Common Cleaning Chemicals Make Breathing Harder

Common Cleaning Chemicals Make Breathing Harder
A small study finds indoor air pollution from everyday products impairs breathing in older people.
By Leah Zerbe LINK TO FULL ARTICLE BELOW

Snuff out paraffin candles for good; instead, use beeswax or soy. And use white vinegar instead of harsh cleaners.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns that thousands of common household items, including many cleaners, candes, paints, glues, printer ink, pesticides, and vinyl flooring, are releasing volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, into your indoor air, posing a number of health problems. And a new study looking at the effects on the elderly suggests these irritating chemicals are actually decreasing their ability to breathe, worsening living conditions for those with heart disease or lung ailments.

THE DETAILS: The small study looked at 154 people 60 years old or older who lived at home but spent their days at senior centers. The participants performed up to eight spirometric tests, designed to measure the amount and force with which people exhale and inhale. The tests are commonly used in evaluating asthma and other lung diseases.

Researchers also used urine samples to detect levels of VOC breakdown substances—chemicals indicating the presence of VOCs in the body—and tested for oxidative stress markers that indicate cellular damage. They found that when metabolites of the VOCs toluene and xylene were present, there were significant decreases in lung functioning and increases in oxidative stress, which can damage cells, tissues, and organs. The authors conclude that toluene and xylene create a harmful effect on lung function by worsening oxidative stress in elderly people.

WHAT IT MEANS: Many studies focus on the harmful effects of VOCs in occupational settings, but this is one of the first looking at health effects of VOC exposure during everyday living. And while the researchers only looked at older adults, there are good reasons for all of us to keep products that contain VOCs out of our homes. According to the EPA, the health effects associated with VOC exposure can vary greatly depending on the compound. Some short-term effects include asthma attacks, allergic skin reactions, dizziness, and headaches. There hasn't been much research looking at long-term effects of VOC exposure in the home setting.

Here's how to cut indoor air pollution in your home, no matter what your age.

• Don't let your paint leave you panting. Finding low- or no-VOC paint is easier than ever, with different brands available at many local hardware stores and national chains. So choose these options over regular paint. But always remember to ventilate while painting, no matter what type of paint you use.

• Can scented candles. Last year at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting, University of South Carolina State researchers unveiled new research that found burning petroleum, or paraffin, candles (the most common kind) emitted carcinogenic chemicals like the VOC toluene and the carcinogen benzene, the same pollution that comes out of tailpipes. On the flip side, soy-based candles did not.

Please read the full article:
http://www.rodale.com/improve-indoor-air-quality?cm_mmc=DailyNewsNL-_-2010_04_13-_-Top5-_-NA


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Toxic Coal Ash Stored in 32 States a "Risk to Human Health and the Environment"

Toxic Coal Ash Stored in 32 States a ‘Risk to Human Health and the Environment’
by www.SixWise.com

http://www.sixwise.com/Newsletters/2009/January/28/Toxic-Coal-Ash-Stored-in-32-States.htm?source=nl

Coal ash is a byproduct of coal-fired power plants. The waste, which is a mixture of noncombustible ingredients of coal and the ash trapped by equipment designed to reduce air pollution from the plants, has become an increasing burden as electricity needs have increased, as have the regulations restricting emissions from power plants.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, the Associated Press found that 721 power plants produced nearly 96 million tons of coal ash. Some of the waste was transferred to landfills while another portion was sold for use in concrete, but about 20 percent of this, or close to 20 million tons, was put into surface ponds.

What are Coal Ash Ponds, and What’s All the Concern About?

Some 300 ponds for coal ash exist in 32 states around the nation, with Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia and Alabama storing the most. These ponds are subject to very little regulation, despite the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) saying eight years ago that it wanted to set up national standards to do so. Because the EPA has not yet addressed the issue, the ponds are subject to less regulation than landfills that accept household garbage.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the New York Times. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

The regulations that do exist vary by state, and most of the ponds have no liners and no monitors in place to ensure that the toxins held within do not leak into underground aquifers. Already, leaks and ruptures in several states have contaminated surrounding land and water supplies, and the EPA has suggested that contamination may be more widespread than is realized due to lack of monitoring and poor state records.

