Household detergents, shampoos may form harmful substance in waste water

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-04/acs-hds040710.php

Public release date: 7-Apr-2010

Contact: Michael Bernstein
[e-mail]
202-872-6042
http://www.acs.org/">American Chemical Society

Household detergents, shampoos may form harmful substance in waste water

Scientists are reporting evidence that certain ingredients in shampoo, detergents and other household cleaning agents may be a source of precursor materials for formation of a suspected cancer-causing contaminant in water supplies that receive water from sewage treatment plants. The study sheds new light on possible environmental sources of this poorly understood water contaminant, called NDMA, which is of ongoing concern to health officials. Their study is in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

William Mitch and colleagues note that scientists have known that NDMA and other nitrosamines can form in small amounts during the disinfection of wastewater and water with chloramine. Although nitrosamines are found in a wide variety of sources — including processed meats and tobacco smoke — scientists know little about their precursors in water. Past studies with cosmetics have found that substances called quaternary amines, which are also ingredients in household cleaning agents, may play a role in the formation of nitrosamines.

Their laboratory research showed that when mixed with chloramine, some household cleaning products — including shampoo, dishwashing detergent and laundry detergent - formed NDMA. The report notes that sewage treatment plants may remove some of quaternary amines that form NDMA. However, quaternary amines are used in such large quantities that some still may persist and have a potentially harmful effect in the effluents from sewage treatment plants.

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ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE "Quaternary Amines As Nitrosamine Precursors: A Role for Consumer Products?"

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/es902840h

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[joshcryer]

1. I've always wondered how I'd make ecologically friendly soap.

Probably some lard or something.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Better headline: Freaking CHLORAMINE converts harmless chemicals into carcinogens.

Chloramine is nasty stuff. Surprise, surprise -- grassroots efforts to ban it are already underway!

http://www.chloramine.org/articlearchive.htm

[NNadir]

3. The environmental chemistry of "household chemicals" is no small matter. Surfactants...

...for instance are particularly problematic, notably nonylphenol, a "degreaser" used by the dangerous car CULTure and many other processes. This compound is a known powerful estrogen mimetic, and has been implicated in many disease states, notably breast and ovarian cancer - although the carcinogenicity has not been definitively established.

I'm not so sure that alkyl sulfonates are so great, and the problems with what alkyl sulfonates replaced, alkyl phosphonates, are well known.

These sort of issues, by the way, are poster children for what is wrong with the libertarian "distributed energy" approach, which involves point source pollutants, with the "replacement" proving as bad, and in some cases worse than the original problem.

One may argue, for instance, that the problem with CFC's - a serious problem - had to do with its relatively short atmospheric half-life, which involved chlorine intermediates in the stratosphere. But the replacement HFC's is problematic precisely because their half-lives are long.

This will be obviated if solar PV energy, for instance, finds itself in the position of producing as much as 1% of humanity's energy needs, something I personally don't anticipate happening, but may happen because of the force of ignorance.

For water treatment, I personally favor ozone - not without problems - and radiolysis.

Interestingly radiolysis has recently been investigated for palliating nonylphenol pollution:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVT-4GMJ917-1&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2006&_alid=1285824398&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5543&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=85&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=17569f66d0c3d1cdfff6d189c5f3600a">Radiation Physics and Chemistry 75 (2006) 61–69

Regrettably, the utility of radiolysis in water treatment - and let's be clear that treatment is not perfect, but it is vastly superior to not treating water - from doing what it might to help fight humanity's big problem with degraded water supplies is ignorance and stupidity.