Scientists tracked down a mass killer of salmon
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We keep churning out new compounds (~2000 every year??!) or new use cases for existing ones at insane scale or speed because "most of them are safe". Except the ones that aren't cause a wide range of damage, take 15 years to identify as causes, 15 more years to ban, 15 more to leave the ecosystem if they do at all, and are often replaced by minor variations that haven't been yet proven dangerous.
It seems to me these things should be considered unsafe by default, tested at small scale for years, proven to be bio-degradable and if used at scale introduced very slowly... which in many cases won't be possible, which will readjust our stance so we only use them when absolutely critical and necessary vs. eg. putting teflon or PFAS in literally everything because why not.
The other thing is individual accountability: chemical engineers who facilitate this insanity should be held responsible. Putting lead in gasoline and CFCs in the atmosphere used to get you medals, now similar "inventions" should get you a jail term proportionate to the damage caused.
That's no way to create shareholder value.
Hey, I wanted to point out for your future reference that you really should be blaming the chemists. They’re the ones who design the product and intentionally choose this. Chemical engineers are the ones who do the manufacturing of chemical products. I have CE friends and they’re the ones in the plants keeping processes running
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsal...
If any effect is seen at a 100x dose (of the amount expected to be ingested) the chemical would be dropped.
Some chemcials are damn useful while being toxic. I don't think the right thing to do is banning all toxic chemcials because they might cause environmental damage. Instead, let's focus on figuring out safe handling upfront.
A good example of this is batteries. Super toxic, super useful.
Batteries are a great example. We really need good battery recycling. We also really need good batteries, since it looks like they'll play a major role in preventing catastrophic global warming.
First, what is a 'dose' for a new chemical?
Second, there are all sorts of critical things that if you took 100x the recommended dose you would see a significant negative physiological effect. Like salt. Or water.
This is a far more nuanced problem that "let's just shoot up some monkeys with a gallon of the stuff and see if their nuts shrivel up". In fact, that sort of reductionist approach is why we have this problem.
The dose is the amount you expect an animal to ingest in its lifetime.
> Second, there are all sorts of critical things that if you took 100x the recommended dose you would see a significant negative physiological effect. Like salt. Or water.
Uh, lol, no. 100x and 1000x multiples are standard EPA testing procedure, so you're not disagreeing with me, you're disagreeing with the EPA, and I'm gonna stick with the EPA on this one. [1]
> This is a far more nuanced problem that "let's just shoot up some monkeys with a gallon of the stuff and see if their nuts shrivel up". In fact, that sort of reductionist approach is why we have this problem.
That's a disingenuous reading. A 1000x dose of these chemicals would be less than a miligram, which is plenty to do harm. Even lead can do brain damage at the ppm level (some chemicals are even ppb). Don't be too embarrassed by your comment though, we all start somewhere.
Radiation too, 2-30 is pretty typical and no statistically significant results but bring that to 300 and you get measurable increase in cancer rates.
(Entry 1 of 2) 1a : the measured quantity of a therapeutic agent to be taken at one time b : the quantity of radiation administered or absorbed 2 : a portion of a substance added during a process 3 : an amount of something likened to a prescribed or measured quantity of medicine a daily dose of hard work a dose of scandal 4 : a gonorrheal infection
So the common definition isn't the one you are using. But if you pick your own definition, you get to be right.
Being able to write with accuracy and precision is hard. Don't be too embarrassed by your comment though, we all start somewhere.
How would they be expected to know what the results of their chemical will be? Drug companies focus exclusively on biological effects and can't even get drugs to regularly pass phase 1 trials, and you're asking for a single chemist at Industrial Sealants Inc to do what entire pharma companies can't? Putting lead in gasoline sounds dumb, but so does putting mercury in vaccines. The only way to tell the difference is to do studies, which would take teams of people. It is absolutely not possible to expect individual chemists to accurately predict the biological consequences of their products.
(And if we already do, then the rules for the higher tiers need to be tightened.)
There should also be a presumption that minor edits to known dangerous molecules should be presumed dangerous without testing.
In all of those studies, etc., there is someone at the top who does, and should, make the ultimate decision, just like when building a bridge, there is an engineer who puts his career on the line.
