Tag: chemistry

Deodorant Maker Fouls the Air

  • Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) come out of our vehicle tailpipes, out of smokestacks, and they’re in a lot of every day products. (Photo courtesy of NinaHale CC-2.0)

The makers of a popular deodorant body spray have been fined more than a million dollars for polluting the air in California. Julie Grant reports it’s part of an increased effort to reduce air pollution.

Transcript

The makers of a popular deodorant body spray have been fined more than a million dollars for polluting the air in California. Julie Grant reports it’s part of an increased effort to reduce air pollution.

The makers of Axe body spray – popular among teenage boys – have been fined for causing environmental problems in California. Dimitri Stanich is spokesman for the California Air Resouces Board. He says California has specific low limits on how much air pollution can come from consumer products.

And if they get a tip that a product is over the limit – they head to the pharmacy.

“THE AIR RESOURCES BOARD HAS ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS THAT WILL BUY PRODUCTS OFF THE SHELF AND THEN TAKE IT BACK TO THE LAB IN SACRAMENTO. TECHNICIANS THEN WILL PIERCE THE CANISTER AND DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF VOCS IN THERE.”

VOCs – that’s short for volatile organic compounds. VOCs come out of our vehicle tailpipes, out of smokestacks. And they’re in a lot of every day products: some aerosol sprays, most paints, even some cosmetics. Stanich says there are lots of reasons a manufacturer might use a volatile organic compound. In a product like Axe, he says the VOCs make it spray better.

“MOST OF OFTEN IT IS PART OF THE PROPELLENT USED TO FORCE THE PRODUCT OUT OF THE CANISTER AND INTO THE PRACTICAL PURPOSE THAT THE CONSUMER IS USING IT.”

And once those VOCs hit the air – from deodorants, tailpipes and smokestacks – they mix with the heat of the sun – and create ground level ozone. Pollution.

The multinational corporation, Unilever, owns the Axe brand. Stanich says that between 2006 and 2008, Unilever’s parent company, Conopco, sold more than 2.8 million units of Axe spray that failed to meet California’s clean air standards.

The state has fined Conopco 1.3 million dollars.

It’s all kind of a bummer. At least for some teenage girls.

Katie Schombeck and Julia Rombach say the boys locker room reeks of Axe. And they love it.

“YOU SMELL IT AND YOU’RE LIKE DRAWN TO IT, IT SMELLS SO GOOD.”

“I DO THAT ALL THE TIME. I REMEMBER HANGING OUT WITH GUYS, AND LIKE IF THEY SMELL GOOD I’LL BE LIKE ‘HEY COME HERE FOR A MINUTE’ AND SMELL THEIR SHOULDER AND BE LIKE ‘YOU SMELL GOOD.’”

“I’LL GIVE THEM A BIG HUG, JUST BECAUSE THEY SMELL GOOD.”

But these 16 years olds didn’t realize body spray could be bad for air quality.

“BUT IT NEVER REALLY DAWNED ON ME THAT AXE…I DON’T KNOW, YOU DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT THAT.”

Compared to all those cars and trucks and smokestacks – it doesn’t seem like a little deodorant spray could cause that much of a problem. But Dimitri Stanich with the California Air Resources Board says all those little bits add up.

“WE SPRAY A LITTLE PERFUME HERE, WE SPRAY A LITTLE DEODORANT THERE, SOME WD-40 ON THE VEHICLES WE’RE WORKING ON. THE LIST GOES ON. EVERYTHING THAT’S A CONSUMER PRODUCT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CONTRIBUTE TO OZONE.”

Stanich says on peak ozone days, people have a harder time breathing, especially those with asthma.

California has a particularly bad ozone problem in its cities – and also has tougher clean air rules than most of the country.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to tighten federal air quality standards – to reduce ozone pollution everywhere else.

Julian Marshall is professor of environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota.
He says most health officials support tougher air standards.

But there are lots of ways to reduce exposure in your own home:

“BUYING LIMITED QUANTITIES OF PRODUCTS THAT EMIT VOCS, OR BUYING LOW VOC PRODUCTS. WHEN YOU GO TO BUY PAINTS FOR EXAMPLE THERE ARE LOW VOC PAINTS.”

To reduce exposure, Marshall says get rid of old chemicals and those you don’t need.

In the meantime, California officials say Unilever has corrected the problems with Axe – and reduced the emissions from its spray can. Making a lot of teenage boys – and some of their girl – friends happy.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Using Rust to Remove Arsenic From Water

  • Scientists have been using tiny particles of rust to draw arsenic out of water (Source: Roger McLassus at Wikimedia Commons)

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of drinking water has arsenic in it. It’s a problem all over the globe, especially when drinking water comes from deep under the ground. Julie Grant reports that some researchers are using tiny particles – at the nano-scale – and plain old rust, to remove arsenic from the water:

Transcript

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of drinking water has arsenic in it. It’s a problem all over the globe, especially when drinking water comes from deep under the ground. Julie Grant reports that some researchers are using tiny particles – at the nano-scale – and plain old rust, to remove arsenic from the water:

You can’t see, smell, or taste arsenic – but prolonged exposure to it can lead to skin discoloration and even cancer.

