The sign that welcomes people into Williston, North Dakota, has an inscription at the bottom: “Boomtown, USA.” It’s one way of characterizing the now infamous oil boom that doubled the city’s population between 2010 and 2020, with an influx of workers eager to get to the oilfields. All those newcomers led to another boom: an increase in evictions.
New research from Princeton University sheds light on the relationship between fracking and evictions, finding that in Williams County, the surrounding area of Williston, eviction filings rose from 0.002 percent in 2010 to over 7 percent by 2019. In the same time period, fracked oil in the area grew from 300,000 barrels of oil a month to 7½ million barrels a month.
Williston is not alone. Other research backs up the connection between fracking and evictions, since the industry often draws an influx of new, temporary residents to places like Midland, Texas, or Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. This is because fracking often leads to a plethora of high-paying jobs. In the meantime, long-time residents aren’t always able to access the wealth that these areas produce and are left to bear out the consequences long after the boom is over.
“Renters are almost invariably going to lose out in this equation,” said Carl Gershenson, lead author and director of Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Existing residents can often be displaced because landlords can charge short-term renters exorbitant rates instead of the relatively affordable prices that long-term renters pay for the same property, according to Gershenson.
“A savvy landlord realizes that a lot of these people are coming for the season,” said Gershenson. “So it’s very common to, say, switch over a place that had been on an annual lease to monthly leases. And now you’re renting out rooms instead of a whole house. In some cases, you can fit 10 or 12 people, you know, into a house that was renting out to one family.”
He also notes that not only do evictions displace residents, but can be a destabilizing force for the people that have experienced them.
“Evictions are not just the consequence of poverty, but really are one of the leading causes of poverty,” said Gershenson.
People who have experienced evictions often also experience mental and physical health issues more than their peers who have never been evicted.
Another hurdle to overcome is that smaller municipalities aren’t often equipped to handle the influx, or the developers that follow rapid population increases. So things like long-term planning fall by the wayside as cities and towns try to cope with the immediate increased needs for municipal services.
“It’s an investment in terms of not only hard infrastructure, like pipes, and electrical and roads, but also human infrastructure, things like law enforcement, things like emergency services, things like social services,” said William Caraher, associate professor of history and American Indian studies at the University of North Dakota.
Caraher also noted that initially, the large presence of man camps, or temporary housing for oilfield workers, posed a problem for community members who did not want the negative stigma associated with the drug use and other issues that arrived with the camps. In response, many cities and towns in this area allowed more development to occur, so that workers could live in a form of permanent housing. But now those places are left with hastily built and overpriced housing.
There are ways to combat displacement, though, and one solution that Caraher points to are increased protections for tenants, which could help keep eviction rates low.
Caraher noted that despite the fact that people in the community did attempt to secure more housing and tenants rights, the pace of the boom was ultimately too much to accommodate lower-income, longer-term residents.
Another option that Gershenson points to is something called a community-benefits agreement, wherein residents can work with companies to determine how any economic development can help long-time residents alongside any new employees drawn to the area for work.
“I think it’s fair that the community captures some of those profits to invest into affordable housing,” he said.
There needs to be better options, said Caraher, to accommodate both workers and communities in boomtowns.
Housing in the U.S. falls between two extremes, either short-term hotels or forever homes, he said. “This kind of gray area in between isn’t ever well established as to how it should operate,”
The research, conducted by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, found that insect numbers tripled in less than five years, a press release from Argonne National Laboratory said.
“Global declines in insect populations have important implications for biodiversity and food security,” the study’s authors wrote. “The expansion of utility-scale solar energy development in agricultural landscapes presents an opportunity for the dual use of the land for energy production and biodiversity conservation through the establishment of grasses and forbs planted among and between the photovoltaic solar arrays (‘solar-pollinator habitat’).”
For the five-year study, the researchers examined two southern Minnesota solar sites built on former agricultural land. They looked at how the newly planted vegetation would establish itself, as well as how communities of insects would respond to the restored habitat.
“This research highlights the relatively rapid insect community responses to habitat restoration at solar energy sites. It demonstrates that, if properly sited, habitat-friendly solar energy can be a feasible way to safeguard insect populations and can improve the pollination services in adjacent agricultural fields,” said lead author of the study Leroy J. Walston, who is an environmental scientist and landscape ecologist with Argonne National Laboratory, in the press release.
The study, “If you build it, will they come? Insect community responses to habitat establishment at solar energy facilities in Minnesota, USA,” was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Insect biodiversity worldwide has been declining due to pesticides, habitat loss and climate change. Land-use changes for the development of renewable energy coupled with insect habitat restoration could help mitigate this ongoing crisis, Argonne National Laboratory said.
The expansion of photovoltaic (PV) solar development is essential to curbing the climate crisis. To meet climate goals, including decarbonization of the grid, much more land — roughly 10 million acres — will be needed in the United States for large-scale solar by 2050. Former farm fields are a good choice for installing rows of solar panels — much more so than previously undisturbed lands.
The combination of vegetation and agricultural management practices with solar energy production is known as agrivoltaics. One agrivoltaic strategy focuses on establishing habitat for pollinators and other wildlife that provide essential ecosystem services.
“Insects serve many roles for ecosystem function, including nutrient cycling, plant pollination and seed dispersal, maintaining soil quality, and occupying important trophic levels as both natural predators and prey,” the authors of the study wrote. “Approximately 75% of global crop production is at least partially reliant upon pollination by insects, underscoring the importance of insect pollinator conservation for human food production. In addition, insect biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is important for natural pest control, and loss of beneficial insect predators can result in reduced crop yield and increased use of pesticides.”
There has not been much field data to date documenting the ecological benefits and feasibility of pairing habitat restoration with solar energy production on previously used lands.
The solar sites in the study were planted with flowering plants and native grasses during the early part of 2018. For four years beginning in August of that year, 358 surveys were conducted by the researchers on insect communities and flowering vegetation. The team looked for shifts in insect and plant diversity and abundance each time they visited the former agricultural locations.
“The effort to obtain these data was considerable, returning to each site four times per summer to record pollinator counts,” said Heidi Hartmann, co-author of the study and manager of Argonne’s Land Resources and Energy Policy program, in the press release. “Over time we saw the numbers and types of flowering plants increase as the habitat matured. Measuring the corresponding positive impact for pollinators was very gratifying.”