As of 2007, there were 24 cases of water pollution linked to coal ash ponds or landfills, spread throughout 13 states, and another 43 cases where coal ash was the likely cause of the pollution.

Most recently, in December 2008 a coal ash pond in East Tennessee ruptured, spewing a billion gallons of the toxic waste over 300 acres of land.

Just what types of risks are involved here? Coal ash is a concentrated source of arsenic, lead, mercury and many other contaminants. It is also radioactive. Not surprisingly, according to the EPA the wastes "have the potential to present danger to human health and the environment."

Also according to the EPA, coal ash poses an increased risk of cancer when metals from the ponds leach into drinking water sources. It’s also been linked to birth defects, and tadpoles and certain fish species have also suffered deformities as a result of coal ash leaks and spills.

As for when regulations may be enacted to help clean things up, it doesn’t appear to be anytime soon.

“We’re still working on coming up with those standards,” Matthew Hale, director of the office of solid waste at the EPA, told the New York Times. “We don’t have a schedule at this point.”

A Simple Solution to Protect Your Family’s Water

Whether or not you’re in the vicinity of a coal ash pond or any other toxic waste area, it’s a good idea to make sure that your family’s drinking water is safe.

According to the EPA, consuming contaminated tap water over time that contains excessive levels of chemicals (such as disinfection by-products, solvents, and pesticides), radionuclides (such as radium), and minerals (such as arsenic) can lead to chronic health effects such as cancer, liver or kidney problems, or reproductive difficulties.

To put your mind at ease and get safe, superior quality water from your own kitchen, Sixwise.com highly recommends The Wellness Kitchen Water Filter. It reduces chlorine, chloramines, cysts, VOCs, pesticides, and herbicides below detectable levels for the life of the filter.

The Wellness Kitchen combines the best filtration and enhancement technologies to deliver the purest and most natural tasting water available. It effectively reduces harmful contaminants, while at the same time enhancing the water with adding important yet delicate wellness "ions and minerals" that your body needs.

Your health is simply too important to gamble with, and that’s why we at Sixwise.com believe you’re better off safe than sorry. If you choose not to filter your family’s water, we highly recommend getting a sample independently tested so you can be sure it’s safe for you to drink.

Toxic Dryer Sheets & Cleaning Supplies

Toxic Dryer Sheets & Cleaning Supplies
Saturday, March 29, 2008

http://www.thenatureinus.com/2008/03/toxic-dryer-sheets-cleaning-supplies.html

When I was reading about information on what to leave out for birds to build their nests, the information specifically stated NOT to use dryer sheets. I wondered why. This is what I found. You can easily see why they could kill baby birds ... but what about our babies? Nobody needs to be using clothes and towels coated with these chemicals.

* Benzyl Acetate: Linked to pancreatic cancer

* Benzyl Alcohol: Upper respiratory tract irritant

* Ethanol: On the EPA's Hazardous Waste list and capable of causing central nervous system disorders

* A-Terpineol: Can cause respiratory problems, including fatal edema, and central nervous system damage

* Ethyl Acetate: A narcotic on the EPA's Hazardous Waste list

* Camphor: Causes central nervous system disorders

* Chloroform: Neurotoxin, anesthetic and carcinogen

* Linalool: A narcotic that causes central nervous system disorders

* Pentane: A chemical known to be harmful if inhaled

Even the liquid fabric softeners are filled with the same and similar chemicals. Our skin absorbs these things, especially when we sweat and our pores are wide open. Throw them away and use vinegar in your rinse cycle. I pour it where the fabric softener goes. It's been working for me for 20 years.

Bush's Parting Shots at the Environment are Major

Bush's Parting Shots at the Environment Are Major
By Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor
November 12, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/106444
http://www.alternet.org/water/106444/
http://www.alternet.org/story/106444/

[Read comments:
http://www.alternet.org/water/106444/#comments ]

The changes seem minor: clarifications of regulations, revisions to rules, updated land-management proposals.

