Greenlist Bulletin
From the Toxics Use Reduction Institute
at the University of Massachusetts Lowell
August 16, 2013
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| Growing Up With Pesticides | Source: Science, August 16, 2013
Author: Amanda Mascarelli
SALINAS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA -- It's a sunny July day, sweltering by midmorning. Fields with meticulously maintained rows of lettuce and bushy, berry-laden strawberry plants stretch to the horizon. Farm workers wearing brightly shaded headscarves and layers of clothing -- most of them low-income Mexican immigrants -- dot the fields. This is "America's salad bowl," a region that grows much of the produce found in grocery stores throughout the country.
At about 3 p.m. in the afternoon, Guillermina Aguilar walks into a small office with her husband and their 12-year-old son Eric, who's about to undergo a series of tests. Aguilar and her family are part of a long-term study into the effects of pesticides and other environmental chemicals at the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas, or CHAMACOS, which is also Mexican slang for "little kids".
Aguilar enrolled in the study when she was pregnant with Eric. At the time, the family lived two blocks from the fields, where the pungent, sweet odor of pesticides often hung heavy in the air. "Sometimes in the mornings I remember I would ask my husband, 'What's that smell?'" Aguilar recalls. But they became accustomed to it. "That was normal for us at that time", Aguilar says. Today she lives in Arkansas; Eric's 12-year assessment takes place during a family visit.
The program, run by the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of three U.S. studies that have followed children since the late 1990s to investigate the impact of chemicals in the environment on their brains. The Berkeley program focuses on an agricultural area in California; studies at Columbia University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine look at multiethnic, low-income inner city families in New York City.
Read more...
Also read in Science, "The Pesticide Paradox."
The CHAMACOS cohort is also being used to study other substances, "In Utero and Childhood Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) Exposures and Neurodevelopment in the CHAMACOS Study."
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| Comprehensive Assessment of a Chlorinated Drinking Water Concentrate in a Rat Multigenerational Reproductive Toxicity Study | Source: Environmental Science and Technology, August 2, 2013
Authors: Michael G. Narotsky, Gary Klinefelter, Jerome M. Goldman, Deborah S. Best, Anthony McDonald, Lillian F. Strader, Juan D. Suarez, Ashley S. Murr, Inthirany Thillainadarajah, Sid Hunter, Prof. Susan D. Richardson, Thomas Speth, Richard J. Miltner, Jonathan G. Pressman, Linda Teuschler, Glenn Rice, V Moser, Robert W. Luebke, and Jane Ellen Simmons
Some epidemiological studies report associations between drinking water disinfection by-products (DBPs) and adverse reproductive/developmental effects, e.g., low birth weight, spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, and birth defects. Using a multigenerational rat bioassay, we evaluated an environmentally relevant "whole" mixture of DBPs representative of chlorinated drinking water, including unidentified DBPs as well as realistic proportions of known DBPs at low-toxicity concentrations. Source water from a water utility was concentrated 136 fold, chlorinated, and provided as drinking water to Sprague-Dawley rats. Timed-pregnant females (P0 generation) were exposed during gestation and lactation. Weanlings (F1 generation) continued exposures and were bred to produce an F2 generation. Large sample sizes enhanced statistical power, particularly for pup weight and prenatal loss. No adverse effects were observed for pup weight, prenatal loss, pregnancy rate, gestation length, puberty onset in males, growth, estrous cycles, hormone levels, immunological endpoints, and most neurobehavioral endpoints. Significant, albeit slight, effects included delayed puberty for F1 females, reduced caput epidydimal sperm counts in F1 adult males, and increased incidences of thyroid follicular cell hypertrophy in adult females. These results highlight areas for future research while the largely negative findings, particularly for pup weight and prenatal loss, ease concerns raised by some epidemiological studies.
Read more...
Read article in Chemical & Engineering News, "Study In Rats Finds No Reproductive Health Effects From Water Disinfection Byproducts." |
| Are you ready to report on conflict minerals? | Source: GreenBiz.com, August 14, 2013
Author: Tanya Bolden
Is the issue of conflict minerals on your radar? If not, it probably should be -- especially if you're in the electronics, automotive or a number of other manufacturing-related industries. Chances are, you'll be looking for (and reporting on) conflict minerals in your supply chain soon, if you haven't started already.
You may not recognize conflict minerals in raw form, but you're certainly familiar with the products they can turn up in: everything from your TV and cell phone to your car's sound system and air bags. Conflict minerals currently include cassiterite (the metal ore from which tin is extracted), columbite-tantalite (the metal ore from which tantalum is extracted), wolframite (the metal ore used to produce tungsten) and gold. The common names of these conflict minerals - tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold - are often referred to as 3TG.
Companies should care about this issue for several reasons. First, there's a moral imperative: The intent of reporting requirements is to eliminate an important stream of funding for armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries, where some of the world's supply of conflict minerals is mined.
If that's not reason enough, it's also the law: The 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the 2012 final rule from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), require most companies subject to SEC filing rules to report to the SEC by May 31, 2014, if any of their products produced in calendar year 2013 contain conflict minerals. In July, a federal judge ruled against a challenge to new conflict mineral rules and upheld the law. Translation: there's less than 10 months for the affected companies to report on conflict minerals in any product they make this year.
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| Cambridge firm developing growable plastic | Source: Boston Globe, August 13, 2013
Author: Callum Borchers
The plants growing in a greenhouse on Erie Street in Cambridge bear neither flower nor fruit and, in truth, are downright homely. Tall plumes of switchgrass, once the dominant species of the North American prairie, are domesticated here, sprouting from black pots under skylights and heat lamps.
Underappreciated switchgrass is experiencing second life as a major science project; it is widely used to make alternative fuels and, on Erie Street, to make plastic. In July, the Cambridge company Metabolix Bioplastics received a US patent for its method of supercharging production of the molecule in switchgrass that is used to make biodegradable plastic, and is now working to produce the polymer in high enough concentrations to make the technique commercially viable.
Read more...
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| A Green Route to Petroleum Feedstocks: Photochemistry of Fats and Oils | Source: ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, July 18, 2013
Authors: Maria L. Muro-Small and Douglas C. Neckers
[The authors] demonstrate that it is possible to generate long chain olefins from different fat sources, i.e., animal fat, vegetable oils/fats, and waste cooking oil. [Their] results show that, independent of the source of fat, irradiation using UV-C light produces 1-tetradecene, 1-hexadecene, 1,7-hexadecadiene, and 1,7,10-hexadecatriene. Fats undergo transesterification with primary alcohols rendering the corresponding esters. These, following irradiation, produce the olefins described, in addition to lower molecular weight esters.
Read more... |
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| Please send a message to mary@turi.org if you would like more information on any of these resources. Also, please tell us what topics you are particularly interested in monitoring, and who else should see Greenlist. An online search of the TURI Library catalog can be done at http://library.turi.org for greater topic coverage.
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Greenlist Bulletin is compiled by:
Mary Butow
Research and Reference Specialist
Toxics Use Reduction Institute
University of Massachusetts Lowell
600 Suffolk St., Wannalancit Mills
Lowell MA 01854
978-934-4365
978-934-3050 (fax)
mary@turi.org
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