Vicki Colvin studies chemistry and nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston.

She says arsenic has a chemical bond with rust – and sticks to it. So they’ve been using tiny particles of rust to draw arsenic out of water in the lab.

Now Colvin says they’re working with a city in Mexico. They’re trying to make what they call nano-rust in the field, so the city can cheaply remove arsenic from its water.

“So, we’ve developed procedures and processes that help people make nano-rust not at a major university with a nanotechnology facilty. But you know literally in a restaurant setting, more maybe in a ceramics factory.”

Colvin says they will be experimenting in Mexico over the next two years.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Autos Part 2: Carmakers Slow to Adopt New Battery

  • The powertrain of the Chevy Volt. This concept image shows the lithium ion battery pack running down the center of the vehicle. (Image courtesy of GM)

Car companies are making plenty of promises these days about future
cars that will save you gas. To make them happen,
automakers are counting on a new kind of battery. They’re called lithium ion
batteries. These batteries could bring about a revolution in automobiles.
In the second part of a two-part series on green cars, Dustin Dwyer reports it could take a while for the revolution to get
here:

Transcript

Car companies are making plenty of promises these days about future
cars that will save you gas. To make them happen,
automakers are counting on a new kind of battery. They’re called lithium ion
batteries. These batteries could bring about a revolution in automobiles.
In the second part of a two-part series on green cars, Dustin Dwyer reports it could take a while for the revolution to get
here:


Lithium ion sounds like a complicated term. And you don’t necessarily need to know
what it means. But it might help to know that you already use lithium ion batteries every
day:


“It’s being used now in video cameras, personal phones, it’s in iPods, it’s in a lot of small
electronics and in, of course, laptop computers.”


That’s Jim Hall. He’s a consultant to the auto industry. His company is called 2953
Analytics. Hall’s had some experience working on battery powered cars. He says lithium
ion batteries are attractive because they can store a lot more power than the batteries in
today’s hybrid vehicles, and Hall says in the race to get lithium ion batteries into cars,
there are two leading companies: General Motors and Toyota.


They have different approaches to getting the batteries ready, but they both depend on
contractors outside the company to figure out the complicated chemistry. Hall says the
problem is right now, they need a breakthrough:


“And the breakthrough could come from an entirely different source. It could be from
another company that neither company is dealing with. It could. That’s the thing with
breakthroughs. You can’t predict how and when they happen.”


As we mentioned, battery engineers have already invented ways to make lithium ion
work in small things like cell phones, laptops and power drills. But it’s not as easy to
make the batteries work for something big, like a car.


Hall says one problem is cost. Lithium ion batteries are expensive. Another problem is
heat. The more energy you store in a lithium ion battery, the better the chances that the
battery could become unstable. If it becomes too hot, the battery could explode. That’s
already been a problem in some laptops.


Bob Lutz is the Vice Chairman of General Motors. He says his company has already
solved the heat problem with lithium ion batteries by using a different chemistry than
what’s in laptops:


“We’ve cycled ’em in hot rooms, maximum discharge rate, and cut out the cooling system
to simulate a cooling system failure in the car, and we’ve had a temperature rise of maybe
eight degrees centigrade, I mean, just not enough to worry about.”


GM expects to put the batteries in test cars and start running them on roads late this
spring. The goal is a lithium ion powered hybrid car named the Chevy Volt. It will go
forty miles on battery power alone, before a gas engine has to kick in. Lutz says he has no
doubt that the Volt will be ready to go by mid-2010, but officially, GM has not
set a production date.


Toyota says it’s also shooting to have the technology ready by 2010. But no other
automaker will even mention a date for lithium ion batteries. Not Ford. Not Honda. Not
Chrysler. Chrysler President Tom Lasorda says there’s a reason for that:


“When you’re trying to predict when a technology is going to be ready for mass market,
it’s very tough. Because you don’t know what the surprises might be.”


In the next few years, you can expect auto executives to make a lot of references to
lithium ion batteries. And basically anyone you talk to in the industry says these
batteries are no doubt, the next big thing that will save you gas.


The question is when. When will lithium ion batteries actually be in your car? Maybe
2010. Maybe a lot later. No one can really say for sure.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

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Green Chemistry

  • Colin Horwitz is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon. He's working on a chemical that will break down pollution released by pulp and paper mills. (Photo by Reid Frazier)

Modern chemistry is everywhere – the paint on our walls, the ink on the morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers.
Problem is – the chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how chemicals are made:

Transcript

Modern chemistry is everywhere: the paint on our walls, the ink on the
morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers. Problem is – the
chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. The Environment
Report’s Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how
chemicals are made:


This room looks and sounds like a chemical lab anywhere in the world.
Trays full of vials sit atop machines with blinking lights. Notebooks
filled with hand-written numbers sit next to computer screens. But this
isn’t a typical chemistry lab.