But some recent proposals from the Interior Department - many likely to be finalized in the waning months of the Bush administration and pushed through with a shortened comment period - are seen by critics as an assault on America's environmental resources and an attempt to solidify industry-friendly policy.

The proposals include changes to the Endangered Species Act, new management plans for 11 million acres in Utah, an effort to revoke congressional committees' emergency powers to protect public lands, and a rule change for mountaintop mining regulations.

The Interior Department says the changes are common-sense ones that balance the needs of conservation with those of national energy policy. Environmentalists counter that the actions represent the final efforts of an administration that has been hostile to the environment since Day 1.

"Overall, it certainly is consistent with the approach this administration has taken for the past eight years," says Sharon Buccino, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's land program. "It's one final push before they go out the door to really open up public resources for private and industry gain."

Mr. Bush is not the first lame-duck president to change environmental rules. Bill Clinton, in the last few days of his presidency, pushed through regulations to protect vast areas of the West.

The proposals include the following:

A change to the Endangered Species Act to disallow the ESA from being used to regulate global climate change even if a species, like the polar bear, is suffering as a result of it. The change also reduces the number of scientific reviews of projects performed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Six new resource management plans for 11 million acres of federal land in Utah that critics say would open more roads and trails, make nearly 9 million acres available for oil and gas development, and reduce the areas managed primarily for environmental value. Five of the plans were finished on Friday.

A rule change eliminating one of the few regulations governing mountaintop mining, a common practice in Appalachia in which a mountain's top is blown off to get access to the rich coal beds beneath. Currently, a largely ignored "buffer zone" rule bars mining companies from dumping debris within 100 feet of any stream. The new rule would require them to either avoid the buffer zone or show why that is not possible, and to minimize harming the streams "to the extent possible" if they must dump there.

A proposal to remove an "emergency powers" provision that allows the Interior Department or two congressional committees to protect public lands. The rule gained prominence this summer when the House Natural Resources Committee declared 1 million acres next to the Grand Canyon off limits to uranium mining.

These proposals have been portrayed incorrectly, says Chris Paolino, a spokesman for the Interior Department.

The proposed changes to the ESA, Mr. Paolino says, would clarify the Interior secretary's belief that the ESA is not the right mechanism for regulating climate change. "Science at this point cannot make the link between the specific greenhouse-gas emissions from, say, Kansas, and link it to the effect on a subset of polar bears or an individual polar bear in the Arctic region," he says. As for the reduced number of federal scientific reviews of projects, he believes it will allow the Fish & Wildlife scientists to give more time to projects that are more likely to affect listed species.

Environmental groups counter that allowing different agencies to determine whether a project needs independent scientific review hasn't worked in the past and could lead to a scattershot approach in which potential hazards to species are overlooked. "They won't have good sense of the cumulative impacts if they're not tracking projects across species and agencies," says Noah Greenwald, science director for the Center for Biodiversity in Tucson, Ariz.

As for the ESA's role in climate change, Mr. Greenwald argues that it provides a focus for assessing the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions. He notes that even in the past, when the ESA was used to regulate DDT because of its impact on the bald eagle, officials did not tie one use of DDT to the death of one particular eagle.

Some of the harshest criticism is reserved for the land-management proposals in Utah and the easing of restrictions on drilling and oil-shale exploration, in part because they would be difficult for a future administration to overturn.

"Defaulting to providing more and more routes for oil and gas and more land for oil and gas development effectively prohibits other uses of these lands," says Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. Encouraging oil-shale development and geothermal leasing, and creating new "energy corridors" in the West, could lead to an "industrialization of the landscape," she adds.

The Bureau of Land Management, for its part, says most of the lands were already open to potential drilling and off-road vehicles. The new plans would get rid of some of the unrestricted vehicle use, they say, and put designated routes in play. "There seems to be a perception ... that these plans would throw open vast new acreage to development and use," says Don Ogaard, planning lead for Utah's BLM. "The land is open to that use now."

Amanda Paulson is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Rich World Behind Much of Global Pollution

Rich world behind much of global pollution
By Timothy Gardner
Wed Oct 22, 2008

http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-36084620081021
http://in.reuters.com/articlePrint?articleId=INIndia-36084620081021

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rich countries are partly responsible for pollution from poor ones, including poisonous mining discharge, because they buy many of the raw materials and goods that produce the waste, environmental groups said.