By the end of the field study, the researchers noticed increases in all biodiversity and habitat measurements. There were more flowers, native plant species and native pollinators — including bees, hornets, wasps, hoverflies, other flies, butterflies, moths and beetles. Flowering plant species and flowers had increased, the total insect population had tripled and there were 20 times more native bees. The most abundant insects in the new insect wonderland were flies, moths and beetles.
The research team also discovered that solar site pollinators visited neighboring fields and pollinated their soybeans.
The findings of the study suggest that not only can solar sites that are habitat-friendly help with biodiversity conservation, they can assist with the mitigation of land-use conflicts that can arise when converting farmland for solar production.
Agricultural lands could be used for roughly 80 percent of ground-based solar development in the future. By making marginal farmland habitat-friendly, it could be preserved and made more productive by the increased presence of healthy and robust pollinator communities.
“Solar-pollinator habitat is unlikely to completely offset the residual ecological impacts of solar developments poorly sited in areas with high ecological value. In this context, solar-pollinator habitat may have the greatest potential for ecological benefit for solar energy facilities sited in areas that have been previously ecologically compromised, such as marginal farmland, former industrial or mine lands, and other disturbed sites. In these situations, solar-pollinator habitat may be able to provide net biodiversity benefits,” the authors of the study said.
Argonne said more research is needed to know how feasible habitat-friendly solar would be in different regions with distinct ecological targets like conserving a particular wildlife or insect species.
Climate-induced sea level rise will lead to dangerous levels of arsenic being released into Bangladesh’s drinking water, putting tens of millions of people in the country at greater risk of cancer, new research by scientists from Norwich University has found.
“Over 165,000,000 people live in Bangladesh; approximately 97% of Bangladeshis drink well water. Approximately 49% of Bangladesh’s area has drinking well water with arsenic (As) concentrations that exceed the 10 micrograms per liter (μg/L) World Health Organization (WHO) guideline,” the authors of the study wrote.
The researchers said this will escalate the country’s current public health crisis, reported The Guardian.
“Chronic arsenic poisoning from drinking water… is a real problem, not a theoretical exercise,” said Dr. Seth Frisbie, research lead and a Norwich University emeritus professor of chemistry, as The Guardian reported. “I once walked into a village where no one was over 30 years old.”
The study, “Sea level rise from climate change is expected to increase the release of arsenic into Bangladesh’s drinking well water by reduction and by the salt effect,” was published in the journal PLOS One.
The problem of arsenic water contamination in Bangladesh started in the 1970s, when the country had one of the highest infant mortality rates caused by surface water pollution. A program of boring into sedimentary rocks to access clean water had been sponsored by aid agencies from the United Nations and NGOs. The wells lowered the rates of infant mortality, but in the following two decades it was obvious that the water had naturally high arsenic levels.
Jamie Williams, senior policy advisor with NGO Islamic Relief, said the country has been experiencing water shortages because of pesticide pollution, especially in fishing regions, reported The Independent.
“Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change due to its population density, and limited low-lying land area dominated by major rivers that drain the Himalayan mountains and foothills,” Williams told The Independent. “Many people are landless and forced to live on and cultivate flood-prone land; waterborne diseases are prevalent.”
Bangladesh had its first chronic arsenic poisoning case from drinking well water in 1993, which WHO described as the “largest mass poisoning of a population in history,” The Guardian said.
According to Frisbie, sediments washed down from the uplift of the Himalayas contain arsenic.
“So all the sediments from the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna, Irrawaddy [and] Mekong river basins are rich in naturally occurring arsenic,” Frisbie said. “It wasn’t a problem when people drank surface water, because the surface water is in communication with the oxygen in the atmosphere and that makes the arsenic insoluble and removes it from the water. But the deep well water does not communicate as well with the oxygen in the atmosphere. And that’s why all of a sudden giving people access to these deep water wells has been a tremendous public health crisis.”
Frisbie said approximately 45 percent of the country’s wells have water with five times or more the maximum WHO limit for arsenic.
Arsenic builds up in organs inside the body, causing cancers. Chronic arsenic poisoning can also manifest as keratinization on people’s palms and the soles of their feet.
“My current estimate is about 78 million Bangladeshis are exposed, and I believe a conservative estimate is that about 900,000 Bangladeshis are expected to die from lung and bladder cancer,” Frisbie said, according to The Guardian.
The climate crisis will make the situation worse, as sea level rise is predicted to cause more flooding in the country. This will trigger a process called “reduction,” which will alter aquifer chemistry and lead to greater arsenic leaching from sediment.
Flooded homes after a heavy storm in the coastal area of Khulna, Bangladesh on Aug. 17, 2023. Kazi Salahuddin Razu / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Sea level rise will also cause aquifers to be inundated with seawater, increasing their salinity. That will speed up the leaching of arsenic through a process called “the salt effect.”
The effects of climate change on the underlying chemistry of water drawn from aquifers is not only a problem in Bangladesh.
“These chemical processes are global,” said Frisbie in The Guardian. “There’s this reduction of arsenic in Manchester, there’s the salt effect in Louisiana [because of] floods like Hurricane Katrina. So because these are universal chemical processes, this is a global problem.”
The European Parliament has voted to adopt a law regulating sustainability claims on product labels. The law will prohibit retailers from making general environmental claims and sustainability claims without evidence.
The law bans the use of terms including “eco,” “biodegradable,” “environmentally friendly,” “natural” and “climate neutral” without evidence. The EU will now require sustainability labels to be linked to official certifications or those established by public authorities, such as the the EU Ecolabel, the European Environmental Bureau reported.
Further, the law addresses carbon offsetting, banning labels from noting that products have a “neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment” because of companies’ participation in carbon offsetting programs. The move comes at a time when more and more studies are revealing that carbon offset programs do little to actually mitigate emissions, instead operating more as “phantom credits” that don’t remove any carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
The EU directive against greenwashing received strong support with 593 votes to approve the law and 21 against, as well as 14 abstentions.
“We will step away from throwaway culture, make marketing more transparent and fight premature obsolescence of goods,” European Parliament’s rapporteur Biljana Borzan said in a press release. “People will be able to choose products that are more durable, repairable and sustainable thanks to reliable labels and advertisements. Most importantly, companies can no longer trick people by saying that plastic bottles are good because the company planted trees somewhere — or say that something is sustainable without explaining how. This is a big win for all of us!”
