Rachel’s News #541, April 10, 1997

The corporate decision in 1923 to add toxic lead to gasoline changed the chemistry of planet Earth, particularly the northern hemisphere. According to the National Research Council (NRC), in 1983 industrial emissions of lead into the atmosphere exceeded natural lead emissions by a factor of 700.[1,pg.105] In other words, by 1983, humans were putting 700 times as much lead into the atmosphere as were natural processes such as volcanoes, sea spray, etc.[1,pg.103] In 1983, humans put 363,000 tons (330,000 metric tonnes) of lead into the atmosphere, 75% (272,800 tons) of it from automobile exhausts. (One ton is 2000 pounds; one metric tonne is 2200 pounds).

About 90% of lead emissions occur in the northern hemisphere where the lead remains because it falls to Earth before it has time to float across the equator.[1,pg.105]

In addition to putting 363,000 tons of lead into the atmosphere, humans in 1983 put another 1.2 million tons of lead directly onto the land in the form of commercial waste (330,000 tons), mine tailings (330,000 tons), municipal waste (8800 tons), sewage sludge (6600 tons), fly ash from burning coal (154,000 tons), and so forth.[1,pg.105]

As a result, says the NRC, “the pandemic scale of lead contamination… has increased lead concentrations throughout the Northern Hemisphere by a factor of at least 10.”[1,pg.107] In other words, the northern half of the planet now has at least 10 times as much lead in soil and water as it had before the arrival of Europeans in North America.

Naturally this translates into contamination of all parts of the ecosystem. According to the NRC:

** Lead concentrations in terrestrial organisms of all kinds are 100 times as high as natural concentrations.[1,pg.107] In other words, all animals, birds, worms, insects, etc., now carry 100 times as much lead in their bodies as they used to. In sum, everything has been poisoned.

** The NRC says humans have pulled about 300 million metric tonnes (330 million tons) of lead out of the Earth and “Most of the 300 million metric tons of lead ever produced remains in the environment, largely in soil and dust…. Today’s production evolves into tomorrow’s background exposure, and despite reductions in the use of lead for gasoline, overall production continues to grow and federal agencies have not addressed the impact of future increases of lead in the environment.”[1,pg.18]

In other words, all of the lead that is mined out of the deep earth eventually becomes environmental contamination; it is very long-lived, resulting in the progressive, cumulative poisoning of the environment with a potent neurotoxin. All creatures –especially humans, who eat at the top of the food chain –have been severely contaminated and are no doubt suffering subtle and not-so-subtle impairments today.[2]

It is worth emphasizing that lead “consumption” in the U.S. only diminished 8% between 1970 and 1990 even though major uses of lead were banned by the U.S. government.[3] The lead industry is very creative in finding new uses for lead, and, because it is organized in the form of corporations, the industry is incapable of feeling remorse for the irreversible damage it is doing to life on Earth. Corporations cannot voluntarily curb their misbehavior because they have only one duty: to return a profit to investors, no matter what the costs may be to others. So long as poisoning is legal, corporations will poison (and if poisoning is profitable, they will spend millions on election campaigns to make sure poisoning remains legal.) (See REHN #308, #388, #449, #488, #489.)

The amount of lead in a person’s blood that is officially considered “safe” today is 10 micrograms of lead in each deciliter of blood, or 10 ug/dL. (A microgram is a millionth of a gram; there are 28 grams in an ounce. A deciliter is a tenth of a liter; a liter is approximately a quart.) According to the most recent estimates, in the period 1991-1994, somewhere between 613,000 and 1.4 million American children younger than 6 years old (mostly African Americans and Hispanics living in large cities) had average blood lead levels of 10 ug/dL or more; a third of these children had blood lead levels of 15 ug/dL or more.[4]

The NRC said in 1993, “There is growing evidence that even very small exposures to lead can produce subtle effects in humans. Therefore, there is the possibility that future [safety] guidelines may drop below 10 ug/dL as the mechanisms of lead toxicity become better understood.”[1,pg.3] The NRC offers evidence that lead at 5 ug/dL (half the official “safe” level) can cause attention deficit in children and in monkeys; reduced birthweight in children; and hearing loss in children.[1,pgs.69,254-256]

The NRC summarizes a series of recent studies, then says, “Those studies support the general conclusion that there is growing evidence that there is no effective threshold for some of the adverse effects of lead.”[1,pg.67] In other words, there is growing evidence that there is NO level of lead below which no adverse effects occur. If this is true, it means the only safe level is zero.

