Friedman, India and Development

The REACH program from the European Union is an incredibly far reaching (no pun intended, of course!) effort to catalog the effects of chemical compounds on human health. I came across this interesting article at Environmental Science and Technology.

ES&T Online News: Will the EU’s REACH serve researchers’ needs?

Europe’s new chemicals law, REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorisation of Chemicals), will put about $13 billion worth of data on 30,000 substances onto a searchable database made available at no cost on the Internet. It sounds like a dream come true for researchers wanting to design new compounds free of the structures that cause human health hazards. But lack of funding for basic research and concerns about the competence of toxicity tests have dampened expectations among some scientists.

Well, D’uh, any program that big is bound to have some problems. But the shifting of burden of proof away from the regulators to industry is a big deal and will lead to a lot of self regulation. Companies will have to prove that their chemicals are safe.

John Warner, a synthetic organic chemist at the University of Massachusetts, says REACH will be effective at pushing companies to select safer alternatives that are already on the market. But for the many reagents and solvents that have no safe alternatives, safe molecules must be designed, and REACH is not structured to promote the design work, Warner says.

Yes, this is an effort to regulate existing and new chemical entities, not an initiative to spur innovation. From the REACH site:

The REACH Regulation gives greater responsibility to industry
to manage the risks from chemicals and to provide safety information
on the substances. Manufacturers and importers will be required
to gather information on the properties of their substances,
which will help them manage them safely, and to register the
information in a central database.

The innovation is going to be market driven by the fear of this regulation. Maybe we will start calling it OVERREACH!

I tend to be a bad news blogger, so when some good news comes along, I really should mention it…  A plugin hybrid (PHEV) is a gasoline car with a battery that can be charged. So, you go 30 miles or so on battery power before switching to gasoline, and plug the cars in at night so that they will be ready to go again the next morning. The average American commute is 16 miles (one way), so the amount of gas used for work and back for me will be reduced from around 1.2 gallons (assuming about 28 mpg city for my current car) to around 0.1 gallons. Think about that!

The good thing about these batteries is that they seem to be built with ruggedness (10 year, 150,000 miles) in mind.

The Energy Blog: A123Systems Announces Li-ion Automotive Batteries

A123Systems today introduced its 32-series Nanophosphate™ Lithium Ion cells, specifically designed for Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) use. These batteries leverage the company’s existing low-cost, high-volume manufacturing techniques to offer the electric drive industry a new level of price-performance.

Hope they work as advertised. My next car is definitely a PHEV.

Meanwhile, America’s most experienced, most accomplished and most sensible presidential candidate gives a truly forward looking speech on energy policy, and nobody notices. I guess he’s just not good looking enough.

Benzene Levels in Soft Drinks Above Limit – Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON – Cancer-causing benzene has been found in soft drinks at levels above the limit considered safe for drinking water, the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged Wednesday.
Even so, the FDA still believes there are no safety concerns about benzene in soft drinks, or sodas, said Laura Tarantino, the agency’s director of food additive safety.”We haven’t changed our view that right now, there is not a safety concern, not a public health concern,” she said. “But what we need to do is understand how benzene forms and to ensure the industry is doing everything to avoid those circumstances.”

The admission contradicted statements last week, when officials said FDA found insignificant levels of benzene.

In fact, a different study found benzene at four times the tap water limit, on average, in 19 of 24 samples of diet soda.

The formation of benzene in soft drinks is from the reaction of ascorbic acid (aka Vitamin C) and benzoate salts, notably sodium benzoate which is used as a preservative. As the FDA letter states:

We learned that elevated temperature and light can stimulate benzene formation in the presence of benzoate salts and vitamin C, while sugar and EDTA salts inhibit benzene formation.

Is this a pressing concern? First of all, exposure modeling done by the EPA indicates that 93% of all benzene exposure is through inhalation (cigarette smoke, indoor offgassing, that wonderful refueling smell!), with 7% exposure through oral ingestion. So, potentially elevated levels in this 7% fraction are not likely to greatly increase exposure. In addition, the 5 parts per billion level for drinking water is set based on an assumed daily consumption of 2 liters per day (Source – USEPA), a safety factor up from the actual estimated 0.9-1.2 L per day measured consumption. Assuming the average amount of benzene in soda (mainly diet, mind you) is 4 times that of drinking water, a 500 ml dose of diet soda per day is required to equal the dose from drinking water, which mind you, only counts for 7% of the total bezene exposure. So in a sense, a person drinking 2 servings of diet soda per day would exceed the exposure from drinking water at the federally regulated level, and knock the socks off the California standard of 0.13 ppb in water. This will increase his/her known oral exposure. The total exposure to benzene of that individual, however, would not go up significantly because the overwhelming majority of the exposure still occurs through the nose, not through the mouth.

The issue here, and benzene is just the symptom, is that consumers know much more about their drinking water than they do about their manufactured food products, and that is not good for the consumer or for the industry because in the absence of knowledge and full disclosure, both parties are vulnerable. Which is why attempts to limit consumer knowledge hurt everyone.

Conclusion Please don’t stop drinking soda because of this, I am sure you can find plenty of other reasons to limit your soda consumption… Drink lots of filtered tap water, it’s the best!! And, I can assure you that most tap water is tested thoroughly, it’s zero calories and cheap!