Toxins
Hexavalent chromium (aka Chromium-6 )
Chromium is a lustrous, brittle, hard metal. Its colour is silver-grey and it can be highly polished. It does not tarnish in air, when heated it burns and forms the green chromic oxide. Chromium is unstable in oxygen, it immediately produces a thin oxide layer that is impermeable to oxygen and protects the metal below.
The most common forms of chromium in the environment are trivalent chromium (chromium-3), hexavalent chromium (chromium-6) and the metal form of chromium (chromium-0).
Hexavalent chromium occurs naturally but it is usually produced by industrial process.
It can easily gain electrons from other elements, meaning that it can easily react with them. This ability to react can produce hard coatings.
However, its ease of reaction with other elements is the main reason why hexavalent chromium is considered a major health hazard.
With that spill at the electro-plating facility in Michigan, a lot of people are talking about Chromium-6.
Federal Toxmap Shutters, Raising the Ire of Pollution Researchers
Fifteen years ago, the U.S. National Library of Medicine launched Toxmap, a free, interactive online application that combines pollution data from at least a dozen U.S. government sources. A Toxmap user could pan and zoom across a map of the United States sprinkled with thousands of blue and red dots, with each blue dot representing a factory, coal-fired power plant, or other facility that has released certain toxic chemicals into the environment, and each red dot marking a Superfund program site — “some of the nation’s most contaminated land,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Toxmap allowed users to pull up detailed EPA data for each toxic release site, and to overlay other information, such as mortality statistics, onto those maps. And it’s precisely those capabilities that earned Toxmap a devoted following among researchers, students, activists, and other people keen to identify sources of pollution in their communities.
Those capabilities appear to no longer be available to the public.
A Swamp of Chemicals
Yesterday I was thinking about that article I posted about PFOAs being found in rain water … 💦
We really live in a swamp of man-made chemicals, toxic or otherwise. It literally rains all kinds of noxious things out in sky, we breathe them in, we eat it in our food. Most of the chemicals are at very low levels, but they’re everywhere. Now we shouldn’t be afraid, but we should be asking manufacturers to use a little bit more precaution because once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t put him back in right away. I think it’s kind of silly for individuals to take excessive steps to avoid exposure to chemicals, as they’re everywhere and you can’t avoid them, but we should be asking more of industry to do better.
The Man Who Harmed the World the Most
‘Forever chemical’ found in drinking water serving 7.5 million people in California – New York Daily News
A nonprofit environmental organization reported it found evidence of a potentially harmful chemical in drinking water systems used by 7.5 million Californians. The review by the Environmental Working Group detected PFAS, a “forever chemical” that does not break down, in 74 different communities’ water.
Even “very low doses” of PFAS in drinking have been linked to health problems such as cancer and birth defects, the organization said. All of the tested water exceeded the safe level recommended for PFAS (one part per trillion) and nearly half of the samples had samples over 70 parts per trillion.
I suspect they will be finding PFAS in drinking water for a long time, and it will be all over. As they note, it doesn't really go away, it gets washed into drinking water from washing clothes and pans, it comes out of landfill lechate, and sewage treatment plants have no ability to remove it.