In addition to banning greenwashing claims, the directive will target false or unfounded durability claims, to promote reusability and repairability. Brands will not be able to claim that products last longer than they would with normal use or promote replacing a product sooner than necessary, with such claims currently common on labels for technology products, such as printer ink.
Once approved by the European Council, the legislation will be recorded in the EU’s Official Journal. Afterward, member states of the EU will have two years to enact the law. In the meantime, the law will be a complement to the Green Claims Directive, still under review. The Green Claims Directive will provide more information on the use of environmental claims, the EU reported.
According to the European Environmental Bureau, about 75% of products on the market in the EU have some sort of sustainability claim, but more than half of these claims are vague, confusing or without evidence to back them up.
Activists have applauded the move to ban greenwashing but also hope to see legislation that bans planned obsolescence, which is when a product is designed to break or become useless quickly.
“This law cuts through the smoke of misleading green marketing, putting a leash on shady claims and boosting the credibility of sustainability labels,” Miriam Thiemann, European Environmental Bureau’s policy officer for sustainable consumption, said in a statement. “People will also have access to more information about the durability and reparability of products before buying them. But we still need stronger rules to make durable, repairable products the norm.“
As hurricanes, drought and the other symptoms of our climate crisis become increasingly present in our daily lives, many of us are looking for ways to learn more about our changing world. The following beautiful and entertaining works of graphic nonfiction also grapple with difficult issues regarding climate change, fossil fuel extraction and the loss of once-natural spaces, for readers of all ages.
Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science, Philippe Squarzoni (2014)
Abrams Books
Imagine a documentary, but portrayed in squares of cartoons and lines of text, or a textbook on climate science, but much more engaging and with much better pictures. Climate Changed by French cartoonist Philippe Squarzoni takes readers through his own quest to learn about the science of climate change, after he realized that he knew next to nothing about it. Deftly combining research, personal reflection, interviews with climate experts and stunning black-and-white visuals, Squarzoni teaches readers about the basics of climate change, breaking down difficult concepts like atmospheric science, the benefits and drawbacks of renewable energy options, the IPCC, and how we got here — that is, at the center of a climate crisis — in the first place. At nearly 500 pages, it’s no light read, but the subject matter isn’t light either, and nearly a decade after its publication, the book is still highly relevant and beneficial to all readers hoping to understand more about our changing planet.
Paying the Land, Joe Sacco (2020)
Macmillan Publishers
Joe Sacco’s 2020 blend of comic and journalism, Paying the Land, centers around the Dene people — an indigenous group in the Northwest Territories of Canada in the Mackenzie River Valley — and the mining industry that began to encroach in the late 1800s. Mining for oil, gas and diamonds brought jobs to these territories, and with it, waste, scarred landscapes, pipelines and development, as well as rising rates of alcohol abuse and other social problems. Sacco explores the benefits and the steep costs of mining on the Dene people, to whom the land was essential to their livelihoods and ways of being — and which they believe cannot be owned in the first place. He digs into the history of the region, including the residential school system that isolated indigenous children from their families and culture, and how the Dene came to rely on wage labor.
The book’s name is derived from the long Dene tradition of repaying the land when something is taken from it, thereby allowing the earth to continue sustaining itself. This idea is commented on throughout the book — both visually and in words — on the fossil fuel industry’s antithetical treatment of the land, taking from it by drilling for oil and fracked gas, and leaving only toxins behind.
The book asks us to see how the fossil fuels that we use are linked to the displacement of indigenous people and the desecration of our environment, and the deep complexity of these issues.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton (2022)
Drawn & Quarterly
In 2008, hundreds of migrating ducks died after landing in the oil sludge of Alberta’s oil sands. This graphic memoir chronicles Kate Beaton’s time as a laborer in those sands, trying to pay off her student loans during the lucrative Alberta oil rush. Against a backdrop of Canada’s stunning landscapes, Beaton’s illustrations of industrial development and razed earth show the visible and devastating impact of the oil sands on the environment. During her two years on the job, Beaton faces harassment, misogyny and threat of violence from the men she works alongside. The book exposes the trauma and hardship inherent to this kind of work that isn’t often discussed. She considers the land that was taken from First Nations people for this industry, and how they’ve become economically wrapped up in the oil sands, but have also suffered from higher rates of cancer. Ultimately, the book serves as a critique of the way we cheaply, irresponsibly and violently source our energy.
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, Lauren Redniss (2020)
Penguin Random House
In Oak Flat, artist and writer Lauren Redniss follows the long battle of the Apache people to save their land from development. The title refers to Oak Flat itself, a mesa in southeastern Arizona near the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. The site has historical and cultural significance to the Apache people as an ancient burial ground, and as the place where young Apache women hold their coming-of-age Sunrise Ceremony. Ten years after copper reserves were discovered in the area in 1995, a law passed that transferred ownership of the land to Resolution Copper, which is still planning mining development that would alter this landscape forever. While the company has promised jobs — an attractive prospect in an area that has faced much economic hardship — skepticism and fear of another boom-and-bust cycle pervades in the divided community. The book is structured around interviews with native people who live near Oak Flat — two families in particular, including one of an Apache teenage activist, and a mining family. Through it all, Redniss’ vibrant and colorful pencil sketches of the landscape and its people depict the beauty of Oak Flat.
If there hadn’t been construction planned for the bridge that crosses over Leslie Run, one of the creeks that runs through the middle of East Palestine, Ohio, Rick Tsai and Randy DeHaven might not have noticed the worst contamination they’d seen in the creek in weeks.
A backhoe had hoisted a chunk of earth from the bank of the creek, leaving a pool about eight feet across and deep enough to come up to the knees of Tsai’s rubber fishing waders. What it also left, in Tsai’s words, was an opportunity for a sort of “geological sample” — evidence that oil and chemicals still lingered in the soil and in the creeks six months after a catastrophic derailment.
On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train carrying thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals derailed and spilled its contents in the town of East Palestine, on the Pennsylvania border. Three days later, in an effort to prevent a dangerous explosion, Norfolk Southern supervised a controlled vent-and-burn of hazardous vinyl chloride, which produced a toxic cloud that spread for miles over the surrounding area.
On a late August morning, Tsai asked me to stand on the freshly created edge of the pool, while he shook some dirt and rocks loose from the bank with a metal rod. As they tumbled into the water, an iridescent web spooled out across the water’s surface, emanating from the point Tsai had disturbed. He exclaimed into his respirator, declared the water as bad as he’d ever seen, and gestured for me to lean down and look closer. The simple fact of my body’s weight on the creek bank elicited a new burst of oily sheen, billowing into the still pool.
