Toxicity

Flint, Michigan, made headlines in 2015 when tests revealed dangerously high lead levels in its drinking water. The city had switched its water supply to the Flint River a year earlier, and corrosive water had damaged aging lead pipes, exposing thousands of people to lead contamination. The result was a human health crisis that residents are feeling the effects of to this day. And Flint was only the tip of the iceberg. The EPA estimates that 9.2 million service lines that deliver drinking water to U.S. homes and businesses are made of lead. The federal government considers replacing these lead pipes a top priority and has launched a variety of initiatives to help, including the 2021 Infrastructure Law, which committed US$15 billion over five years to lead pipe replacement. The EPA is now proposing to require the removal of lead pipes across the U.S. within 10 years. The agency has been silent, however, regarding what should replace lead....

Bees help pollinate over a third of the world’s crops, contributing an estimated US$235 billion to $577 billion in value to global agriculture. They also face a myriad of stresses, including pathogens and parasites, loss of suitable food sources and habitat, air pollution and climate-driven weather extremes. A recent study has identified another important but understudied pressure on bees: “inert” ingredients in pesticides. All pesticide products in the U.S. contain active and inert ingredients. Active ingredients are designed to kill or control a specific insect, weed or fungus and are listed on product labels. All other ingredients – emulsifiers, solvents, carriers, aerosol propellants, fragrances, dyes and such – are considered inert. The new study exposed honeybees to two treatments: the isolated active ingredients in the fungicide Pristine, which is used to control fungal diseases in almonds and other crops, and the whole Pristine formulation...

As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?” This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab, a group of Australian and international scientists who study plastic pollution, adds to a growing body of evidence that ingesting plastic debris has discernible chronic effects on the animals that consume it. This work represents a crucial step: moving from knowing that plastic is everywhere to diagnosing its effects once ingested. From individual to species-level effects There’s wide agreement that the world is facing a plastic pollution crisis. This deluge of long-lived debris has generated gruesome photos of dead seabirds and whales with their stomachs full of plastic. But while consuming plastic likely killed these individual animals, death...

Across the U.S., children and adults are increasingly exposed to harmful chemicals from a source few people are even aware of. It begins on a street outside a home or school, where a worker in a manhole is repairing a sewer pipe. The contractor inserts a resin-soaked sleeve into the buried pipe, then heats it, transforming the resin into a hard plastic pipe. This is one of the cheapest, most common pipe repair methods, but it comes with a serious risk: Heating the resin generates harmful fumes that can travel through the sewer lines and into surrounding buildings, sometimes several blocks away. These chemicals have made hundreds of people ill, forced building evacuations and even led to hospitalizations. Playgrounds, day care centers and schools in several states have been affected, including in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. With this sewer pipe repair method, the chemical wast...