A landmark Environmental Protection Agency report concluding that children exposed to toxic substances can develop learning disabilities, asthma and other health problems has been sidetracked indefinitely amid fierce opposition from the chemical industry.

America’s Children and the Environment, Third Edition, is a sobering analysis of the way in which pollutants build up in children’s developing bodies and the damage they can inflict.  

The report is unpublished, but was posted on EPA’s website in draft form in March 2011, marked “Do not Quote or Cite.”  The report, which is fiercely contested by the chemical industry, was referred to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where it still languishes.

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For the first time since the ACE series began in 2000, the draft cites extensive research linking common chemical pollutants to brain damage and nervous system disorders in fetuses and children.

It also raises troubling questions about the degree to which children are exposed to hazardous chemicals in air, drinking water and food, as well exposures in their indoor environments – including schools and day-care centers – and through contaminated lands.  

 

In the making since 2008, the ACE report is based on peer-reviewed research and databases from federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Housing and Urban Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public health officials view it as a source of one-stop shopping for the best information on what children and women of childbearing age are exposed to, how much of it remains in their bodies and what the health effects might be. Among the “health outcomes” listed as related to environmental exposures are childhood cancer, obesity, neurological disorders, respiratory problems and low birth weight.  

The report cites hundreds of studies -- both human, epidemiological studies that show a correlation between exposure to certain chemical pollutants and negative health outcomes, and animal studies that demonstrate cause and effect.  In some cases, the authors note, certain chemicals have been detected in children, but not enough is known about their effects to draw conclusions about safety.

In a section on perfluorochemicals (PFCs), for example, which are used to make nonstick coatings, and protect textiles and carpets from water, grease and soil, among other things, the draft notes that they are found in human breast milk. 

The report said that “a growing number of human health studies” have found an association between prenatal exposure to PFCs and low birth weight, decreased head circumference and low birth length. It also stated that based on “emerging evidence suggests that exposure to some PFCs can have negative impacts on human thyroid function.”

Furthermore, it noted that animal studies produced similar results, although exposures were typically at higher levels than people are exposed to. 

The EPA’s website still notes that the report will be published by the end of 2011.  But after a public comment period that was marked by unusually harsh criticism from industry, additional peer review and input from other agencies, the report landed at OMB last March, where it has remained. No federal rule requires the OMB to review such a report before publication, but EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said the agency referred it to the OMB because its impact cuts across several federal agencies.

The spokeswoman said EPA had no idea when OMB would release it, allowing publication. 

A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget said she would not discuss the review process or give an estimated release date.   

Some present and former EPA staffers, who asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs, blamed the sidetracking of the report on heightened political pressure during the campaign season.  The OMB has been slow to approve environmental regulations and other EPA reports throughout the Obama Administration — as it was under George W. Bush according to reports by the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit consortium of scholars, doing research on health, safety and environmental issues, which generally advocate for stronger regulation and better enforcement of existing law.

“Why is it taking so long? One must ask the question,” said a former EPA researcher who works on children’s health issues. “It is an important document and it strikes me that it’s falling victim to politics.”  

The EPA states that the report is intended, in part, to help policymakers identify and evaluate ways to minimize environmental impacts on children.

That’s an unwelcome prospect to the $674 billion chemical industry, which stands to lose business and face greater legal liability if the EPA or Congress bans certain substances mentioned in the report or sets standards reducing the levels of exposure that is considered safe.

Among other findings, the report links numerous substances to ADHD, including certain widely available pesticides; polychlorinated biphenyls  (PCBS), which were banned in 1979 but are still present in products made before then and in the environment; certain polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants; and methyl mercury, a toxic metal that accumulates in larger fish, such as tuna.  The draft also cites children’s exposure to lead, particularly from aging lead water pipes, as a continuing problem (See previous coverage, Toxic Taps.) 