“It looked like ‘Starry Night,’” Tsai, referring to the Vincent van Gogh painting, later described to a few community members gathered in the lobby of his chiropractic office. “It would be beautiful if it weren’t so toxic and deadly.”
Rick Tsai searches for evidence of lasting pollution in the creek water at a construction site at Leslie Run. With a metal rod, he disturbs the oily sheen on the creek’s surface. Grist/ Eve Andrews
As the one-year anniversary of the derailment approaches, Tsai, DeHaven, and many other residents across East Palestine and its surrounding towns have not accepted federal regulators’ assurance that the water, air, and soil are safe for its residents. In rubber boots and waders, smartphones strapped to their chests to document the pollution, they wield shovels and rods to dislodge rocks and earth that harbor reserves of substances persistently leaching into the creeks. By DeHaven’s estimate, he spends as many as 15 hours a week wading through the waterways.
At the beginning of August, when construction on the bridge began, DeHaven found a pool that had been dammed off in Leslie Run, thick with oil that carried a chemical stink. Dead fish littered the bottom of the creek. That week, Tsai took a water sample from Sulphur Run, upstream of its juncture with Leslie Run, using a kit approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He sent it to a Eurofins lab in Cleveland to test for the presence of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.
I asked Tsai, when I met him at the construction site, how he knew the substance pouring out of the bank was more than oil. He told me that it was how he felt, physically, when he spent time in the creek without a gas mask: burning nostrils, faintness, acid reflux, diarrhea. He showed me a smattering of red spots on his forearm, where the water had splashed onto his bare skin.
Rick Tsai shows a rash on his forearm, which he says came from contact with contaminated creek water.
Grist / Eve Andrews
“Me getting these symptoms, proving there may be something in there, all the bullshit — why would we have to do it?” he said to me later, over the phone. “It’s because we never get any straight answers from the EPA.”
Tsai got the results back from Eurofins in the middle of September. His sample showed elevated levels of three VOCs: isopropylbenzene, cyclohexane, and methylcyclohexane, all of which are related to petroleum.
It’s no secret that there’s still oil in the creeks. First of all, you can see it. But in the middle of October, the EPA published a report that detailed derailment-related compounds — benzo(a)pyrene, toluene, and acetone, among others — detected in water sampling. The agency ordered Norfolk Southern to conduct additional analysis and cleanup of creek sediment.
A local resident collects a sample from Leslie Run creek on February 25, 2023, in East Palestine to test the pH and the total dissolved solids (TDS) of the water. Michael Swensen / Getty Images
The EPA reports having taken over 100 million samples of soil, air, and water in and surrounding East Palestine since the night of the derailment. The crux of the agency’s argument that local homes are safe to inhabit is that derailment-related chemicals in those samples have measured below levels considered dangerous to human health since April. And if the outdoor environment has ostensibly been free of dangerous contamination for several months, said Mark Durno, the EPA emergency response coordinator for East Palestine, in an interview with Grist, there’s no scientific rationale for concerns about the air indoors.
But other scientists who have been researching East Palestine have conflicting opinions regarding how contamination has lingered — whether it has persisted in carpets and walls and foundations of homes while it’s cleared outdoors, or if disturbance of the soil and creek water during the monthslong cleaning process stirred up chemicals into the air, polluting buildings anew. Andrew Whelton, a professor of environmental engineering at Purdue University, has been conducting studies to explore those possibilities.
Officials inspect the area around the derailed train on February 17, 2023.
US EPA handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
“Four months after the derailment, we went back to contaminated buildings, and they still smelled like the acrid chemical contamination odor that was associated with the spill,” said Whelton. “And after we came back to Purdue, we were contacted by several other commercial building owners around the site who said they got sick being inside within one minute. Four months after the disaster.”
That suggests, as he shared in a panel hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, that “a number of the exposures occurred not just from the initial crash or the open burn, but the actual contamination leaving the creeks and finding its way to people either outside or inside.”
Indoor air quality is both a complicated and critical factor in post-disaster remediation. There are already a litany of chemicals from common sources — cleaning products, cigarette smoke, gas stoves — that pollute the air in a home well before a toxic explosion devastates your town. The ways in which emissions from that explosion can settle into a home and interact with each of those chemicals are also numerous and difficult to predict.
An EPA instruction guide on indoor air monitoring after an incident of contamination notes that, due to the wide variety of pathways through which a chemical can enter a building, “the amount of chemical arriving at the building then becomes a complex function of meteorological conditions and soil properties.”
There’s also debate surrounding the definition of “levels of concern,” particularly in a chemical spill with at least a dozen different pollutants mixing and intermingling with each other. Stephen Lester, cofounder of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice in Falls Church, Virginia, has been counseling the greater East Palestine community on the risks of dioxin exposure. Lester was hired by the state of New York in 1978 as a science advisor to the community of Love Canal, where a landfill in the town of Niagara Falls leached upwards of 20,000 tons of toxic chemicals into the neighborhood surrounding it.
“Scientists and public health officials are largely making statements based on an analysis of risk of one chemical at a time,” he said. “We don’t have any analysis, any tools, or a way of judging what’s going to happen to people who are exposed to 15 chemicals.”
Almost a year has passed since the derailment and vent-and-burn. Still, residents continue to report physical ailments that they can’t explain: nosebleeds, headaches, growths, dizziness, gastrointestinal issues. (“It’s not really the stuff of polite conversation,” said one business owner in town.)
So whom do you trust? The government agency that maintains that everything is fine, or those who suggest that the danger has not fully passed?
At a town meeting a couple of weeks after the derailment, “The frustration that I was feeling in the room and hearing in the room was very much similar to the frustrations of my experiences at Love Canal,” said Lester, “where government was just openly saying one thing and people knew that just couldn’t possibly be the case, because their firsthand, personal experiences were so much different.”
And the very nature of the pollution generated by the derailment makes those personal experiences highly variable.
First, the environment in which the exposure takes place — including all the other chemicals in that environment — affects whether it has a toxic effect on a person.
“Toxic effects often add up or synergize, even if the individual chemical levels are safe,” explained Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego who is conducting a study on the toxicity of the East Palestine derailment. Two people can be exposed to the same chemical — or even the same mix of chemicals — and have entirely different reactions, based on their genes and the incalculable quantity and mixture of other chemicals they’ve been exposed to in their life.