"In our part of the world, these problems have been fixed for the most part," said Richard Fuller, founder of the New York-based Blacksmith Institute, which has compiled a database of 600 of the world's worst polluted places.

"We have exported our industry overseas and yet there's no pollution controls in these places or the pollution controls are terribly inadequate."

Blacksmith and Green Cross Switzerland, which works to clean up contamination from industrial and military disasters, released a report on Tuesday called "The World's Worst Polluted Places" -- available at www.worstpolluted.org.

It found that artisanal gold mining, contaminated surface water, radioactive waste processing and uranium mining and the recycling of used lead acid batteries, most of which occur in poor countries from Africa to Asia, are some of the world's top 10 sources of pollution dangerous to human health.

Millions of people are poisoned or killed each year by industrial pollution and emissions, it said.

To be sure, the developing world is also rife with problems that are not caused by the processing or manufacture of goods used in rich countries.

Indoor air pollution from cooking fires, which occurs mostly in Africa, is one key example, the report said. And many of the products made or processed in rapidly developing countries, such as China and India, are used domestically.

Still, children in developing countries are hit by pollution from many of the industries that make or process things used mostly by rich countries, including metals smelting and processing, lead battery recycling and the industrial mining of both common and precious materials, it said.

Children are more vulnerable to disease from toxic pollution than adults.

Rich countries should help mop up pollution sources not only because they are the world's largest consumers but because some pollution can travel over oceans through the atmosphere, eventually reaching consumers throughout the world.

"Mercury from artisanal gold mining can end up in tuna that we end up eating, poisoning our own children," Fuller said.

Blacksmith and Green Cross Switzerland helped launch the Health and Pollution Fund last year with representatives from the United States, Germany, China, Russia and other countries.

The planned $400 million fund will be dedicated to cleaning up toxic hotspots in developing countries. Fuller said. Blacksmith is trying to work with the U.S. Department of Treasury to help with clean-ups.

POP Goes the National Diabetes Rate

POP Goes the National Diabetes Rate
By the Inkslinger
October 6, 2008

http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/blog/pop-goes-national-diabetes-rate?source=email&utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=READ+MORE+&utm_content=fidyl%40yahoo.com&utm_campaign=7Gen+-+October+8%2C+2008+-+Non-Nation

We've all heard the news: type 2 diabetes is epidemic and the situation is going from bad to catastrophic with some 24 million people, or about 8% of the U.S. population, diagnosed as diabetic and, according to CDC estimates, another 57 million suffering from the blood sugar changes that precede the disease. Suddenly, a huge swath of our population has developed or is at risk of developing this dangerous condition. What's going on?

The conventional wisdom says too many Americans simply have a lousy diet oversaturated with fats and sugars that combine in the body to promote the obesity that causes the insulin resistance that triggers type 2 diabetes. But some new research says maybe the cause is chemicals in the environment.

At issue are Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPS, which are carbon-based chemicals (often containing chlorine) that resist biodegradation and build up in the environment and inside people, too. It's a complicated medical detective tale, but here's the Cliff Notes version: Our bodies manufacture an enzyme called GGT that scientists have learned is a strong indicator of diabetes. The higher your GGT levels, the more likely you are to be diabetic. Researchers have also discovered that GGT plays a big role in clearing POPs out of our cells. Putting two and two together, they wondered: Is GGT simply a marker for the true cause of this epidemic and are POPs the real culprit where diabetes is concerned?

The preliminary answer is yes. Because when this theory was explored, scientists found that people with the highest levels of POPs were found to have a rate of diabetes 38 times that of those with the lowest levels. And weight had nothing to do with it. Skinny people with high levels of POPs were likely to be diabetic. Obese people with low levels of POPs were not.

No one really knows what's going on yet, but I believe in a few years this is going to be a major story. (Keep your eyes on it.) Think of this research as the first distant rumble of scientific thunder. If the storm builds, it could be the straw that breaks the camel's back where our chemically-dependent lifestyles are concerned.