But further to that, if said executive does follow regulatory guidance and accepted practice but the product has a problem, should they really be held individually responsible?
For the clinical trials example, if a trial fails to turn up a significant problem, is it the exec's fault or the regulators? The regulators or the legislative body?
Putting a known biologically tested and FDA cleared preservative into vaccines is not "dumb".
Having to remove said preservative because because people committed medical fraud (and later lost their licenses) to create fear about it and because a bunch of people picked up on it as a desperate, now-negatively validated reason for their child having autism?
That's dumb. But the manufacturers did it anyway because people are dumb.
It sounds like you are describing the Precautionary Principle, which is unfortunately made light of here due to its impact on GMO food adoption in the EU. I do agree with you, but this idea seems to go against the hyper-growth form of capitalism which is generally accepted as the only option in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...
While we're waiting for some compound to be deemed 'safe' for some particular use, society is missing out on the benefits of that use.
The COVID vaccine is a very timely example of this. It/they haven't gone through nearly the amount of testing and trials that are normally required. But we're going ahead with it anyway, since waiting would cost more lives. This is a judgement call that some set of fallible humans has made. Easy in this huge, public, major case. But for the thousands of compounds developed yearly, who decides this, and at what cost to society in lives, quality of life and resources?
And this doesn't count the resources that society has to spend to make the determination of safety, which have their own opportunity cost as well.
Maybe the vaccine is actually a bad idea? I don't think so.
But even if it turned out to have terrible side effects, that would only affect people (the people alive now and taking the vaccine) and not the environment (all the humans and other animals, present and future).
Generally speaking, the latter camp gets labeled as "antiscientific" by the former, and the former gets labeled as "elitist" or having conflicts of interest. It's part of a theme that seems to be popping up a lot in the last several years or so in numerous settings: which is worse, lack of evidence or misleading evidence?
This example with the salmon is interesting to me because (if I'm understanding it correctly), the compound in the tire isn't the problem, it's a byproduct of tire breakdown. So I could see a chemist in the lab sitting there saying "ok we ran our tests on X it's fine" without understanding that in the real world, X reacts and breaks down into other compounds that are problematic. It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. Within the bounds of the model, X is fine, but the model is wrong as a representation of reality, so the conclusions are wrong.
I think underlying a lot of this are differing ideas of what is "scientific", or what constitutes the universe of risks. I don't see this dynamic changing until certain cultures surrounding scientific authority change.
What's your proposed alternative to science for determining the products of tire breakdown? Asking psychics? Polling facebook moms? Voting on it in Congress?
Worth pointing out just because your appeal to absurdism (which most of us would agree with) is losing steam in the marketplace of ideas.
The whole point is we need to accept that no single method will give us this kind of visibility and understanding, and given that fact we should be more careful about certain things, especially things we just seem to keep miscalculating and that have long-lasting, terrible effects.
That's actual science vs. commercial/industrial marketing masquerading as science.
But it takes effort, so the model only expands in the directions where a person chooses to the do that work. Scientific models are a communal human artefact, flawed with the bias and inattention of those that built them.
The is a lot we know about the world, from history, from our experience, that we are not able to express with enough rigor to include them in a scientific model.
So we can be confident that our scientific understanding of any new compound, will not gives us a complete understanding of the impact of that compound in the world. From history we have a partial map of our ignorance. We know from past experience that there are realms of unknown - ecological effects, decomposition products, birth defects, health impacts - associated with new products. We know there is a very big difference between safe and no known adverse impacts
Rather than an alternative to science, we need a more vigorous meta model, better appreciation of where the model ends, and a better model for how we should act given our ignorance. I don't think we lack the ability to do this, it's a matter of will and power.
Of course, gut feeling and "pontification-based" methods still have to prove themselves effective. You would need to have one group pontificate about the future using your meta-level thinking, and another group just focus on the concrete-level, and demonstrate that the proposed meta-model would improve the situation. A system to figure out what scientific discoveries were going to be made before they are made would be nice, but you can't just pick an oracle and say you've found it.