And chemicals from the spill and the subsequent burn-off seeped into the surrounding region through many different paths, concentrating around some homes while sparing others. Butyl acrylate carried down the current of the creek could settle into sediment under one house, and never touch a property far from a waterway; the cloud of incinerated vinyl chloride could rain down on one farm and blow clear over the next.
Whether you suffered or not, it seemed, was just a matter of chance.
One Halloween, when Krissy Ferguson was about 12, a bunch of neighborhood boys on Rebecca Street in East Palestine talked her into corning old man Snyder’s house. Corning, she explained, is when you fill a sock with the hard field corn that’s left after a harvest and throw it at someone’s house so that all the grains pelt against the windows like buckshot.
The way Ferguson told it on an afternoon in October, more than 30 years later, the group of them got caught and Snyder jumped on his moped and chased them down the street as if he had every intent of running them down. Terrified, she ran into the culvert under Rebecca Street, a wide stone tunnel containing a stretch of Sulphur Run. It was the first time she had set foot in it.
Many old East Palestine houses still have the remnants of century-old sewer systems, and an uncapped pipe runs directly from the Fergusons’ basement into that culvert, essentially funneling evaporation from Sulphur Run directly into her house. The creek itself rises quickly with a heavy rain, where it can flood her basement. Ferguson showed me wet patches on the concrete floor around the drain filter that tops the old pipe.
Sulphur Run flows through a culvert under Krissy Ferguson’s house on Rebecca Street. An uncapped pipe leads directly from her basement to the creek, which was contaminated in the derailment. Grist / Eve Andrews
In the days after the derailment, Ferguson felt dizzy and nauseous whenever she set foot in her house. Her eyes stung and her vision got worse. She couldn’t keep her balance walking from one end of her living room to another. The smell that permeated the house was like “sweet paint thinner” that left a strong metallic taste in her mouth and dried out her lips.
Nine months since the night the train crashed a few hundred yards from her home, Ferguson is still dealing with health complications. She suffers from headaches, her vision hasn’t fully returned, and in September, a set of growths appeared around her groin. CTEH, the emergency environmental remediation firm contracted by Norfolk Southern, has told her that everything is safe in her home, but she gets sick every time she visits.
“I can’t get out of February 3,” she said, perched on the couch in the living room she no longer lives in. “I have no more answers now than I did that night.”
Krissy Ferguson sits in the living room of her house on Rebecca Street, where she lived from birth until Norfolk Southern’s train derailed a few blocks away on February 3, 2023.
Grist / Eve Andrews
Ferguson, along with her parents, daughter, and husband, evacuated that weekend. They spent several months in two hotel rooms in the town of Chippewa, Pennsylvania, and now live in a rental house paid for by Norfolk Southern in the town of Columbiana, 15 minutes away from East Palestine.
“What I keep saying to [Norfolk Southern],” said Ferguson, “is that a pocket of chemicals sat soaking into a home built in 1930 with a sandstone foundation. You can’t get chemicals out of a sandstone foundation.”
In the vernacular of toxicology, this is what’s called “a pathway to exposure.” Jami Wallace first heard the term when a toxicologist from CTEH pointed out creek water pooling next to her basement wall, which faces Sulphur Run. (CTEH has been repeatedly criticized by environmental groups for implementing faulty data to determine health risks to the victims of environmental disasters, including the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company has responded to these accusations in the FAQ section of their website.)
He told her that any water from the creek that’s contaminated is going to emit a chemical gas as it evaporates; Wallace wanted to know who would come test the air quality in her basement every day. The next day, she said, Norfolk Southern offered to pay to move her into another home.
“So I could have kept quiet, took my little check, and left,” she said. “But that’s not the kind of people that we are, my husband or I. That night was the first town hall meeting in East Palestine, at the high school auditorium. EPA said, ‘Everything’s fine.’ Mayor said, ‘Everything’s fine.’ So I get the mic and I say, ‘Well, did you know that they said my house was contaminated and offered to move me today? I have a video of it.’ The mayor never called me back.”
For a number of East Palestine residents, the foundation of their mistrust in federal and state public health and environmental agencies comes from repeated assurances that homes showed no signs of harmful contamination, while residents like Wallace and Ferguson have received payment from Norfolk Southern for their temporary relocation — and why would they have to move if the homes weren’t contaminated? A spokesman for Norfolk Southern says that the railroad paid for relocation for those who wanted it during the cleanup process, which does not constitute an acknowledgment of contamination of those homes, and that that program would be coming to an end in February.
Testing mechanisms used by CTEH — and approved by the EPA — have also been criticized by independent scientists as insufficient, relying on inappropriate technology and thresholds of contamination higher than what is considered a risk to human health.
Whelton, the engineering professor at Purdue, said that the handheld photoionization detectors that CTEH used to measure indoor contamination in the months after the derailment weren’t sensitive enough to detect low levels of butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride that are still dangerous to human health. Furthermore, Whelton and a team of engineers conducted a study on these devices that found that they did not provide reliable readings outside of a controlled lab setting.
“We published this, we talked with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health seven years ago on this issue, the Centers for Disease Control 10 years ago,” said Whelton. “It was well known that these devices should not be used how they were applied.”
In June, E&E News reported that the EPA had been aware of CTEH’s use of inappropriate equipment to conduct indoor air testing for weeks before making a public statement about it. Many residents complained that they never heard about this mishap directly from the EPA, finding out about it on social media or from friends. And they never got follow-up indoor air testing, either.
An air monitoring report from CTEH for one East Palestine building, for example, found no detection of dangerous levels of VOCs on the devices used but noted a chemical odor so “unpleasant and overwhelming” that the testing team left after 10 minutes. (In response to this claim, CTEH referred Grist to its FAQ section, which reads: “While some individuals may experience psychosomatic effects from the presence of a strong odor (e.g., headache, nausea, etc.), there is a difference between that temporary, transient experience and the significant health impacts against which exposure guidelines and standards are protective.”)
A sampling of the measurement tools used by officials inspecting the area around East Palestine in the wake of the 2023 train derailment and chemical spill.
US EPA handout / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
In an interview, EPA emergency response coordinator Mark Durno said that butyl acrylate has such a strong odor even at extremely low concentrations that it can be detected by scent alone at levels below those considered dangerous to human health — which is why the agency is confident that that particular chemical has ventilated out of buildings, because it can no longer be smelled.