One way to get today’s “safe” level of lead (10 ug/dL) into perspective is to compare it to the natural background levels found in the blood of prehistoric people –people who lived in an environment that had not been poisoned by the members of the Lead Industries Association.

According to careful measurements of human bones, pre-Columbian inhabitants of North America had average blood lead levels of 0.016 ug/dL –some 625 times lower than the 10 ug/dL now established as “safe” for our children. On the face of it, it seems unlikely that levels of a potent nerve poison 625 times as high as natural background can be “safe” for children.[5]

The decision to add toxic lead to gasoline could have gone differently back in 1925. Charles F. Kettering, president of the Ethyl Corporation, explained the options facing the corporation: “…We will use 12 billion gallons of gasoline this year [1925] and 15 billion next year, and at the increasing rate we have GOT to do one of two things: We must build motors which are more efficient–we must build motors of very much smaller size and sacrifice a great many factors which we now enjoy in the motor industry, or we must do something which will allow us to get more work out of the fuel unit. Now, in regard to the building of such motors, there is nothing of a patentable or unknown thing in the building of higher-efficiency motors. Our neighbors on the other side [of the Atlantic Ocean] a few years ago built high compression, relatively higher efficiency motors, because we shipped to them a better grade of gasoline than we use in this country.”[6,pgs.8,9]

The basic problem was engine “knock.” In a high-compression engine, the fuel tended to explode instead of burning evenly. As a result, the engine made a “knocking” sound, power fell dramatically and the engine could eventually be damaged. As Mr. Kettering said, the British (and later the Japanese) solved this problem by burning a higher grade of gasoline in a smaller, more efficient engine. The Americans chose another path: they continued to develop larger, less efficient engines fueled by lower-quality gasoline, which they improved with an anti-knock additive.[7] As a result of this basic strategy, Americans consumed 80% of all the world’s leaded gasoline until 1970.[2,pgs.16-17]

Even the decision to select lead as the anti-knock additive could have gone another way. In 1925, Dr. Alice Hamilton of Harvard, told a lead-in-gasoline conference, “I would like to make a plea to the chemists to find something else, and I am utterly unwilling to believe that the only substance which can be used to take the knock out of a gasoline engine is tetraethyl lead… I think it is not unreasonable to ask that our chemists set about it to do away with tetraethyl lead, by finding something else that will do the same work.”[6,pg.99] And Yandell Henderson of Yale told the same conference that such alternatives existed: “I have asked some of the chemists, my colleagues in Yale University, and I have found that lead is not by any means the only substance which, on theoretical grounds, or even on the basis of experiments, can be used as an antiknock medium.”[6,pg.63]

The real problem was the decision-making process that the corporations were allowed to follow.

If the corporations had been required by law to study all available alternatives (a process described in the federal National Environmental Policy Act of 1969) and then to adopt the least-damaging alternative, the poisoning of the northern hemisphere could have been averted.

Instead, the corporations poisoned every creature on half the planet WITHOUT SERIOUS, OPEN DISCUSSION OF HOW THEY MIGHT HAVE BEHAVED DIFFERENTLY. If they had been required to assess all available alternatives and then to pick the least-damaging path, every creature in the northern hemisphere –including every human –would be healthier, would feel better, and would be smarter today.

The Ethyl Corporation went on to compound its errors. When the corporation was forced in 1972 to start phasing out leaded gasoline, Ethyl began selling one of leaded gasoline’s components –ethylene dibromide, or EDB –as a pesticide. Eleven years later, in 1983, EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) took EDB off the market because it readily caused cancer in several species of animals, damaged sperm cells and sperm production in humans, and harmed reproduction in other ways. At the time EDB was banned, the U.S. was putting 20 million pounds of it into soils each year and it was showing up in cake mixes and cereal.[8]

This is another instance where a proper assessment of alternatives would have spared the world millions of pounds of a supremely potent poison.

In 1995 the Ethyl Corporation did it AGAIN.[9] The corporation began marketing a new anti-knock gasoline additive, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl, or MMT, a compound of the toxic metal manganese.

According to a group of scientists who have studied the dangers of manganese, MMT gives us reason for “major concerns.” “Inhalation is an abnormal route of intake for manganese and may be associated with increased risk of toxicity, particularly to the central nervous system and the lungs. Certain susceptible subpopulations, such as the young, the old, and the malnourished, may be at greatly increased risk of adverse effects from exposure to manganese in the environment.”[10] Ethyl Corporation insists that manganese is safe. However, to this day Ethyl Corporation also insists that leaded gasoline is safe.

