Should The EPA Regulate The Use Of Formaldehyde?
Formaldehyde often poses the greatest risk in the one place people feel safest: inside their homes. The EPA has known for more than four decades that formaldehyde is toxic, but the companies that rely on it have thwarted the agency’s attempts to limit the chemical
In a world flush with hazardous air pollutants, there is one that causes far more cancer than any other, one that is so widespread that nobody in the U.S. is safe from it.
It is a chemical so pervasive that a new analysis by ProPublica found it exposes everyone to elevated risks of developing cancer no matter where they live.
And perhaps most worrisome, it often poses the greatest risk in the one place people feel safest: inside their homes.
As the backbone of American commerce, formaldehyde is a workhorse in major sectors of the economy, preserving bodies in funeral homes, binding particleboards in furniture and serving as a building block in plastic.
The risk isn’t just to the workers using it; formaldehyde threatens everyone as it pollutes the air we all breathe and leaks from products long after they enter our homes. It is virtually everywhere.
Federal regulators have known for more than four decades that formaldehyde is toxic, but their attempts to limit the chemical have been repeatedly thwarted by the many companies that rely on it.
This year, the Biden administration finally appeared to make some progress. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to take a step later this month toward creating new rules that could restrict formaldehyde.
But the agency responsible for protecting the public from the harms of chemicals has significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde, a ProPublica investigation has found.
The EPA is moving ahead after setting aside some of its own scientists’ conclusions about how likely the chemical is to cause myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer that strikes an estimated 29,000 people in the U.S. each year.
The result is that even the EPA’s alarming estimates of cancer risk vastly underestimate — by as much as fourfold — the chances of formaldehyde causing cancer.
The agency said it made the decision because its estimate for myeloid leukemia was “too uncertain” to include. The EPA noted that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which the agency paid to review its report, agreed with its decision not to include myeloid leukemia in its cancer risk.
However, four former government scientists with experience doing statistical analyses of health harms told ProPublica that the myeloid leukemia risk calculation was sound. One said the risk was even greater than the agency’s estimate.
Jennifer Jinot, one of the EPA scientists who spent years calculating the leukemia risk, said there is always uncertainty around estimates of the health effects of chemicals. The real problem, she said, was cowardice.
“In the end, they chickened out,” said Jinot, who retired in 2017 after 26 years working at the EPA. “It was kind of heartbreaking.”
The EPA has also retreated from some of its own findings on the other health effects of formaldehyde, which include asthma in both children and adults; other respiratory ailments, including reduced lung function; and reproductive harms, such as miscarriages and fertility problems.
In a draft report expected to be finalized this month, the agency identified many instances in which formaldehyde posed a health threat to the public but questioned whether most of those rose to a level the agency needed to address.
In response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA wrote in an email that the report was not final and that the agency was in the process of updating it.
Still, if the past is any guide, even the limited efforts of President Joe Biden’s administration are all but guaranteed to hit a dead end after Donald Trump is inaugurated. And one of the longest-running attempts to restrict a dangerous chemical in American history would be set back yet again.
ProPublica reporters have spent months investigating formaldehyde, its sweeping dangers and the government’s long, frustrating battle to curb how much of it we breathe.
They have analyzed federal air pollution data from each of the nation’s 5.8 million populated census blocks and done their own testing in homes, cars and neighborhood businesses.
They have interviewed more than 50 experts and pored through thousands of pages of scientific studies and EPA records. They’ve also reviewed the actions of the previous Trump administration and what’s been disclosed about the next.
The conclusion: The public health risks from formaldehyde are greater and more prevalent than widely understood — and any hope of fully addressing them may well be doomed, at least for the foreseeable future.
Since its inception, the EPA has been outgunned by the profitable chemical industry, whose experts create relatively rosy narratives about their products. That battle intensified over the last four years as the EPA tried to evaluate the scope of the public health threat posed by formaldehyde.
Regulatory rules put the onus on the government to prove a chemical is harmful rather than on the industry to prove its products are safe.
Regardless of who is in the White House, the EPA has staff members with deep ties to chemical companies. During some administrations, it is run by industry insiders, who often cycle between jobs in the private sector and the government.
Trump has already vowed to roll back regulations he views as anti-business — an approach that promises to upend the work of government far beyond formaldehyde protections.
Still, this one chemical makes clear the potential human toll of crafting rules to serve commerce rather than public health. And Trump’s last term as president shows how quickly and completely the efforts now underway might be stopped.