Evan Beach is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. He works at the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, or
Green Ox. Beach is analyzing wastewater from a pulp and paper mill:


“We try and work with as close to the real pollution as we can. We
actually have the paper mill ship the stuff to us.”


Beach is working on a chemical that he hopes will clean up the
wastewater before it hits rivers and streams.


The Green Ox lab is run by Terry Collins. His career as a green chemist
started as a college student in his native New Zealand. He worked
during summers at a plant that made refrigerators. One summer, he
discovered that workers using a cleaning agent were all getting sick.


“Just in lunch with them I’d hear about their headaches and their blood
noses and I realized, my goodness, they’re using an awful lot of these
organic solvents, and if there’s any benzene there, these are signature
benzene intoxication conditions, early stage.”


Collins calculated the workers were getting slowly poisoned by benzene,
a chemical that’s known to cause cancer. He told company officials
about it and they promised to replace it.


“So I went a way, nine months later, I felt an obligation I went back
and checked they had made no change so I went and I got every paper I
could and I took it and dropped it on the chief chemist and I can still
remember his jaw hitting the floor when I opened the door and gave it
to him, I then tried to get the institute of chemistry to help and they
told me not to even bother going to the health department, that they
wouldn’t help, and they were probably right, and I just felt immensely
frustrated by the situation.”


After this experience, Collins decided to focus his research on
reducing the harm caused by modern chemicals. He started designing a
chemical catalyst in the 1980s. When combined with hydrogen peroxide,
the catalyst eats through long chains of harmful chemicals. It could
potentially clean up the paper, textile, and plastics industries. It
could also curb pollution found in almost every home in America: The
water coming out of your tap.


“If you have a glass of water in most American cities you get some
Prozac and you get many other things as well that come from the
pharmaceutical industry.”


The drugs can be found in trace amounts in tapwater. Their effect on
human health is still unknown. But these drugs are being flushed into
the environment and they don’t break down easily. Once they enter
rivers and streams, these chemicals can last for decades. Scientists
believe they might be affecting fertility in some animals. Collins and
his colleagues believe the catalyst they’re developing could break down
these drugs once they hit the environment.


Some believe all chemists should take a more holistic look at the
compounds they make. Sasha Ryabov is a physical chemist who works in
Collins’ lab. He worked as a traditional chemist at Moscow State
University in his native Russia. Ryabov converted to green chemistry
when he came to Green Ox. Since he’s made the switch, he thinks that
all chemists should consider themselves green:


“It’s not the future field… It’s a natural part that cannot be
separated. The green chemistry we are thinking should be part of
chemistry as a whole.”


While academics like Collins are forging new grounds in their field,
some big companies have started to follow suit by using more
environmentally-friendly products. One hitch is that the federal
government provides little funding for research in the field. A bill
before congress could boost funding for green chemistry. Regardless of
funding, Collins says all chemists must do their part to address some
of the problems their discipline has helped create:


“If you’re a chemist, and you have this information, it’s a burden to
carry. But we have to deal with it, we have no choice; we have to look
after the children of future generations.”


For the sake of those future generations, Collins hopes more chemists
see the value of taking the long view when they’re in the laboratory.


For the Environment Report, this is Reid Frazier.

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City Votes to Reduce Toxic Chemicals

  • Purchases and disposal of many common office supplies can lead to toxic chemicals escaping into the environment. The City of Buffalo has found a way to curb some of this leaching.

Buffalo has become the first city in the Great Lakes region
to pass a law aimed at curbing the amount of toxic chemicals entering the environment. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak reports… officials hope to accomplish this goal by changing their buying habits:

Transcript

Buffalo has become the first city in the Great Lakes region to pass a law aimed at curbing the amount of toxic chemicals entering the environment. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak reports, officials hope to accomplish this goal by changing their buying habits:


Every day, cities buy tons of office supplies and other products containing toxic chemicals. When these products are discarded, they eventually break down and sometimes leach toxins into the soil and water. The City of Buffalo recently adopted a policy to reduce purchasing of products containing Persistent Bio-Accumulative Toxins, or PBTs. But the decision could put more fiscal strain on a city that’s already in crisis. University at Buffalo Chemistry Professor Joe Gardella helped push for the law. He says a university study convinced the city it could both be fiscally and environmentally responsible.


“It doesn’t create additional exprenses, and, in fact, if one takes a long-term view of the fiscal impact, especially on the issue of creating markets for the recyclables that you’re trying to sell, there can be some really solid benefits to this,” said Gardella.


Under the new law, officials can only pay ten percent more for an alternative product. They say other costs will be reduced by eliminating some unneccessary purchases.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

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