But what constitutes harmful levels of exposure in a case like East Palestine is actually very difficult to establish, because there is such a dearth of research on the health consequences of potentially continuous exposure to multiple chemicals at once.
“It’s a real indictment of the scientific community that we haven’t done the research to begin to really answer these questions,” said Lester, the toxicologist with the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. “And it’s also an indictment of the EPA, to go before the public and say to them that everything is fine, we don’t have any evidence that your health will be affected by this.
“And that’s such a disingenuous statement, and a misstatement of reality and truth, that it’s very frustrating for someone like myself to hear that — because there’s just not data that is collected that can support it.”
Wallace and I spoke at the house she and her husband and 4-year-old daughter, Kyla, are renting in East Liverpool, Ohio, about 20 miles south of East Palestine on the Ohio River. She furnished their new home with finds culled from yard sales and thrift stores. Before moving into the hillside bungalow in May, Wallace’s family was living in hotels with little sense of how long they’d be there.
On Facebook, she noticed that many of her neighbors and contacts in East Palestine had a lot of the same questions and concerns about the EPA and Norfolk Southern’s repeated assertions that homes were safe, while the physical symptoms they were experiencing implied otherwise. She started to organize, forming a group of concerned citizens under the name Unity Council.
“It just started with us coming up with a list of demands, things like Governor Mike Dewine asking for a State of Emergency declaration, air testing, health monitoring, relocation,” said Hilary Flint, the council’s vice president. “A lot of those demands we made in that March-April time period. We’re still making the same demands.”
Flint had moved back to her family home in East Palestine’s neighboring town of Enon Valley, Pennsylvania, after a battle with cancer in 2022, and wants to know whether she’s facing exposures that could take her out of remission. In March, a research team at Wayne State University found ethylhexyl acrylate, a volatile organic compound associated with the derailment, in the air filter in Flint’s bedroom. In August, follow-up testing confirmed that the same chemical was still present in another home near Flint’s.
Continued indoor air testing is the most prevalent demand that concerned residents continue to make of the EPA. In June, members of Unity Council visited Washington, D.C. to meet with a number of congressional representatives and their staffers. That’s where they learned about the criteria for Superfund site designations.
“To go from having a number to being on the registry is a point system, and one of the ways to get the most points is if you have bad indoor air,” said Flint. “And if we went on the registry, from my understanding, they’d have to relocate a lot of people and it would possibly unlock federal benefits. I believe they’re just trying to avoid that economic burden.”
But the EPA has not offered or performed indoor testing in homes since April of 2023. In an interview, EPA emergency response coordinator Mark Durno gave several reasons for that: Testing in February and March did not show dangerous levels of derailment-related VOCs in any homes; those VOCs have short half-lifes and would be expected to ventilate out of homes by now; and the agency sees testing for the “peace of mind” of residents as not recommended due to the difficulty in distinguishing household VOCs from potentially derailment-related VOCs.
“I could see a scenario where some biological monitoring suggests that some environmental exposures that are specifically train derailment-related may be recommended,” he said. “In that case, then I could see some research dollars going towards evaluating that. But in its current condition, there’s just no feasible scientific reason to believe that there are any indoor continued exposures going on in homes.”
Misti Allison, for one, is not satisfied by those explanations. In September, she co-organized a collaboration with the local nonprofit The Way Station to distribute over 70 indoor air monitors to households across the town in homes, churches, and businesses to track VOC levels for one week. If the EPA won’t test to see if there are still toxic chemicals lingering in our homes, they said, we’ll do it ourselves.
Most of the monitors showed low levels of VOCs, but some locations scattered throughout town consistently measured in the “moderate,” “bad,” and “very bad” ranges. Allison has shared the results with the mayor, the village council, the village manager, academic researchers, and Mark Durno of the EPA.
“[Durno] was very complimentary of the community-based assessment project,” she said. “I was grateful for the support because I wasn’t sure about how the EPA would feel about us doing this citizen science.”
The problem is that these readings only tell total levels and activity of VOCs and indicate how safe that overall level is to breathe — they can’t distinguish whichVOCs are present. So while residents are looking for evidence of VOCs released in the February 3 derailment, like butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride, the monitors are also picking up VOCs emitted by common household cleaners, shampoos, and other products.
Erin Haynes, chair of the department of epidemiology and environmental health at the University of Kentucky, has distributed 15 devices to append to the indoor air monitors that Allison helped distribute. Judy Westrick’s lab at Wayne State University will analyze the results from those devices to discern the presence of specific chemicals and compounds related to the train derailment, including butyl acrylate and ethylhexyl acrylate. Additionally, 20 residents of East Palestine volunteered to provide Haynes with samples of blood and urine. The blood will be analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the presence of dioxins, and Westrick’s lab is measuring for a specific metabolite produced when the body processes vinyl chloride and acrylates.
The results from these tests could help answer the question of whether chemicals from the derailment have persisted in homes, months later.
“Were they exposed? Absolutely,” said Haynes. “If they were anywhere near that derailment, there was an exposure.” But the question she’s investigating is the duration of the exposure, if chemicals have lingered in indoor spaces or if pockets of chemicals in the soil and water erupted and exposed residents anew. When creeks were aerated in February and March to remove VOCs from the water, for example, there’s a possibility that those chemicals were absorbed into culverts and foundations like the one under Ferguson’s house. As of early December, the EPA was still performing cleanup in culverts across East Palestine.
In April, Beatrice Golomb, the medical professor at the University of California San Diego, launched a pilot project to analyze exposure and health effects after the derailment. Golomb previously studied the impacts of environmental pollution on veterans from the Gulf War, and found that even a few days’ worth of exposure to toxic chemicals from explosions, burn pits, and other sources of pollution can affect the mitochondria of human cells, leading to a wide and difficult-to-predict variety of health problems. When she read about symptoms being reported from East Palestine, she hypothesized that residents there might be experiencing the same thing.
“The fact that it’s multiple symptoms, spanning many different organs, that it differs from person to person — all of these are classic for impairment of mitochondria,” she said, referring to many of the reported persistent conditions.
Many residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area shared a similar feeling: that the derailment of the train on February 3 established their participation in a human experiment to which they did not consent.
“We are peeing in cups and getting arms jabbed with needles and wearing silicone wristbands to see what these long-term health care impacts are going to be, and to have real insight into what our children are facing,” said Allison. “We are truly canaries in the coal mine.”