Among the other widespread contaminants linked to learning disabilities is perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel , fireworks and other industrial products, which has polluted water around the country.  The Department of Defense, which wants to avoid paying to clean it up, is alarmed by research showing that the chemical interferes with thyroid function and otherwise damages the nervous system, according to R. Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and an expert on perchlorate.

Zoeller, who has served on EPA advisory panels studying the issue, said the Pentagon’s concern was evidenced by the Air Force’s hiring of two consultants – Richard Mavis and John DeSesso --  to help shape its response to the research.  He noted that in 2009, after their consulting contract had ended, Mavis and DeSesso wrote a letter to the editor of Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, attacking an EPA scientist’s study showing that perchlorate may damage the brain.  “I don’t like my tax dollars going for one federal agency to refute the work done by scientists at EPA,”  he said. The Defense Department and the Air Force declined to comment on the publication, but spokeswoman  Melinda Morgan wrote that, “The DoD is aware that there are many differing opinions on the science related to perchlorate health effects,” and believes the current level permitted by EPA is safe.

One of the new sections of the report notes that children may be widely exposed to pollutants in schools and day-care centers. Among them are pesticides; lead; PCBs; asbestos, a mineral fiber long used as insulation and fire-proofing;  phthalates, chemicals that are used to soften vinyl and as solvents and fixers, and are found in numerous consumer goods, among them: toys, perfumes, medical devices, shower curtains and detergents; and perfluorinated chemicals, which are used in non-stick and stain-proof products.  The study notes that these substances are (variously) associated with asthma, cancer, reproductive toxicity and hormone disruption. 

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) , the chief industry trade group, has accused EPA of lacking objectivity and vilifying its products. It has filed dozens of pages of comments accusing the EPA of ignoring certain studies – including some funded by ACC itself — that would help businesses make the case that their products are safe. The ACC also contends that EPA has not included enough positive comments about the role of chemicals in society.   

“ACC members apply the science of chemistry to make innovative products and services that make people’s lives better, healthier and safer,” wrote ACC senior toxicologist Richard A. Becker. … “The exclusive focus on exposure is particularly problematic as it may lead to the incorrect conclusion that exposure to chemicals (e.g. phthalates) at any level is not only cause for concern, but also a direct source of negative health effects.”

Becker also expressed the ACC’s contention that EPA was painting too bleak a picture of children’s health in America.  

“It is troubling that the draft ACE report seems to make such little effort to provide a complete overall picture of child health in the United States,” Becker wrote. “For example, the draft report does not refer to The Health and Well-Being of Children: A Portrait of States and the Nation … which concludes the health and well-being of children in the U.S. is improving overall with 84.4% of children in the United States listed as being in excellent or very good health, an increase from 83% in 2003.” Other ACC members, representing manufacturers of BPA, phthalates and other substances, also weighed in against the report.

Nsedu Witherspoon, executive director of the Children’s Environmental Health Network and a member of the EPA Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, which oversaw the report, called it a major accomplishment, reflecting the explosion of science since the first ACE was published. She also praised EPA chief Lisa Jackson for standing behind it.

Industry critics, Witherspoon said, “in many cases are the same ones out there trying to debunk the original research,” that the study cites.  

Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and president of the Center for Progressive Reform, said the ACE report need not have gone to OMB for review in the first place. Steinzor notes that Executive Order 12866 states that proposed significant regulations — generally defined as those that could cost more than $100 million — need be reviewed by OMB, but studies do not.  

The Executive Order gives OMB up to 60 days to review such proposals — although it allows for extensions. In practice, OMB has missed numerous such deadlines.  But the ACE report, which is not a proposed regulation, falls into a gray area.

“If it’s not a rule, I don’t know what it’s doing there,” Steinzor said. “And even if it were a rule, there would be a deadline and they’d be violating it.”

In an email statement to the Investigative Reporting Workshop, EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said, “The report was provided to OMB so that they could conduct an interagency review process to ensure accuracy and consistency.”

