Gingerbread Man Implicated In Toxifying Homes

[brahmburgers]

From a home in Utah USA, toxic chlorinated solvents led to contamination of a shallow groundwater reservoir. A pollutant plume containing 1,2-dichloroethane, or DCA, and trichloroethylene, or TCE, migrated out from under the base. Vapors from these highly volatile chemicals can seep into homes.

When Doucette and his group initially began checking out Utah homes with substantially elevated DCA readings, they suspected household cleaners or other consumer products might be responsible. So they began sampling the air, room by room, for DCA and TCE, looking for a hot spot.

And indeed, one home’s basement storage room emerged as a zinger. Not sure what was the source of its contamination – air intrusion, the carpeting or the room’s eclectic contents – the scientists transferred all of the goods into the garage. Within a few days, the room’s DCA levels dropped from 82 micrograms per cubic meter down to 0.37. Meanwhile, pollution in the ventilated garage spiked from nondetectable values to 10 μg/m3. When the researchers returned the goods to the room, the room's pollutant concentrations skyrocketed to 103 μg/m3.

It looked like they had found the smoking gun. And, of all places, in a plastic bin of Christmas decorations. The researchers took the ornaments back to the lab, popped them into a sort of pressure cooker and assayed any fumes they could suck out of each. Sure enough, a gingerbread man and several other ornaments proved to be hot potatoes. Such ornaments are most often produced in China for export.

After testing some paint chips from the ornaments and finding little DCA, the researchers decided to probe deeper. So they amputated the cute little gingerbread guy’s legs and sampled his interior. Bullseye. Each gram of this polyresin contained 2.3 milligrams of DCA. If the emission rate the Utah scientists measured from this ornament – 0.3 μg per minute – remains constant, the decoration should continue to emit toxic fumes for 345 days, the researchers report in a paper due to be published soon in Ground Water Monitoring & Remediation.

A few of the other local homes that had registered anomalous DCA levels also had such products. Doucette and his colleagues went to a store and bought seven new ornaments. And pollutant off-gassing by some of these proved almost as high as that from the initial sentinel gingerbread guy.

But ornaments are hardly the only products made from this material. Doucette says his team turned up plaques and objects up to two-feet tall made from this DCA-laced plastic. And the bigger it is, the more DCA it can shed into air.

full story by Janet Raloff