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Dirty Resea Ashley Berthelot
We all know that cigarette smoke is deadly. It’s a concept taught to children as soon as they can talk, pushed by health advocates and underscored by statistics. In general, air-borne carcinogens are simply bad news and should be avoided at all costs. But what if simply breathing air from the outdoors was just as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes? Environmentally-Persistent Free Radicals, or EPFRs, are pollutants generated by hazardous waste, and just like their name suggests, they remain readily available in the environment for long periods of time. EPFRs are introduced to the environment in a variety of ways, most commonly through the combustion process often found in industrial sites. Those generated from Superfund Sites, an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people, are particularly long-lived. And they’re definitely bad for your health.
“Simply breathing on a worst-case scenario day in Mexico City, for example, is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day,” said LSU’s Patrick F. Taylor Chair of Chemistry Barry Dellinger. “EPFRs are essentially incomplete molecules. We believe, when pollutants are attached to fine particles in the environment, they actually exist as EPFRs, rather than molecules.” Prior to Dellinger’s ground-breaking work with EPFRs, these dangerous pollutants hadn’t been proven to exist. But now, not only do researchers know they’re real, thanks to the work being done at LSU, they’re also starting to realize just how hazardous they can be.
Dellinger recently received more than $11 million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, or NIEHS, to continue the LSU Superfund Research Center and focus its research on EPFRs. The center was originally funded by $3.8 million in 2009, and has been hugely successful since its initiation. The momentum Dellinger and his team have built in the relatively short time span of two years is still increasing. Because of the intense competition for NIEHS superfund center grants, gaining full support was an uphill battle. Dellinger originally received an individual award allowing him to get a foothold within the institute and the specialty. Only a few years later, he was able to secure funding for the center, and now has received this renewal due to their impressive research and publications record. Now, he’s finding that when extraction of EFPRs is attempted with solvents, a whole new problem is literally created.
“We are seeing a reaction in solution that produces a new pollutant that was not originally there,” said Dellinger. “This is controversial due to the implications for public health. The reactions in solution mean researchers may be studying chemicals that don’t even exist in the environment.” Researchers are already well aware of the dangers inherent in dioxins, which, similar to EFPRs, enter the environment through combustion, refineries and other common industrial processes.