She noted that because the report addresses children's health, it includes issues that are the focus of many departments and agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services -- including the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Cancer Institute.   

Steinzor, whose organization has studied OMB under numerous presidents, doesn’t buy it. 

The report should be released now, she said, “ because to protect children adequately we need all the information we can get… I guess I understand why there was great anxiety and paranoia before the election … (but) why would you not do it now? It’s sad that things have gotten so polarized that we’re afraid to release scientific information.”

The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, is a nonprofit, professional newsroom that pairs experienced professional reporters and editors with graduate students, and co-publishes with mainstream media partners and nonprofit newsrooms. Sheila Kaplan is a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

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When you think of pollution, you might picture an industrial center like Camden, N.J., or Jersey City. But new research shows that when it comes to a potent class of cancer-causing toxic chemicals, many American parking lots are a lot worse.

New studies paint an increasingly alarming picture – particularly for young children – about how these chemicals are being spread across big swaths of American cities and suburbs by what may seem an unlikely source – a type of asphalt sealer. These sealants are derived from an industrial waste, coal tar.

Four new studies (links are at the end of this article) announced this week further implicate coal tar-based asphalt sealants as likely health risks.  The creosote-like material typically is sprayed onto parking lots and driveways in an effort to preserve the asphalt. It also gives the pavement a dark black coloring that many people find attractive.

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Coal tar is a byproduct of the steelmaking industry. In 1992, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared that it would not be classified as a hazardous waste, even though it met the characteristics of one, because it could be recycled for uses that include coating asphalt. That meant steel mills didn’t have to pay for costly landfilling or incineration of the waste.

 

 

 

Only in recent years have scientists discovered the ill effects of this practice.

Coal tar sealants are used most heavily in the eastern United States, but were applied in all 50 states until Washington state banned the products last year. More than a dozen local governments, including Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, also have banned the coal tar sealants in favor of the other major type of sealant, which is asphalt-based.

Asphalt-based sealants contain about 1/1000^th the concentration of the cancer-causing chemicals that coal tar-based products do. Home Depot and Lowe’s stores have dropped the coal tar sealants from their product lines, but still some 85 million gallons of the coal tar-based sealants are applied annually in the United States.

The new research, published in peer-reviewed science journals, focuses on a class of chemicals found in coal tar and known as “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” or PAHs. Previously, researchers believed that people’s exposure to PAHs came primarily through food, which contains trace amounts produced primarily from smoking food or cooking it at high temperatures in practices such as grilling, roasting, and frying. PAHS are produced when any organic matter burns.

The new research shows:

• It appears that children – especially those from 3 to 5 years old – living by coal tar-sealed parking lots and driveways are getting a bigger dose of PAHs from house dust than from their food. The kids who put their hands in their mouth most often are likely receiving 9 ½ times more exposure through house dust than through food, according to research led by E. Spencer Williams, a Baylor University human health risk assessment expert. That’s just from the house dust. When the kids are outside in the yard or playing on coal tar-sealed pavement, they likely are picking up much larger doses.
• While researchers previously theorized that airborne PAHs come mostly from power plants, factories and cars’ and trucks’ tailpipe emissions, U.S. Geological Survey researchers measured large amounts vaporizing into the air off coal tar-sealed parking lots.  The concentrations coming off parking lots in suburban Austin, where the researchers are based, were higher than in centers of heavy industry, including Jersey City and Camden, N.J.; Chicago; London and Manchester, England; and Guangzhou, China. The Austin parking lots tested were three to eight years old. Much more off-gassing occurs in the first few years after the sealants are applied, researchers said.
• Concentrations measured four feet above the coal tar-sealed lots in some cases exceeded health-protection guidelines recommended by a European Union science panel to protect against cancer. The United States has no similar guidelines.
• Extrapolating from the 85 million gallons of coal tar sealants laid down annually and the out-gassing rates measured in Austin, Geological Survey researchers calculated that nationwide, more PAHs are getting into the air from coal tar-sealed parking lots, driveways and playgrounds than from all the auto and truck exhaust.

