Case of the toxic gingerbread man
By Janet Raloff
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49897/title/Case_of_the_toxic_gingerbread_man
NEW ORLEANS Why did researchers take a knife to a cute little plastic
gingerbread man? To make him give up the source of his toxic fumes.
Or so explained Bill Doucette, this morning, in a particularly entertaining
session at the Society for Toxicology and Environmental Chemistry’s annual
meeting. But the underlying message that this Utah State University scientist
brought home to his audience was anything but funny. He graphically illustrated
that hidden dangers may lurk in surprising places.
Doucette’s team stumbled upon the polluting Christmas ornament while puzzling
out the source of some indoor-air anomalies detected by Hill Air Force Base, an
aircraft-maintenance facility north of Salt Lake City.
Toxic chlorinated solvents released by the base led to contamination of a
shallow groundwater reservoir. A pollutant plume containing 1,2-dichloroethane,
or DCA, and trichloroethylene, or TCE, migrated out from under the base.
Vapors from these highly volatile chemicals can seep into homes as the
pollutants flow beneath them. Fortunately, there are techniques to keep most of
those fugitive vapors out (techniques similar to those used for keeping radon
gas from entering homes). And Hill AFB installed such systems in homes where
these chemicals polluted groundwater and indoor air.
“We got involved,” Doucette explains, “only after [Hill AFB] had installed vapor
removal systems and found some were not reducing the concentrations of this
particular compound [DCA].” A second hint that something was hinky: Hill found
that DCA and TCE concentrations in the air of these homes didn’t match the ratio
present in groundwater
And that’s where the gingerbread man comes in. He pointed Doucette’s group,
which includes an engineer who works at Hill AFB, to something other than vapors
from groundwater pollutants as a source of substantial indoor air contamination.
Their data would indicate that a lone ornament – that gingerbread man – could
elevate DCA concentrations in an entire house above the level that Hill
considers safe, notes toxicologist Christina McNaughton of the Utah Department
of Health in Salt Lake City. Especially disturbing, she notes, many homes don’t
have just one such ornament, but a whole host of them or other goods molded from
the same type of “polyresin” material.
In nearly all cases, products found to be emitting DCA were labeled as “made in
China.” That country-of-origin labeling is not insignificant, McNaughton adds.
Although DCA can harden inexpensive plastics, she says that “its use is not
allowed in the United States,” – at least not in the manufacturing of consumer
goods.
At today’s meeting, she confirmed that the problem uncovered by Doucette’s group
not only appears to pose a genuine health threat, but also points to possible
explanations for indoor-air anomalies showing up in other states, notably
Florida.
Sniffing around
When Doucette and his group initially began checking out Utah homes with
substantially elevated DCA readings, they suspected household cleaners or other
consumer products might be responsible. So they began sampling the air, room by
room, for DCA and TCE, looking for a hot spot.
And indeed, one home’s basement storage room emerged as a zinger. Not sure what
was the source of its contamination – air intrusion, the carpeting or the room’s
eclectic contents – the scientists transferred all of the goods into the garage.
Within a few days, the room’s DCA levels dropped from 82 micrograms per cubic
meter down to 0.37. Meanwhile, pollution in the ventilated garage spiked from
nondetectable values to 10 g/m3. When the researchers returned the goods to
storage room, its pollutant concentrations skyrocketed to 103 g/m3.
It looked like they had found the smoking gun. And, of all places, in a plastic
bin of Christmas decorations. The researchers took the ornaments back to the
lab, popped them into a sort of pressure cooker and assayed any fumes they could
suck out of each. Sure enough, a gingerbread man and several other ornaments
proved to be hot potatoes.
After testing some paint chips from the ornaments and finding little DCA, the
researchers decided to probe deeper. So they amputated the cute little
gingerbread guy’s legs and sampled his interior. Bullseye. Each gram of this
polyresin contained 2.3 milligrams of DCA. If the emission rate the Utah
scientists measured from this ornament – 0.3 g per minute – remained constant,
the decoration should continue to emit toxic fumes for 345 days, the researchers
report in a paper due to be published soon in Ground Water Monitoring &
Remediation.
A few of the other local homes that had registered anomalous DCA levels also had
such products. Doucette and his colleagues went to a store and bought seven new
ornaments. And pollutant offgassing by some of these proved almost as high as
the initial sentinel gingerbread guy
But ornaments are hardly the only products made from this material. Doucette
says they turned up plaques and objects up to two-feet tall made from this DCA-laced
plastic. And the bigger it is, the more DCA it can shed into air.
The pollutant's concentration in some Utah homes “certainly fell within the Air
Force Base's action level,” Doucette notes.
Which is? According to his team's new paper, DCA values in homes exceeding 0.94
g/m3 should trigger installation of vapor barriers or pollutant-removal
technologies. Citing draft EPA guidelines, the new paper suggests that to keep
DCA-based lifetime cancer incidence below a one-in-one-million level, the
pollutant's concentrations in air should not exceed 0.094 g/m3. All it would
take is one 65-gram gingerbread guy like the one they studied to exceed that
value,
Kyle Gorder of Hill AFB works through the calculations for this estimate in his
new paper.
Doucette’s team forwarded its findings, last December, to the Utah Department of
Health.
“We then started to do some quick calculations to determine whether [such DCA
pollution] is a health concern,” McNaughton says. At about the same time, she
notified the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which funds her
department to investigate risks associated with such emerging contaminants. And
right away, she learned from this federal agency that other areas of the country
were also reporting anomalous levels of this pollutant. Utah's problem “suddenly
became nationally relevant,” she says.
Earlier this year, McNaughton developed a “health consultation” letter about DCA
which is now on her agency’s website. It describes the pollutant’s health risks,
she says, “and the fact that both the estimated and measured indoor
concentrations that have been found exceed the cancer-risk evaluation guide.”
Her letter has since been circulated to environmental-health directors in all 50
states.
A related brochure for consumers synthesizes this information.
It's important to keep in mind, McNaughton notes, that many decorative products
are made from the same material that's in those ornaments, “so it's not just a
holiday phenomenon.” Her agency is now looking for funding to begin testing a
range of other objects in homes that may pose a similar risk. “This is something
that’s definitely going to affect a lot of people,” she predicts.
Is the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission aware of DCA-emitting goods?
“Definitely,” McNaughton says. “They have assigned a case investigator to it.”
And that’s a good thing. “I’ve received a fair amount of calls from other
states,” she notes. Like from Colorado, where indoor-air surveys have turned up
rising numbers of homes with detectable DCA since 1997 – and increasing
concentrations of the contaminant within affected homes.