When Robert Hale travelled down to Chesapeake Bay on the coast of Virginia to take a professorship at the Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, he expected to be spending his days out on the water, not investigating the dusty and, as it turns out, dangerously toxic contents of household vacuum-cleaner bags. After all, Hale, a leading environmental chemist, had been hired in 1987 to study the effect pesticides and other cancer-causing chemicals were having on bass, carp, and catfish.
Hale was doing just that until he hit upon a troubling mystery: while his fish samples showed traces of many well-known contaminants, they were also saturated with a whole new class of chemicals, known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or pbdes. The presence of these chemicals, widely used in textiles, plastics, and furniture foams as supposedly safe fire retardants, puzzled Hale.
The more he investigated, the more pbdes he found—in the air near plastic factories, in the dust particles falling from decaying polyurethane foam, and in sewage used as agricultural fertilizer. Almost from the beginning, Hale was bothered by a nagging question: if the chemicals were in fish and virtually everywhere in the atmosphere, could they be building up in humans as well? It was a frightening thought—pbdes are a close chemical cousin of pcbs, the dreaded carcinogen that was banned in the 1970s. Finally, two years ago, a hunch led him to analyze the contents of a vacuum-cleaner bag taken from a colleague’s home. And just like the fish he had been studying, the dust was saturated with a toxic mix of fire-retardant chemicals.
The vacuum-cleaner dust, now filling dozens of bottles lining the shelves in his lab, underscores the most disturbing point of all—short of donning a gas mask when you enter your own home, there is virtually no escaping these toxins. They inhabit every nook and cranny—the foam in couches, mattresses, curtains, carpets, even the materials in computers and televisions. Automobiles offer no escape, with the same chemicals in the seats and plastic components. In the modern office, industrial strength doses are built into electronic hardware, video screens, and acres of carpeting. “The highest levels we’ve ever seen in a non-plastic item was in household dust,” says Hale. “We’ve always pointed the finger at industry and the manufacturing processes. Here, we are saying, ‘It has to be people’s homes.’ ”
Slowly—tragically, too slowly—politicians are starting to heed the mounting evidence to support claims that the flame-retardant chemicals swirling invisibly through our homes can cause neurological damage in children and impair hormone production in adults. According to some of the latest studies, even minute doses of brominated fire retardants impair attention, learning, memory, and behaviour in laboratory animals.
Scientists at Environment Canada and Health Canada are so concerned that in May they recommended that the federal government remove octa-bde and penta-bde, two of three types of pbde formulations, from the market. The European Union, California, and in August New York State have banned the two formulas. But there was no mention of pbdes in October’s Speech from the Throne, in which the Liberal government outlined their environmental initiatives. So far, Canadian politicians seem more interested in talking to the pbde-industry lobby than in taking immediate action to end what some researchers believe could become one of the worst toxic-contamination disasters in history.
“I have considerable human health concerns,” says Miriam Diamond, a professor of environmental science at the University of Toronto. “There is a deep-seated conservatism that has prevented us from acting proactively even when we have evidence from our pcb experience, which suggests we should exercise precaution.”
Incredibly, even as the evidence mounts for banning pbdes outright, more are being used than ever before. Nearly 300,000 tons are produced annually, and contamination levels across the continent are doubling every five years. More than fifteen million Americans are now saturated with high levels of pbdes. At a major conference in Toronto on brominated flame retardants last June, an official from the California Environmental Protection Agency said contamination levels for those fifteen million people have reached the “margin of safety.”
Because of the chemical similarity with pcbs, Hale is deeply worried. “Many of them seem to act a lot like pcbs in the body,” he says, “which is no great surprise given their similar chemistry and similar role as fire retardants.”
Swedish researchers first started tracking pbdes in the environment in the late 1970s, Hale explains while reaching across a filing cabinet to pick up a fist-sized chunk of polyurethane foam—a substance which, recent tests show, deteriorates into a fine, easily inhaled dust. But even though the Swedes suggested human pbde contamination was pervasive, enduring, and harmful, the movement to ban them in Europe and North America has only recently gathered steam, delayed by the industry’s claim that brominated flame retardants remain stable and do not migrate from the products they’re used in.