“That’s a lot,” said Barbara Mahler, a USGS scientist involved in the research.

Researchers previously had shown that coal tar-sealed parking lots were shedding tiny bits of the material, which was washed by rain into nearby waterways – killing, sickening and maiming aquatic creatures such as salamanders, minnows and, importantly, bugs at the base of the food chain. The chemicals kill tadpoles, cause tumors on fish, stunt growth of aquatic creatures and reduce the number of species able to live in a waterway.

As a result of being washed into waterways by stormwater, these chemicals’ concentrations have been rising over the last two decades, even as levels of most contaminants are headed down, Geological Survey researchers showed.

The chemicals are getting into the house dust, researchers think, when small bits are eroded off pavement and tracked into nearby homes.

Scientists also had previously demonstrated that toxic constituents of coal tar were showing up in the dust of homes adjacent to parking lots and driveways, raising questions about health effects on children in those homes, especially toddlers who frequently put their hands in their mouths. Coal tar is known to cause cancer in humans, as well as genetic mutations in lab animals.

One of the new studies helps quantify that risk. Kids who are average in terms of how often they put their hands into their mouths are getting 2 ½ times as many PAHs from house dust as from food, while those in the 95^th percentile of hand-to-mouth behavior – they do it more than 94 percent of other kids – get 9 ½ times as much from the dust.

Researchers still would like to know how much of a toxic dose those same kids are getting when they play outside in yards next to coal tar-sealed asphalt, or on the asphalt itself. The level of cancer-causing chemicals in the dust on the asphalt itself has been measured at about 37 times the levels found in house dust.

“Those concentrations are a good bit higher and this study doesn’t include that at all,” said Williams, the Baylor researcher. “That may be important because just one little fingerful could be a relevant dose,” meaning one that worries health experts.

While researchers have known about contamination of water and dust, the findings about air pollution are new. Significant amounts of PAHs continue to vaporize off coal tar-sealed lots even years after the sealant is put down.

“When we look at a seal-coated parking lots, in any direction we look we see these really strongly elevated concentrations,” said Peter Van Metre, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist based in Austin. Of the dust on the coal tar-sealed pavement, he said: “It would just take a tiny amount of that to be a large enough dose for it to be significant.”

Companies that sell and use the coal tar sealants have previously disputed the growing body of evidence of the coal tar sealants’ danger being amassed by scientists from the Geological Survey, the University of New Hampshire, Baylor and other institutions.

Repeated attempts this week to reach an industry representative, Anne LeHuray, executive director of the Pavement Coatings Technology Council, for comment on the new studies were unsuccessful. In an email on Thursday, LeHuray said she was tied up at a meeting of the pavement council in Memphis.

Generally, the pavement council has attacked previous coal tar research on technical grounds.

Read previous articles on coal tar sealants:

Study sees parking lot dust as a cancer risk

State bans coal tar sealants in big win for foes

The pavement council has fought bans – sometimes successfully – when they have been proposed by local and state governments. In addition to the local governments that have forbidden use of the coal tar sealants, some governments have placed restrictions on their use, including the state of Minnesota and the California Department of Transportation. Restrictions also are in effect in more than 40 Illinois municipalities.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democratic congressman from the Austin area, has previously filed legislation calling for a nationwide ban on coal tar sealants. He plans to refile the legislation, a Doggett spokeswoman said, but is currently embroiled in a redistricting fight.

Tom Ennis, an Austin city official who helped get coal tar sealants banned there, has now launched a campaign to support a nationwide ban.

“You’re looking at a big urban air quality” problem, Ennis said. “It’s completely unacceptable and something needs to be done.”

The studies announced this week appeared in the science journals Environmental Science and Technology, Chemosphere, Atmospheric Environment,  and  Environmental Pollution.

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