The problem is that all models are wrong to varying extents, but often in the scientific community the wrongness of models isn't recognized. You estimate your effect size or the p-value or posterior predictive p or whatever it is, but all those themselves are some estimates based on assumptions, and there's always some probability of being radically incorrect.
My concern isn't with science per se, it's that science as a community is often too arrogant and underestimates the extent to which it is likely to be incorrect. I just think critics need to be given more respect, especially when the argument against the critics is "we did a carefully controlled lab study under isolated conditions."
Maybe there needs to be a greater meta-scientific perspective with these things, like some policy that explicitly asks "how often when these types of evidence are submitted is something wrong?"
Do you mean "this particular scientific model" (which lacks the analysis of byproducts) or the scientific method? If the latter, what other method would you use instead?
So while the scientific method is fine, applying it without an abundance of caution commensurate to the potential negative impacts leads to poor outcomes in the long run.
Which leads to the real overall point I suppose - is there something better we could be using as "just never make anything new" isn't free of problems either so it's a question of "what's the best method" not "what method can guarantee something" (none so far can).
The issue described is akin to testing some new code with unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and running it for some time in a dev environment, but not running it in a QA environment that mirrors production, and not monitoring it for issues when it does get deployed to production.
The response there wouldn't be "the test/devops model isn't the correct one to use in the first place", it's that the testing and QA was inadequate because it only looked at an idealized model of reality and didn't consider "where the rubber meets the road" (literally). Testing something in isolation is insufficient, since you need to test the downstream effects and potential complex interactions with everything else in the environment.
There is no testism problem; only a poor testing problem. Unless, as you say in your last sentence, one is just arguing about definition semantics - e.g. if "QA" falls under "testing", or, here, if "real-world observation" falls under "scientific testing". I'd argue both do. I think your concerns might be better phrased as "lab model" and "lab-ism".
What you described isn't "the scientific model" but merely one flawed study. Science is the process of learning about the world. Scientific paradigms change. Right now we seem to have a statistical frequentist paradigm in most fields, but it's shifting towards Bayesian. The business science field still seems stuck in the case study / anecdote paradigm, though it's also shifting.
If the science doesn't seek to learn about "the real world" then it's bad science.
This seems to be a category error - after all it was science that found the problem also.
I think you are poking around the edges of something real here, but suspect the thinking is muddy still and falling into a false dichotomy. There is a lot of confusion about the role of science and what it can and can't do, but I don't think it maps at all purely onto the "culture wars" as you are seeming to suggest.
https://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach
The individual accountability is certainly tough, particularly since we learn about impacts only over time. And discoveries like these are studied, applied and distributed by ultimately hundreds to thousands of people.
But it wasn't because "why not" it was because there were very concrete benefits. This is why the fundamental issue is policy, not science - the science can only help you understand a situation better, it can't answer "what is the right amount of risk to take".
The precautionary approach you suggest isn't a new idea, but it has very real negative economic effect at minimum, and a complex relationship with other issues. Collectively, somehow (e.g. legislative bodies) we have to attempt the impossible task of finding the "right" position on the scale between don't-trust-anything-new to anything goes. Clearly both these extremes are problematic, but balancing them is really hard.
It took decades for a lot of people working on this problem to identify the cause of the salmon deaths.
Do not expect the individual chemical engineer to be able to come close to knowing how safe a chemical is.
But I get your point and I think there's something to be done advising caution with certain classes of chemicals. For example, ones containing Bromine and Fluorine have a much higher chance of being dangerous because their bonds are so strong
> In U.S. Pacific Northwest coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), stormwater exposure annually causes unexplained acute mortality when adult salmon migrate to urban creeks to reproduce. By investigating this phenomenon, we identified a highly toxic quinone transformation product of N-(1,3-dimethylbutyl)-N'-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine) (6PPD), a globally ubiquitous tire rubber antioxidant.
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/09/scie...
It's silly to expect consumers to verify safety upfront. if products are shown to be toxic and alternatives exist, then you can start expecting consumers to choose the less toxic version.
Once you know that, you can approach regulators who will have to weight between the interests of the fish industry and the interests of the tires industry.