At the EPA, he appointed a key figure from the chemical industry who had previously defended formaldehyde. The agency then quietly shelved a report on the chemical’s toxicity. It refused to enforce limits on formaldehyde released from wood products until a judge forced its hand.
And it was under Trump that the agency first decided not to include its estimate of the risk of developing myeloid leukemia in formaldehyde’s overall cancer risk calculation, weakening the agency’s ability to protect people from the disease.
The latest efforts to address formaldehyde pollution are likely to meet a similar fate, according to William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law who specializes in environmental governance.
Boyd has described formaldehyde as a sort of poster child for the EPA’s inability to regulate chemicals.
Because formaldehyde is key to so many lucrative industrial processes, companies that make and use it have spent lavishly on questioning and delaying government efforts to rein it in.
“The Biden administration was finally bringing some closure to that process,” said Boyd. “But we have every reason to suspect that those efforts will now be revised. And it will likely take years for the EPA to do anything on this.”
Perhaps best known for preserving dead frogs in high school biology labs, formaldehyde is as ubiquitous in industry as salt is in cooking. Between one billion and five billion pounds are manufactured in the U.S. each year, according to EPA data from 2019.
Outdoor air is often suffused with formaldehyde gas from cars, smoke, factories and oil and gas extraction. Much of the formaldehyde outdoors is also spontaneously formed from other pollutants.
Invisible to the eye, the gas increases the chances of getting cancer — severely in some parts of the country.
This year, the EPA released its most sophisticated estimate of the chance of developing cancer as a result of exposure to chemicals in outdoor air in every populated census block across the United States.
The agency’s sprawling assessment shows that, among scores of individual air pollutants, formaldehyde poses the greatest cancer risk — by far.
But ProPublica’s analysis of that same data showed something far more concerning: It isn’t just that formaldehyde poses the greatest risk. It’s that its risk far exceeds the agency’s own goals, sometimes by significant amounts.
ProPublica found that, in every census block, the risk of getting cancer from exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air over a lifetime is higher than the limit of one incidence of cancer in a million people, the agency’s goal for air pollutants.
That risk level means that if a million people in an area are continuously exposed to formaldehyde over 70 years, the chemical would cause at most one case of cancer, on top of those other risks people already face.
According to ProPublica’s analysis of the EPA’s 2020 AirToxScreen data, some 320 million people live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agency’s ideal.
(ProPublica is releasing a lookup tool that allows anyone in the country to understand their outdoor risk from formaldehyde.)
In the Los Angeles/San Bernardino, California, area alone, some 7.2 million people are exposed to formaldehyde at a cancer risk level more than 20 times higher than the EPA’s goal.
In an industrial area east of downtown Los Angeles that is home to several warehouses, the lifetime cancer risk from air pollution is 80 times higher, most of it stemming from formaldehyde.
Even those alarming figures underestimate the true danger. As the EPA admits, its cancer risk calculation fails to reflect the chances of developing myeloid leukemia.
If it had used its own scientists’ calculation — “the best estimate currently available,” according to the agency’s August report — the threat of the chemical would have been shown to be far more severe. Instead of causing 20 cancer cases for every million people in the U.S., formaldehyde would be shown to cause approximately 77.
Using the higher figure to set regulations for the chemical could eventually help prevent thousands of cases of myeloid leukemia, according to ProPublica’s analysis.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here childrenshealthdefense
Please note: PSI does not necessarily endorse the views of each and every article we publish. Our intention is to encourage open, honest, scientific debate.
Header image: Chemical Suppliers
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
solarsmurph
| #
Growing up with my parents on an Alberta family farm, it was a common yearly planting practice to ‘treat wheat seeds with formaldehyde to prevent a disease called Rust. The process was to purchase liquid formaldehyde, put 3-4 ounces of formaldehyde in a 5 gallon bucket of water, and ‘wet’ the seeds with the mixture (by bare hand, dipping a can and dribbling the mixture on the grain as was being moved via a grain auger from the cleaned-seed ready bin to a different bin a day or so before it was put into the machinery for actually planting. I know there are now some ‘powders’ that can be now used, but at that time, ‘1950’s-1960’s they were not available, and according to my father, that is what he was taught in the local school of agriculture in the 1940’s, but the powders have their own safety challenges).
It is no wonder the local farmers had/have such crippling issues in their old age (and I am in my 70’s now and am experiencing physical and mental challenges, possibly due to such practices so many years ago).
Reply