Toxins

The Poisoned Generation

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The Poisoned Generation

Inside the apartment, her boys were insulated from the crossfire outside. But like thousands of others seeking shelter behind the peeling walls muffling the bubbling bass dripping from Crown Vic speakers, the poison of lead would find a way into her sons’ bodies all the same. Ryan and Ronnie, along with thousands of other poor children in New Orleans whose parents believed they could shelter their children from the violence outside, would become an entire poisoned generation.

Lead was only one of many ecological risks her family faced. The playgrounds where Ryan and Ronnie played often brimmed with pools of fetid, standing water—owing to New Orleans’s fabled and constant flooding—that were sometimes tainted with battery acid. Billieson had heard tell about the regurgitated sewage and chemical waste from Louisiana’s booming petrochemical operations that flowed back into dirt common spaces where her children learned to walk, all while they breathed in the emissions from the nearby roads and highways.

Department of Defense Illegally Burning Stockpiles of Toxic “Forever Chemicals” | Earthjustice

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Department of Defense Illegally Burning Stockpiles of Toxic “Forever Chemicals” | Earthjustice

New York, NY — Today, environmental and community groups sued the Department of Defense (DOD) over its contracts to burn millions of gallons of unused firefighting foam containing PFAS in incinerators across the country. The DOD is the nation’s largest user of firefighting foam containing PFAS, a class of highly persistent and toxic chemicals that are known to cause cancer, liver disease, infertility, and other serious health effects.

According to government documents Earthjustice obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests, PFAS burning already took place, or is taking place, in the towns of East Liverpool, Ohio; Arkadelphia and El Dorado, Arkansas; and Cohoes, New York. The contracts also authorize PFAS incineration in other locations, including Port Arthur, Texas, and Sauget, Illinois. Incineration may already be underway in those and other locations, too, but DOD has not fully responded to FOIA requests seeking a full list of incineration locations.

I guess it's not a problem if the fire is hot enough to fully break up the carbon chains, but it's good to ask questions and not trust the government at it's word, because it doesn't always do the right thing.

Great Lakes microplastics may increase risk of PFAS contaminants in food web – Great Lakes Now

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Chemical Hitchhikers: Great Lakes microplastics may increase risk of PFAS contaminants in food web – Great Lakes Now

Lab-based studies show that when both contaminants are in water, PFAS will stick to the surface of microplastics. John Scott, an analytical chemist at the University of Illinois, wondered if the same thing happens in a real lake.

“I haven’t seen anybody else look at this in the natural environment,” he said.

Scott’s study showed that not only does it happen, the effect is magnified. More PFAS sticks to microplastics in lake water than in the lab, where researchers use simulated lake water. This simulated water is deionized water to which researchers have added the calcium, sodium and chloride that would normally be found in lake water. But unlike real lake water, it does not include organic matter and polluting compounds.

These unregulated, potentially dangerous chemicals are probably already in your bloodstream

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These unregulated, potentially dangerous chemicals are probably already in your bloodstream

A PFAS molecule consists of a chain of carbons with fluorine atoms attached, with some additional specialized atom group thrown in for flavor, called functional groups. There are many iterations of this structure, but they all fall under the PFASs family umbrella because they heavily rely on the carbon-fluorine (C-F) bond.

The C-F bond is one of the strongest bonds in chemistry, and it renders powerless an arsenal of chemical and environmental mechanisms that degrade other pollutants. The basic PFAS structure is so stable that many degradable versions of PFASs, with fewer C-F bonds, get together in the environment to re-form structures with more C-F bonds, making them more stable — and much more toxic. It’s like the chemical equivalent of Gremlins, as “friendly” molecules turn ugly under the right conditions.

This characteristic structure also makes PFASs two-faced: The carbon chain doesn’t like to associate with water, but various functional groups are quite chummy with it. This means that PFASs are both water and oil repellant, an extremely valuable quality that has made them extremely popular in consumer, industrial, and military applications.