This bothers me. It's not about the 'fish industry' it's about weighting the interests of the tire industry against the life in the Puget sound ecosystem.
https://wildsalmoncenter.org/why-protect-salmon/
>Few animals have been as central to the Pacific human experience as salmon. Their annual migrations are a miracle of nature. They feed us and their presence tells us that our rivers are still healthy. From grizzly bears to orca whales, at least 137 different species depend on the marine-rich nutrients that wild salmon provide
>Salmon and freshwater ecosystems are inextricably linked by feedbacks between salmon runs, food webs, and riparian forests. Salmon runs function as enormous pumps that push vast amounts of marine nutrients from the ocean to the headwaters of otherwise low productivity rivers. For example, sockeye salmon runs in southwest Alaska contribute up to 170 tons of phosphorous per year to Lake Illiamna. These nutrients are incorporated into food webs in rivers and surrounding landscapes by a host of over 50 species of mammals, birds, and fish that forage on salmon eggs, juveniles, and adults in freshwater. Predators, such as brown bears, disperse these marine nutrients into surrounding forests, enhancing the growth of stream-side trees that shade and protect stream banks from excessive erosion
Sure it would not be perfect, because you would still have out-of-state vehicles using the roads, but it would be an improvement that could probably get done a lot faster and it might be enough.
Is it just salmon affected by this chemical?
It looks like Kentucky has both cutthroat and rainbow trout. Both of which are actually species of salmon in the genus Oncorhynchus, which are true salmon.
Would they be affected by the chemical?
How about other species of fish?
That's the thing about this kind of stuff, it's not necessarily localized. There's a lot we don't know about ecosystems and the long term effects of chemicals like this. Chances are though, if it affects one area in such a negative way, it'll have other negative effects.
A lot of environmnental regulation got its start with regulation in California that spread from there. It's easier to get something passed locally than to get national support from day one.
That probably says more about environment research funding in Kentucky than it does their fish.
Washington is one of the most pro-science states in the US, the Puget Sound area has one of the greatest concentration of environmentally focused people, and salmon are historically deeply ingrained in Washington culture. If it took all of that to garner enough resources to discover this problem, imagine all of the other environmental disasters out there that we're simply oblivious to.
It probably affects other species, too. Now that we know the chemical responsible it will be easier to test that.
This approach, if successful, will be way faster than starting with regulation.
Note that they said this affects every tire on the market, so this isn’t a case of reporting a few manufacturers. This is going to result in an industry-wide change.
Once the compound is readily available across the industry, then we can rest assured that new tires will be "safe". But tires have a usable life of 2-5 years depending on the type of tire. So it will take many more years before people with "non-safe" tires purchase new ones that are "salmon-safe". Remember also that some people (generally as a result of financial concern) may drag tire use out to 8 or even 10 years.
This puts a timeline for "safe tires" at 10-20 years from now! I hate to shout "doomsday", but the Salmon may not have that long. Salmon only live 2-3 years on average before spawning. According to this article, 90% of them are dying due to this chemical during their trip up Puget Sound urban rivers to spawn. Salmon are already operating at low population rates. So we may not have decades to sit and figure this out.
As a more immediate alternative, I would like to see if there is a way to neutralize or catch this 6PPD chemical with some type of "filter" in the road runoff pipes or a road-coating that could be installed in critical areas. This would seem like a more immediate solution that wouldn't require global or national "buy-in" from tire manufacturers.
And of course all this assumes that tire manufacturers care enough to save the salmon. This is the type of thing that regulation is useful for instead of relying on tire manufacturers to "do the right thing".
No, it puts a maximum end date for 100% removal at 10-20 years. Incremental progress can happen much sooner. What you describe is basically the speed that most large-scale changes occur at. It's just how it goes.
> I hate to shout "doomsday", but the Salmon may not have that long. Salmon only live 2-3 years on average before spawning.
The salmon will bounce back. It is a real concern and problem that we need to fix, but we are not on the brink of extinction and don't need to panic.
> According to this article, 90% of them are dying due to this chemical during their trip up Puget Sound urban rivers to spawn.
90% in some streams. That's the worst case number, but there are many streams in Washington, many of which are not in urban areas.