Isn’t it time we changed the way corporations make decisions? Shouldn’t we require an assessment of all available alternatives and selection of the least-damaging? And shouldn’t the burden of proof of safety be placed on the Ethyl Corporation –and others like it –and not on the public? Where can all this poisoning be taking us? (National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO) –Peter Montague

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[1] National Research Council (Bruce A. Fowler and others, editors), MEASURING LEAD EXPOSURE IN INFANTS, CHILDREN, AND OTHER SENSITIVE POPULATIONS (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1993).

[2] C.C. Patterson and others, “Lead in Ancient Human Bones and Its Relevance to Historical Developments of Social Problems with Lead,” THE SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT Vol. 61 (1987), pgs. 167-200.

[3] In 1970 the U.S. refined 666,730 tons of primary lead production (including both domestic and imported ores). Secondary production was 597,390 tons. We also imported 244,623 tons of refined metal. Exports were 7747 tons (0.51% of total domestic “consumption”) of refined metal. See HISTORICAL STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES; COLONIAL TIMES TO 1970; VOLUME 1; Tables M243, M244, M246, M247. Therefore total domestic “consumption” in 1970 was (666730 + 597390 + 244623 -7747) x 2000 = 3 billion pounds.

In 1989, total “consumption” was 1,283,000 metric tonnes; exports were 29,000 metric tonnes (2.3% of total domestic “consumption”). See STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1991, Table 1243. So domestic “consumption” was (1283000-29000) x 2200 = 2.76 billion pounds.

[4] “Update: Blood Lead Levels –United States, 1991-1994,” MORBIDITY AND MORTALITY WEEKLY REPORT [MMWR] Vol. 46, No. 7 (February 21, 1997), pgs. 141-146. See table 2, pg. 143.

[5] A. Russell Flegal and Donald R. Smith, “Lead Levels in Preindustrial Humans,” NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE Vol. 326 (May 7, 1992), pgs. 1293-1294.

[6] Treasury Department, United States Public Health Service, PROCEEDINGS OF A CONFERENCE TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT THERE IS A PUBLIC HEALTH QUESTION IN THE MANUFACTURE, DISTRIBUTION OR USE OF TETRAETHYL LEAD GASOLINE [PUBLIC HEALTH BULLETIN NO. 158] (Washington, D.C.: Treasury Department, United States Public Health Service, 1925). Available from William Davis at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.: (202) 501-5350. [National Archives Record Group No. 287; T27.12:158/3S1 [possibly 351?] 24/2316 Box T777. RG 287.]

[7] Jerome O. Nriagu, “The Rise and Fall of Leaded Gasoline,” THE SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT Vol. 92 (1990), pgs. 13-28.

[8] Josh Karliner, “Barons of Bromide: A History of Methyl Bromide,” GLOBAL PESTICIDE CAMPAIGNER Vol. 7, No. 1 (March, 1997), pgs. 1, 14-17. GLOBAL PESTICIDE CAMPAIGNER is available from Pesticide Action Network, North American Regional Center, 116 New Montgomery St., #810, San Francisco, CA 94105; $25/yr for individuals.

[9] Technically, MMT is a product of Ethyl’s “sister” company, Albemarle. Albemarle was created out of Ethyl in 1994. The history is convoluted—Albemarle bought Ethyl from GM/DuPont in 1962, changed its name to Ethyl, and then in 1994 two of the Gottwald brothers split Ethyl into Ethyl and Albemarle. Albemarle took with it the MMT business. Personal communication from Josh Karliner, April, 1997.

[10] Gina M. Solomon, Annette M. Huddle, Ellen K. Silbergeld, and Joseph Herman, “Manganese in Gasoline: Are We Repeating History?” NEW SOLUTIONS (Winter, 1997), pgs. 17-25.

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Rachel’s News was published by Environmental Research Foundation (E.R.F.) from 1986 to 2009. All together, 1000 issues appeared. Unless otherwise noted, they were written by Peter Montague.

Over the years the name of the publication changed slightly, starting as “Hazardous Waste News,” then “Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News,” then “Rachel’s Environment & Health News” and finally “Rachel’s Democracy & Health News.” In this archive, we have simply used “Rachel’s News.”

E.R.F. changed its location over the years from Princeton, N.J., to Washington, D.C. to Annapolis, Md. and finally to New Brunswick, N.J.

To contact E.R.F. or Peter Montague, send email to pm8525@gmail.com.