Protecting Children from Toxic Waste: Data-Usability Evaluation Can Deter Flawed Cleanup

Does Hazardous-Waste Testing Follow Technical Guidance, Thus Help Protect Environmental Justice and Health?

Does representative hazardous-waste-site testing tend to follow or to violate government technical guidance? This is an important question, because following such guidance promotes reliable risk analysis, adequate remediation, and environmental-justice and -health protection. Yet only government documents typically address this question, usually only when it is too late, when citizens have already exhibited health harm, allegedly from living or working near current/former hazardous-waste sites. Because no systematic, representative, scientific analyses have answered the preceding question, this article begins to investigate it by posing a narrower part of the question: Does representative US testing of volatile-organic-compound (VOC) waste sites tend to follow or to violate government technical requirements? The article (i) outlines US/state-government technical guidance for VOC testing; (ii) develops criteria for discovering representative US cases of VOC testing; (iii) uses the dominant US Environmental Protection Agency method to assess whether these representative cases follow such guidance; (iv) employs the results of (iii) to begin to answer the preceding question; then (v) discusses the degree to which, if any, these results suggest threats to environmental health or justice. Our initial, but representative, results show that almost all US VOC-waste-site testing (that we investigated) violates government technical requirements and systematically underestimates risks, and this may help justify less expensive, potentially health-threatening cleanups, mostly in environmental justice communities. We outline needed future research and suggest two strategies to promote following government technical guidance for hazardous-waste testing.

Hepatotoxic effects of melamine exposure from the weaning period in rats: a flow cytometric, electron microscopic, and histopathologic study

This study aims to investigate the effects of melamine exposure from the weaning period (21st postnatal days in rats) on liver tissue. Female Wistar albino rats (n = 18) were divided into three groups. About 0.1-ml saline was applied to the control group by gavage for 21 days from the postnatal 21st day. The second group was taken 50-mg/kg melamine (in 0.1-ml saline) and the third group was taken 75-mg/kg melamine (in 0.1-ml saline) p.o. On the postnatal 45th day, all rats were sacrificed under anesthesia. Then, liver tissues were cut into three parts and two of them placed in neutral formalin for histopathological and flow cytometric analysis, and one of them placed in 2.5% glutaraldehyde. Histopathological analysis was performed with hematoxylin & eosin, Masson trichrome, periodic acid Schiff stained sections, and also with transmission electron microscopy. Apoptosis (Annexin V positivity) was analyzed by flow cytometry. According to histopathological analysis, hepatocyte damage, sinusoidal dilatation, and inflammatory cell infiltration significantly increased in both melamine groups compared with the control group. Apoptosis significantly increased in the 50 and 75-mg melamine groups compared with the control group. In the results of transmission electron microscopy analysis, there was abnormal chromatin distribution in the hepatocyte nuclei, loss in the cristae of the mitochondria, and organelle loss in large areas in the cytoplasm in both melamine exposure groups. As result, melamine exposure from the weaning period causes liver damage with increasing doses.

Health Misinformation about Toxic-Site Harm: The Case for Independent-Party Testing to Confirm Safety

Health misinformation can cause harm if regulators or private remediators falsely claim that a hazardous facility is safe. This misinformation especially threatens the health of children, minorities, and poor people, disproportionate numbers of whom live near toxic facilities. Yet, perhaps because of financial incentives, private remediators may use safety misinformation to justify reduced cleanup. Such incentives exist in nations like the United States, where most toxic-site testing/remediation is semi-privatized or voluntary, conducted by private parties, commercial redevelopers, who can increase profits by underestimating health harm, thus decreasing required testing/remediation. Our objective is to begin to determine whether or not interested parties misrepresent health harm (at hazardous facilities that they test/remediate/redevelop) when they use traditional and social media to claim that these sites are safe. Our hypothesis is that, contrary to the safety claims of the world’s largest commercial developer, Coldwell Banker Real Estate/Trammell Crow (CBRE/TCC), the authors’ screening assessment, especially its lab-certified, toxic-site, indoor-air tests, show violations of all three prominent government, cancer-safety benchmarks. If so, these facilities require additional testing/remediation, likely put site renters at risk, and may reveal problems with privatized hazardous cleanup. To our knowledge, we provide the first independent tests of privatized, toxic-site assessments before cancer reports occur. Our screening assessment of this hypothesis tests indoor air in rental units on a prominent former weapons-testing site (the US Naval Ordnance Testing Station, Pasadena, California (NOTSPA) that is subject to carcinogenic vapor intrusion by volatile organic compounds, VOCs), then compares test results to the redeveloper’s site-safety claims, made to government officials and citizens through traditional and social media. Although NOTSPA toxic soil-gas concentrations are up to nearly a million times above allowed levels, and indoor air was never tested until now, both the regulator and the remediator (CBRE/TCC) have repeatedly claimed on social media that “the site is safe at this time.” We used mainly Method TO-17 and two-week sampling with passive, sorbent tubes to assess indoor-air VOCs. Our results show that VOC levels at every location sampled—all in occupied site-rental units—violate all three government-mandated safety benchmarks: environmental screening levels (ESLs), No Significant Risk Levels (NSRLs), and inhalation risks based on the Inhalation Unit Risk (IUR); some violations are two orders of magnitude above multiple safety benchmarks. These results support our hypothesis and suggest a need for independent assessment of privatized cleanups and media-enhanced safety claims about them. If our results can be replicated at other sites, then preventing health misinformation and toxic-facility safety threats may require new strategies, one of which we outline.