different PCB congener profile than the farm-raised fish, at least one of the wild samples appeared to be a farm escapee. For the most part, samples with higher PCBs also had higher levels of pesticide residues, but this was not true for PBDEs, suggesting that these flame retardants were coming from a different source. “In the north of England, around the River Tees, there is a great deal of flame retardant production,” Jacobs says. However, there are lots of other point sources, she adds. For example, PBDEs are widely used in computer and textile production. Although PCBs and many organochlorine pesticides have been banned throughout most of the world, they are still ending up in the food supply. As reported by Jacobs and colleagues, European farm-raised salmon can be a significant source. In some salmon samples, ratios of DDT to its metabolite, DDE, suggest recent usage of the pesticide. “This should be looked at a lot more closely. Without regular monitoring, it cannot be controlled effectively,” Jacobs advocates. “With the emphasis more on dioxins, this sort of thing gets missed,” she says. —BRITT E. ERICKSON
Drug mixtures prove harmful The first study to investigate pharmaceutical mixtures in aquatic ecosystems finds that a mixture of three commonly used drugs has adverse effects on plankton, plants, and fish. Although the study concentrations for individual drugs are up to 100,000 times higher than those found in the environment to date, they are 10 to 200 times lower than typical dosages taken by humans, say the authors. The results were presented at the Society of Toxicology and Chemistry European Meeting in Vienna, Austria, on May 16. “This study shows that we should be concerned about effects of phar268 A
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maceutical mixtures to aquatic species, especially in effluent-dominated streams,” says aquatic biologist Thomas LaPoint at the University of North Texas in Denton. Concerning the relevance of the concentrations investigated, he says, “Remember that we still know very little about drug levels in the environment.” In addition, large numbers of drugs are being found in many streams. The recent United States Geological Survey (USGS) study found as many as 38 targeted compounds in a single water sample. European studies and a recent USGS report have determined that
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / JULY 1, 2002
many waterways contain low concentrations (maximum about 10 micrograms per liter (µg/L), most median concentrations
