Unsuspected businesses add to toxic releases

You don’t have to go far to find toxic chemicals. Pick up the dry cleaning. Take a whiff.

That’s probably percholoroethylene, also known as perc.

Go ahead. Take a deep breath. Perc probably isn’t going to hurt you … much.

But with an estimated 34,000 dry cleaners, most of them unregulated, across the nation, there’s a lot of perc out there. And the bottom line when it comes down to toxic chemicals is that no one really knows just how much.

Estimates of how much toxic release is produced by small businesses either not regulated by environmental standards, or not required to report under the Toxic Release Inventory are hard to find. But in Larimer County, where 522,058 pounds of toxic chemicals were released into the environment during 1994, the last reporting year, unreported toxic releases could easily double that amount.

Nationally, there were total chemical releases of 1.9 billion pounds in 1994. Colorado ranked 44th nationwide in the amount of toxic-chemical releases with 189 firms releasing almost 4.2 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment.

But critics of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s accounting of toxics point out that TRI may account for as little as 5 percent of the toxics released into the environment. The program includes only large users of toxic chemicals, and many chemicals are not on the list.

Accordingly, there may be as much as 40 billion pounds of untreated toxic chemicals released every year into our air, water and soils.

That’s when the real problem becomes apparent. That is, that reducing the end-of-pipe releases from major industries isn’t making the grade anymore.

“There are a lot of unregulated releases out there,´ said Dave Shauller of the EPA Region 8 Pollution Prevention program in Denver. Not only are small businesses largely unregulated, but even industrial concerns often have releases in processes that go unaccounted.

Schauller heads the XL program in Region 8, which is designed to allow companies employing new processes and innovative procedures flexibility in meeting EPA regulations – providing those companies can prove that their processes eliminate more environmental discharge.

“It’s looking to offer flexibility … in return for superior environmental performance,” he noted. “If there’s a better way to skin the cat, the company is offered flexibility for the way the volumes and number of discharges are characterized.”

Still, Schauller noted that nationally only a few firms have opted to try the XL program, which stands for eXcellence in Leadership. In Region 8, including most of the Rocky Mountain West, there are currently no companies participating in the program.

At this point, Schauller said, companies are taking a wait-and-see attitude, wondering if participation in the program is financially sound.

One of the problems in categorizing toxic releases is the breadth of chemicals involved. All of them have varying degrees of risk in toxicity and as carcinogens.

Take perc, for instance. Enough perc can cause dizziness, coma or even death. (Perhaps now would be a good time to stop smelling that dry cleaning so deeply.)

But the amounts of perc used in dry cleaning are well below that required to kill somebody. The second measure the EPA uses to categorize chemicals is for long-time exposure, and perc is a possible liver carcinogen.

The EPA — after usually killing off a bunch of mice – establishes a threshold for daily exposure. That exposure is also subjected to a safety margin, which establishes the threshold at about 1,000 times less than what toxicologists believe may cause cancer in humans.

So what’s the worry?

What the EPA, and scientists around the country, have just begun studying is what the exposure to a number of volatile organic chemicals, or VOCs, can have as an accumulated exposure. Currently, the science is based on exposure to a single chemical over a lifetime, but estimating the exposure to a VOC soup over a lifetime is a lot more difficult.

Also, new inquiries into how exposure to VOCs can affect the reproductive systems of animals is just starting to take shape.

With human sperm rates falling, and breast and female reproductive cancer rates possibly rising, the concern may have extended past the academic.

Whether the EPA can address the problem of toxic pollution in voluntary programs is still largely undetermined. For instance, while there are wet-cleaning processes available for the cleaning of fine linens, there doesn’t appear to be any great move to replace perc in dry-cleaning shops.

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