Health Misinformation about Toxic-Site Harm: The Case for Independent-Party Testing to Confirm Safety

Abstract

Health misinformation can cause harm if regulators or private remediators falsely claim that a hazardous facility is safe. This misinformation especially threatens the health of children, minorities, and poor people, disproportionate numbers of whom live near toxic facilities. Yet, perhaps because of financial incentives, private remediators may use safety misinformation to justify reduced cleanup. Such incentives exist in nations like the United States, where most toxic-site testing/remediation is semi-privatized or voluntary, conducted by private parties, commercial redevelopers, who can increase profits by underestimating health harm, thus decreasing required testing/remediation. Our objective is to begin to determine whether or not interested parties misrepresent health harm (at hazardous facilities that they test/remediate/redevelop) when they use traditional and social media to claim that these sites are safe. Our hypothesis is that, contrary to the safety claims of the world’s largest commercial developer, Coldwell Banker Real Estate/Trammell Crow (CBRE/TCC), the authors’ screening assessment, especially its lab-certified, toxic-site, indoor-air tests, show violations of all three prominent government, cancer-safety benchmarks. If so, these facilities require additional testing/remediation, likely put site renters at risk, and may reveal problems with privatized hazardous cleanup. To our knowledge, we provide the first independent tests of privatized, toxic-site assessments before cancer reports occur. Our screening assessment of this hypothesis tests indoor air in rental units on a prominent former weapons-testing site (the US Naval Ordnance Testing Station, Pasadena, California (NOTSPA) that is subject to carcinogenic vapor intrusion by volatile organic compounds, VOCs), then compares test results to the redeveloper’s site-safety claims, made to government officials and citizens through traditional and social media. Although NOTSPA toxic soil-gas concentrations are up to nearly a million times above allowed levels, and indoor air was never tested until now, both the regulator and the remediator (CBRE/TCC) have repeatedly claimed on social media that “the site is safe at this time.” We used mainly Method TO-17 and two-week sampling with passive, sorbent tubes to assess indoor-air VOCs. Our results show that VOC levels at every location sampled—all in occupied site-rental units—violate all three government-mandated safety benchmarks: environmental screening levels (ESLs), No Significant Risk Levels (NSRLs), and inhalation risks based on the Inhalation Unit Risk (IUR); some violations are two orders of magnitude above multiple safety benchmarks. These results support our hypothesis and suggest a need for independent assessment of privatized cleanups and media-enhanced safety claims about them. If our results can be replicated at other sites, then preventing health misinformation and toxic-facility safety threats may require new strategies, one of which we outline.

Does Hazardous-Waste Testing Follow Technical Guidance, Thus Help Protect Environmental Justice and Health?

“…These are binding on federal contractors who are "conducting, supervising, communicating, and utilizing [scientific testing and] results" [116]. If California's privatized toxic-site cleanup contracts had included such a state contractor integrity clause, this might have prevented the testing violations outlined here [84][85][86]90]. More generally, governments might reevaluate their commitments both to overseeing hazardous-site testing/cleanup and to privatizing most toxic waste cleanups.…”

“…Responding to requests from the community near NOTSPA and tenant risks, in 2021 University of Notre Dame scientists conducted indoor-air tests of NOTSPA units whose tenants requested it [90]. All 11 tested site locations violate all three California safety benchmarks and have two-week-average indoor-air carcinogen concentrations > 10 −6 , namely, concentrations up to 4.4 (10 −4 )-2.0 (10 −5 ), which violates California's No Significant Risk Levels (NSRLs) [90] (Table 7); up to 1.9 (10 −4 )-8.7 (10 −5 ), which violates California's Inhalation Cancer Risk [90] (Table 8); and up to 6.7 (10 −5 )-3.1 (10 −6 ), which violates Environmental Screening Levels [90] (Table 6). Yet in response to presentation of these published certified-lab results, regulators did nothing to protect site tenants.…”

“…The already-cited (Section 4.1.2.) 2021 University of Notre Dame tests show that the renters' current indoor-air risks are hundreds of times above all three allowed safety benchmarks in California [90]. In short: EJ communities host all five privatized cleanup sites where systematic VOC-testing violations will likely worsen both their health and the pollution they face.…”

Health Risks from Supposedly Remediated US Hazardous-Waste Sites: An Early-Warning Signal

“…Type (d) studies, eg, [24][25][26][27][28][29], are the rarest, most expensive, but theoretically most credible assessments of toxics remediation. They are independent (of interested parties) empirical tests of post-cleanup, hazardous-site-contaminant levels before any confirmed harm has occurred.…”

Correction: Shrader-Frechette, K.; Biondo, A.M. Health Misinformation about Toxic-Site Harm: The Case for Independent-Party Testing to Confirm Safety. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 3882

“…Because part of the text was unintentionally omitted, the first paragraph under Section 2.2.4.3. on p. 13 was jumbled and incomplete when it was published [ 1 ]:…”