Not everyone in town is plagued by the same level of concern. Dianna Elzer, who owns several businesses in East Palestine and the neighboring town of Negley, had well and pond water tested at several properties she and her husband own by a researcher with Wayne State University. They didn’t find anything, and she never felt sick.
“I’m in the camp that says, ‘OK, we may have some health issues down the road, but right now, we just need to kind of quit harping on it,’” said Elzer. “Norfolk Southern hasn’t left. They’re still cleaning up. EPA is still here. If they had left and it was still a mess, I’d be right there bitching with everybody else. But they’re doing a ton for this town.
“And a lot of people if you ask them — this could potentially be the best thing that ever happened to East Palestine, because we were not a thriving area. If we could survive getting to the other side, Norfolk Southern is pumping so much money into this town that it will really be a boom.”
The headquarters of Norfolk Southern in Atlanta. The U.S. Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit on March 30, 2023, against Norfolk Southern seeking damages over the East Palestine train derailment.
David J. Griffin / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
It is a lot of money — as of press time, $104 million in addition to the $800 million cost of cleanup. A $25 million revitalization of the East Palestine City Park, courtesy of the railroad. Plans for a railroad safety training center for its employees, to bring further money and jobs East Palestine’s way. College scholarships for East Palestine high school students. More than $3 million to outfit the town’s fire department with brand-new gear. Over half a million to local nonprofits providing community aid, and another half million for an economic development consultant for the town. Air purifiers, a family assistance center on the main street of town, and a “wing bash” (as in chicken) for the town’s first responders.
But that doesn’t do much for residents who have left, too wary of lasting health impacts and distrusting of pronouncements of safety to return. And those who have stayed are increasingly frustrated by the insistence of their former neighbors that so many of the town’s homes are ruined, that the air, soil, and water are still deadly and toxic.
In the months since the derailment, Randy DeHaven (left) and Krissy Ferguson (right) have become friends as they both worked to understand the impact the pollution would have on their community.
Grist / Eve Andrews
Some of Ferguson’s neighbors on her block no longer speak to her since she’s been so vocal about the possibility of lasting contamination in her home. On the day Donald Trump came to East Palestine, after Ferguson had given a number of interviews in which she’d claimed the derailment had made her home unlivable, she found a bloody severed lamb’s tongue on her porch swing. (At least, she thinks it was a lamb. It definitely belonged to a mammal.)
“A lot of us have been labeled ‘tear down the town,’” said Ferguson. “I’ve told my story. I’m not going to fight and tell anyone, ‘You’re in denial.’ Now, if you’re not experiencing [health effects], I say you’re totally blessed. Ten to 15 years from now, I hope you are as blessed as you are now. I don’t discredit them.”
The derailment in East Palestine is not the first disaster of its kind, and it won’t be the last — and those who lived through those disasters can offer advice and support to those enduring them now.
Marilyn Leistner, the last mayor of Times Beach, Missouri, before the town was evacuated due to widespread dioxin contamination from a nearby pharmaceutical manufacturer, is in frequent contact with a couple of people in East Palestine. Melissa Mays, one of the lead organizers after the Flint disaster, gave advice in the weeks following the derailment. (“She told us early on you’d see that it’d be a bunch of house mothers that were fighting,” said Wallace, “And it’s funny, because that’s almost all of Unity Council.”)
In December, Wallace began to organize the Coalition of Chemically Impacted Citizens with representatives from Times Beach, Flint, and Love Canal. “East Palestine is not gonna fight this alone,” she said. “We have a group of fighters, Flint has a group of fighters, Times Beach — if we all share information, we can accomplish a lot more. And it’s so incredibly therapeutic to talk to people who have been through this because you literally feel like you’re going insane.”
“Now that this happened to us, I’ve done more research on some of these other places,” said Daren Gamble, Jami Wallace’s stepfather who retired from his job as a bricklayer shortly before the derailment. “And, you know, it’s the same scenario over and over and over. It’s like a mass shooting, ‘Well, they don’t happen here. They happen somewhere else.’But you know, they happen! And the bad thing is, it’s just a matter of time before it happens somewhere else, before another train derails, and we have the same thing again.”
Members of Unity Council are now connecting with communities concerned for some kind of environmental disaster coming their way. They’ve provided letters of support for a group in Cincinnati opposing the sale of one of the country’s last publicly owned railroads to Norfolk Southern; they’ve begun to consult with the nearby borough of Beaver, home of the Shell ethane cracker plant, to help them put an emergency response plan into place in the event that something goes awry at the plant.
In September, Jami Wallace, Hilary Flint, and Daren Gamble traveled to New York City for Climate Week with the organization Break Free From Plastic. It was Gamble’s first time in New York, and the group met with a number of environmental organizations to share their experiences from East Palestine.
People asked Gamble to tell his story over and over again — “not the short version, they want the whole thing.” He met Al Gore, who showed him a photo he’d saved on his cell phone from the news in February, the billowing black cloud of the explosion after the derailment. He told Gamble what was happening to his community was “criminal.”
“I probably spoke more in the last eight months than I have in 60 years,” said Gamble, sitting on the front porch of his house. “It’s just, I didn’t have anything to say. But once this started, I would talk to anybody that would listen. Maybe the right person, and you never know who, might be able to give you some help somewhere along the line.”
On a windy day last August, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation protecting the canyons, cliffs, and plateaus surrounding the Grand Canyon National Park, nearly a million acres abutting the Navajo Nation and Havasupai Indian Reservation.
To Carletta Tilousi, one of the leaders of the Havasupai Tribe who have called the Grand Canyon home for more than 800 years, Biden’s presence and his words felt momentous. “Finally, the small voices of Indigenous people have been heard in the White House,” she thought.
But she knew the fight was not over. The monument prevented hundreds of mining claims, but two uranium mines were grandfathered in, in part due to an 1872 law that guaranteed their right to operate. And now, nearly 40 years after first gaining permission to extract uranium, a Colorado-based company is cashing in.
On December 21, Energy Fuels Resources announced it had started mining uranium at Pinyon Plain Mine, which lies within the borders of the national monument and has lain dormant until now.
The 17-acre Pinyon Plain Mine is 12 miles from the Grand Canyon, six miles from the Grand Canyon National Park, and four miles north of Red Butte, a site sacred to the Havasupai people where Biden gave his August address. The Havasupai Tribe sued along with environmental groups to prevent the mine from starting production, but lost its case in 2022.