That way you could get the results in 2-3 years with a minimal extra cost because only a small part of the US and Canada have to renew their tires earlier.
It seems to me that trying to figure out if that chemical can be replaced with something else, and if that something else is safe would be priority one. Priority two would be trying to filter the urban runoff somehow (which is probably a positive for many other pollutants). Getting people to switch their tires a little sooner seems like too much effort for too little gain; tires are going to wear out or get too old and be replaced anyway, and there's a lot of cars from out of the area.
Maybe, you could do a rebate program to encourage people in the area to update a little sooner.
Ok, wow, that's so unexpected. In Germany we have mandatory safety and emissions inspections every two years.
That also explains why there were so many parts of tires on roads in WA, last time I was there.
>Maybe, you could do a rebate program to encourage people in the area to update a little sooner.
That would probably get us 80% of the way there, especially if you tell people why they should switch.
There is every expectation that other salmon would be similarly affected given similar exposure.
They do if it gives them a market advantage. If Goodyear can market tires that are more "sustainable" or "eco-friendly" than their rivals that will resonate with consumers who focus on such things (many of them, particularly millenials and younger).
We saw this with trans-fats in food. They aren't prohibited by the FDA, but most producers have eliminated them and have "Zero Trans Fats" emblazoned across the package labeling, because it sells better. Seeing this effect also with high-fructose corn syrup.
People running the corporations who decide to be "socially responsible" are "being nice." The reason they do it is because their customers want/will pay for "social responsibility." If nobody wants social responsibility, why would it fall on corporations to do it anyway? Why do they get demonized and everyone else gets off the hook?
They get demonized because there is nothing stopping them from simply undoing all those policies once the bottom line dictates otherwise. The public cannot trust corporations who act in that way, and when they inevitably do, they get valid criticism for it. They are using language in sinister and misleading ways, and for most people that is equivalent to lying.
Apparently, 6-PPD is there to scavenge ozone. If that ozone doesn't have anything harmless to react with, it reacts with the rubber, which makes it brittle. Ozone scavengers prolong the life of the tire, and make it safer.
Companies don't do things because they are James Bond villains, either.
Shareholder value is the sole driver of corporate decision making. Civic duty in particular has no role.
Obviously you won't be able to separate cause and effect, but in my view if "X chemical in people's blood leads to a higher likelihood of dropping out of school", thats a good enough reason to restrict the use of X, even if it sometimes turns out there is no causal effect.
1. False correlations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
2. True correlations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
3. The number of normal compounds in our body from cell processes or digestion is large. Measuring tiny amounts of unknown compounds is extremely hard in that environment.
A better way is to proscribe more in-depth testing of compounds on animals. Removing all other factors gives statistical power to observations.
It looks like tires are much more toxic than we thought and we should reconsider their composition quickly.
But I suspect they can find an alternative to 6ppd and we just need a bit of publicity, and then maybe a year to reformulate tires.
6PPD is an antioxidant added to tires, and the -quinone is the oxidized form (not sure if it oxidizes before/during/after manufacturing or after escaping the tire).
"The researchers determined that the chemical is formed when a preservative known as 6PPD reacts with ozone. 6PPD is designed to extend the lifespan of tires by reacting with ozone in the surrounding air before it has a chance to interact with the rubber and weaken it, Kolodziej said."
https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/coho-salmon-toxic-c...
I just read that ozone will cause cracks in regular rubber bands over time, I never knew that was the cause [1]. Interesting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6PPD [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_cracking
Cracked tires: dangerous? Cosmetic? Or early warning that tires are getting old?
Ozone in the atmosphere react with the tire compound and weakens it, leading to cracks forming which exposes more and more area deeper in the tire body to ozone. increased area increases chance of reaction.
A tire that has recently been inflated to the upper limit of it's pressure range making stiff is traveling at 70 miles an hour, suddenly there is a spike in pressure as if hits a bump. The sidewall is weak.... How will this failure end?
Tire are not a fixed technology, the companies are always having to create and reformulate to drive the price lower, last longer, have better traction.
The killer was the 6PPD-quinone from the tires in the roadway runoff.