In recent weeks, Portlanders have locked their attention on air pollution from Bullseye Glass, but there are other potential health hazards far closer to home than the Southeast Portland factory. In fact, they're probably inside your home.
Last year, I participated in an experiment convened by U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) to test Oregonians' exposure to potentially hazardous synthetic chemicals in household products such as clothes and couches.
I then wrote about that experiment, and the wristband I wore that detected the presence of a host of synthetic chemicals in my surroundings, for WW.
Quick summary: There's a lot of unpronounceable stuff with shorthand names like PBDE 154 floating in the dust in my home—and yours as well, probably—and we know just enough about them to make you want to live permanently outdoors (if only your yard weren't covered in lead dust from the home demolition next door).
Next week, the U.S. Senate is poised to vote on a bill that was the underlying reason for the experiment—a 2016 overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 that was supposed to give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency powers to regulate and ban harmful substances. A 1991 Circuit Court ruling effectively undid the legislation by blocking the EPA's proposed asbestos ban on the grounds the agency hadn't appropriately balanced the benefit of banning the substance with the cost of getting rid of it.
Fast forward to this week when the new bill—H.R. 2576, or the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act—passed the U.S. House 403-12, moving it to the Senate. On Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) put a hold on the legislation, saying he needed more time to consider the bill, although the Senate approved a previous version of it in 2015. If approved, the bill would allow the EPA to regulate existing synthetic chemicals—and study new ones before they hit the market. The bill would assess a fee on industry to pay for the additional testing.
Just in time for this flutter of activity, the Environmental Defense Fund, working with Merkley to organize the wristband experiment, released new results this week in the analysis of the synthetic chemicals detected by my bracelet last year.
Those results showed the presence of additional flame retardants (probably in my home, and perhaps in my pre-Facebook-era couch) that were voluntarily phased out of the marketplace in the mid-2000s, although the federal government considers PBDEs "not classifiable as to human carcinogenicity due to the lack of human and animal cancer studies."
These kinds of flame retardants aren't bound into the foam in people's old couches. It's mixed in. So every time you flop down on your couch, you may be sending out dust clouds of toxic chemicals, especially if there's a tear in the cushion covers (as there is in mine at home). When that dust gets on your hands and you eat dinner without washing them, you may be eating PBDEs along with your MSG.
Getting rid of the PBDEs isn't as simple as chucking your couch. "You can't trace them to one use," says Sarah Vogel of the Environmental Defense Fund. "There are so many different applications. They've been poured into just about everything that has foam."
(However, if you want to test your cushions at home, there's a free study run by Duke University that accepts samples from U.S. residents.)
Also in my home (or elsewhere in my daily life) was a flame retardant called TPP—a component of Firemaster 550 that was the subject of a Chicago Tribune investigation in 2012 that showed "exposing rats to high doses of Firemaster 550 can lower birth weight, alter female genitalia and cause skeletal malformations such as fused ribs and vertebrae."
Furniture makers such as the one with giant blue and yellow signs and warmed-over meatballs have taken note of consumers' concern. Many places now sell couches that indicate they contain no added chemical flame retardants.
Based on his Senate floor testimony, it seems Rand Paul has plans this Memorial Day weekend to read the bill's 180 pages.
I'll see you in the furniture aisle.
Willamette Week