Energy Fuels plans to operate the mine for three years to six years and estimates that it will generate 2 million pounds of uranium, says Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development.
“After mining operations are complete, the Pinyon Plain area will be fully reclaimed and returned to its natural state,” the company has promised. “There will be virtually no evidence a mine ever occupied the site.”
Amber Reimondo is doubtful. She’s energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau that sued to prevent the mine along with the Havasupai Tribe, and says uranium mining threatens the aquifer in the greater Grand Canyon area.
“Of course we want to reduce carbon emissions, [but] we want to make sure that we do that in a way that doesn’t continue to impact Indigenous communities,” she said.
According to Reimondo, water systems in the landscape are complex and interconnected. Energy Fuels’ mining process involves drilling a mine shaft through shallow aquifers into uranium deposits, and water flows into the shaft, mixing with the ore, before being pumped out. The concern is that contaminated water will be mixed back into the groundwater.
To date, the company has removed about 49 million gallons of water from the shaft, leaving it to evaporate in an aboveground pool or sharing it with local ranchers for their cattle once treated to EPA standards. Reimondo worries that water could eventually contaminate not only drinking water sources but the creeks and waterfalls throughout the Grand Canyon.
“It’s really, really difficult for researchers to understand exactly what that risk is, because the region is so highly fractured and because we don’t know exactly where water flows to and from,” Reimondo said.
Energy Fuels’ Curtis Moore thinks that concern is overblown. He said that the water that the company pumps out of the shaft is already highly concentrated in uranium because it has been in contact with the rocks long before their mining operations started.
“Their implication is that we are contaminating groundwater, which is simply false — it’s naturally not appropriate for human consumption,” he said. He pointed to a 2022 permit from the state of Arizona that concluded the geology of the mine site — like the slope of the land and type of rock — are “expected to prevent any potential impacts to groundwater resulting from mining operations.”
That potential for negative long-term effects are what Havasupai Tribe members are concerned about. Dianna Uqualla, a Havasupai Tribal Council member, says if there’s pollution in the aquifer years from now, she doubts anyone will take responsibility.
“Who’s going to pay the price?” she asked. “Who’s going to be the one to say, ‘Yeah, I did it’? I don’t think anybody’s going to do that. They’re just going to say, ‘Well, one less tribe, and we’re happy for that,’ is what the non-Natives will probably think.”
Despite that ban, once mined, the uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine will be trucked to the White Mesa Mill in southern Utah along state and federal highways, including through Navajo Nation. Navajo President Buu Nygren has implored the federal government to step in on the matter.
Once the ore makes it to White Mesa Mill, the company will extract natural uranium concentrate from the uranium ore, before selling the powder to U.S. nuclear power facilities, which arrange for the concentrate to be sent to other facilities for conversion and enrichment.
Moore says that uranium mining is much safer and better regulated than it was decades ago, and trucking the uranium ore is safe. Uqualla and Tilousi remain skeptical.
Tilousi wishes that Congress would update the 1872 mining law that allowed Energy Fuels to continue operating a mine on a national monument. That’s something the Biden administration has recommended too, in part because the law allows companies to hold mining rights for long periods of time, which sows distrust among local communities including Indigenous peoples.
Tilousi is hopeful reform can happen but doesn’t expect it anytime soon.
“As a Native American living in this country, we are always fighting something,” Tilousi said. “It seems like we are always fighting for our existence.”
Microplastics are tiny plastic particles from textiles and other sources that have broken down into smaller and smaller pieces until they are less than five millimeters in length. They have been found all over the world, from sediments in the deep ocean to Arctic snow.
Scientists have found that microplastics are being released though natural fertilizers from treated sewage sludge deposited onto agricultural fields, as more plastic particles get picked up by the wind than was previously believed, a press release from the American Chemical Society (ACS) said.
“Land application of wastewater biosolids on agricultural soils is suggested as a sustainable pathway to support the circular economy; however, this practice often enriches microplastics and associated contaminants in topsoil,” the authors of the small-scale study wrote. “Analyzing wind-borne sediments collected from wind tunnel experiments on biosolid-applied agricultural fields, we show enrichment of microplastics in wind-blown sediments.”
The researchers found that microplastics are picked up from fields by wind more easily than dust particles of a similar size.
“[T]he combined effects of the low density of microplastics and weakened wet-bonding interparticle forces between microplastics and soil particles lower their threshold velocity, the minimum wind velocity necessary for wind erosion to occur. Our calculations indicate that microplastics could be emitted at wind speeds lower than the characteristic threshold of background soil,” the researchers wrote in the study.
The study, “Preferential Emission of Microplastics from Biosolid-Applied Agricultural Soils: Field Evidence and Theoretical Framework,” was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
Microplastics have increasingly been found in water supplies and the human body, as well as in wastewater and sewage, ACS said. Sewage solids can be treated and turned into “biosolids” that can be used as an agricultural fertilizer that is both renewable and natural.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates are that more than 2.2 million tons of biosolids are applied to land annually — that’s approximately half the total collected in wastewater treatment plants. This gives microplastics found in biosolids the opportunity to reenter the natural environment. The tiny plastics could be carrying wastewater pollutants on them, making them dangerous to inhale.
The research team looked at wind-blown sediments containing airborne microplastics that had been gathered on two plots of land treated with biosolids in Washington state. The researchers found that the sediments had higher microplastics concentrations than the source soil or biosolids.
Because the microplastics are not as dense or “sticky” as soil minerals like quartz, they aren’t as easily trapped by moisture. This means they can more readily be swept up by breezes that are not strong enough to blow dust into the air.
“Analyzing the windspeed distribution for 3 months of wind events over a bare soil surface, we showed that more than 84% of the wind events exceed the threshold velocity of microplastics of size 150 μm, while only 23% of the wind events exceed the threshold velocity of the background soil,” the researchers wrote.
The research team said earlier models didn’t consider unique properties of microplastics like the “sticky effect” when making estimates of emissions from fields treated with biosolids. Because of this, the older models likely miscalculated the true amount of microplastics released into the air.
The team’s calculations indicated that plastic particles may be blown from barren agricultural fields almost 2.5 times more frequently by wind events than previously thought.
“Thus, current models for fugitive dust emissions may underestimate the microplastic emission potential of biosolid-amended soils,” the study said.
