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Sep 17, 2012

Polluting The Water With Toothpaste, Shampoo, And Drugs

InvestigateWest...U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Jennifer Morace tested the water coming out of nine wastewater treatment plants in the Northwest. She found traces of dozens of chemicals, from household products like sunscreen, fragrances in lotions or shampoos, antibacterial agents from hand soaps, and pharmaceutical chemicals.

One Portland treatment plant was sending the equivalent of 400 Benadryl pills into the Columbia River every day.

“What goes down your drain really does go somewhere,” she said. “A lot of people may think, ‘oh, it goes to a treatment plant so it’s taken care of.’ But there’s only so much we can take care of.”

Treatment plants don’t remove these chemicals partly because it would be really expensive. But also because they don’t have to.

These new pollutants aren’t regulated under the Clean Water Act, though some of them have toxic properties that threaten both human health and fish and wildlife. So far they’re only being detected at very low levels, Morace said. But no one knows what happens when they’re all mixed together.

“A lot of these compounds are designed to be bioactive. Pharmaceuticals are designed to have a biological effect in your body,” she said. “That’s why you take them. So it’s not hard to imagine that when they’re excreted from your body and make their way into the ecosystem that they might still have that biological effect on the fish that live in the ecosystem. The bugs. The birds that eat the fish.”

As for what is regulated, there are 126 toxic chemicals on the Clean Water Act priority pollutant list. But not a single pollutant has been added to that list since 1977.

So there are no legal limits for most of the household chemicals that are showing up in the water today. Most of them haven’t been studied enough to know how much is too much to put in a waterway.

During Coleman’s walk-through of Sohm’s house she didn’t find any triclosan. But she did find lots of shampoos and soaps with fragrances in them. The fragrances likely contain phthalates that interfere with hormones in the body.

When they moved into the kitchen, Coleman found a likely source ofperfluorinated compounds that are toxic to wildlife. They’re also known as Teflons, and they can be found in non-stick cookware.

“So then my pan that I always cook breakfast in?” Sohm asked.

Yes, Coleman said. The pan he cooks breakfast in does have a nonstick coating that could contain Teflon chemicals. Those chemicals are released when the pan gets scratched or overheats.

“If you hold it up to the light, you can see it’s in pretty good shape – there aren’t too many scratches,” she said. “The thing about overheating a pan is it’s so easy to do, and at that point it’s probably time to start looking for a new one.”

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