ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANT REFERENCE DATABOOK
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Library of Congress Cataloglng-ln-Publlcatlon Data Prager, Ian. Environmental containment reference databook I by Ian Prager. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-442-01918-1 (v. 1 ) I. Chemicals--Environmental aspects--Handbooks, manuals, etc I. Title. TDI96.C45P73 1995 363.73'8--dc20
94-43927 CIP
To my grandchildren, Jason, alexandra, and Zachary Prager
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.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My wife. Anna. has been very patient and helpful during the months of preparing this book for publication. and I thank her for her constant support and encouragement. I also owe thanks to Stephen Berard. a University of Rhode Island Computer Science undergraduate student. He has been my principal helper and my mentor in the use of the Internet and other on-line sources of public domain Information. and in the Intricacies of OS/2. Linux. FoxPro. GNU utilities. sed. awk. Ventura Publisher. and other computer systems. hardware and applications that we used to compile and edit the manuscript. Joseph Luszcz. also a URI Computer Science student. helped to format many chemical listings. At Van Nostrand Reinhold. Bob Esposito has made numerous helpful suggestions from the very beginnIng of the process and has proven an honest friend and adviser. Caroline McCarra has kept communIcations with VNR frequent. lively. accurate. and very pleasant. Peter Rocheleau has been sympathetic. kind. and generous with technical suggestions about book production and constructive criticIsms of the sample pagesthat swiftly and surely were Fedexed among us. Cam1l1oCimis contracted with Van Nostrand Reinhold to edit the manuscript. and did an excellent job (faults remaining in the copyare mine and not his). I also acknowledge and thank the many anonymous government scientists who painstakingly culled the research literature of many countries to create the public databases that provided information for this volume. Their dedication and competence are greatly appreciated.
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.PREFACE
The newest fad In environmental regulation Is to use ecosystemchanges as a basis for setting permissible amounts of chemical contamination, a trend that alarms me because the science of ecology may not yet be up to the job. Its Insufficiency Is predicting ecological phenomena on the smallscale, cause-and-effect level. Although we can predict with acceptable certaInty that a given large amount of toxic or oxygen-demandlng substances will degrade the quality of air, land, or water, making It unsuitable for l1v1ng creatures (ourselves Included), and we even can predict qual1tatlvely and quantitatively the degree of unsultab1l1ty, In many Instances, we cannot tell the person who wants to use a small, spec1flcamount of land, air, or water for disposal of a small amount of spec1flc waste just how much damage that projected contamination will cause. It Is the additive de minimus problems that undermine pollutant regulation at the Individual permit level. Thus, for specific, local environmental protection decisions, we need return to the consideration of toxicological properties of pollutant chemlcals-those "toxic matertals In toxlc amounts" that the 1970 Clean Water Act banned. Prediction Is a somewhat more straightforward matter In occupational health and safety because It Involves only one species of alr- breathing land animal (Homo sapiens), whose exposure to matertals In the workplace can be or has been measured and whose relationship to pollutants' effects on surrogate species Is reasonably understood. Actual expertences are descrtbed by the subjects themselves. Granted, here too there Is room for honest disagreement about exposure, dosages, and cause-and-effect, but no one Is suggesting that we disregard much of our expertence with the physical, chemical, and biological properties of pollutant matertals In favor of a statistically supported abstraction predicting that a given amount of pollutant will degrade a given amount of environment to a given level of harm. Prediction at that level remains more a research-and-development goal than a rel1ablebasis for regulation. Calls for appl1catlons ofpredlctlve ecology before Its full vertficatlon In regulatory matters are certainly premature, as well-Intentloned as they may be. Environmental siting decIsions that affect our l1vesmost dIrectly are made at the local government level. Although under the guidance of state and federal laws and regulations, local governments, except for the largest munlclpal1t1es,are least well equipped to undertake highly technical evalu'atlons. SIting, I bel1eve,Is the central Issue of environmental protection. The geographic locations we choose to manufacture, transport, use, and dispose of the substances and things we make govern who and what come Into contact with them. Zoning Boards and Planning Commissions rarely have the scientific expertise to consider these matters In an environmental ix
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safety context, and the supply of competent and objective consultants to advise them Is limited and unevenly distributed throughout the United States. Also, our adversarlal system of adjudication and administrative procedures tends to erode the objectivity of technical experts, and thls too needs study and modification to correct bias. The current paradigm for environmental declslon-making Is risk analysIs. Most environmental decisions now require some more-or-less formal analysis that follows the general pattern of first Identifying the persons, places, or things at known risk In the proposed activity , then assessing the likelihood of exposure and effects combining to produce the Identified adverse effect, and finally expressing that likelihood In some quantitative way that the public and those officials making the policy or permit decision can understand. Part ofthls expression Is a statement ofjust how certain Is the pI::edlctedresult. As a general principle, the more systems Involved In the analysis, the less certain will be the prediction. Uncertainty might be mItigated somewhat by Integrating the prediction over a large number of systems taken as a whole (e.g., a physical model of an entire system such as the Army Corps of Engineers. models of various estuary flows or the UnIversity of Rhode Island.s oceanographic miniature models of Narragansett Bay ecosystems), but this technique Is in its infancy because there are few such models available to apply, and both physical and biological models of natural systems need further development, application, and verification. Science Is only as exact as its practitioners can make it-not as exact as we often need It to be for predicting risk. Sensitive dependence on Initial conditions produces apparent uncertainty or even seemingly chaotic events, even in Instances of exact mathematical certainty and Hamiltonian deterministic systems. Promulgating and compounding uncertainty addltively or multiplicatively by combining a sequence of model results often diminishes the usefulness of not only the overall result, but, in the minds of the publi~, the component individual results as well. New techniques applied to modeling environmental consequences of contamination, such as fuzzy logic combined with artificial IntellIgence Inferences, can reduce uncertainty , or at least manage to make It remain within acceptable limits In narrow domaIns, but here too much developmental work and even more verification are needed before public policy Is based on large-scale models of these types. Throwing out the baby with the bath water-dropplng attempts to model ecological processes to theIr lowest common denominator of certainty and prematurely using rough models of integrated processesIs a double mistake. Both model types are needed to make prudent decIsions. Both types of models need specIfic Information on the adverse effects of exposure to specIfic substances and compounds. It Is that specIfic need that this book attempts to fill.
