Widely used chemical *(that was generally phased out in the 70s) linked to Parkinson's. Still important, but you don't need to start searching product labels in 2023 for it.
I'm not for panicked reporting, but in the face of the stated facts (as far as true) your comment is overly dismissive:
the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The movement disorder afflicts about 1 million Americans, and is likely the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world; its global prevalence has doubled in the past 25 years.
It’s used today mainly in producing refrigerants and as a degreaser in heavy industry.
But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee, dry cleaning, carpet cleaning, and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor. TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
...and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
Whilst there are many who call decaffeinated coffee a crime against humanity, it is somewhat disconcerting that at one stage, it actually was just that.
It's used in dry cleaning in the USA, and their suppliers will deliver it to you by the gallon [0]. MSDS of course [1]. If you're in Australia and go to the dentist, there's this as well [2] although surely that container with its death's head and POISON label are kept well out of sight. Of course there's the lab supply chain, but that's usually more expensive. It's really easy and legal to get if you want it. I've known many mechanics and similar, professional and otherwise who use workaround sources like these to get the "good stuff" degreaser.
Proven to cause neurological damage, horrifically acutely toxic and chronically toxic, causes colorblindness of all things...
Oh yeah, when it thermally decomposes into phosgene, a WWI-era chemical weapon. Spray brake cleaner on hot brakes and you're pretty much instantly dead.
It’s also at Stapleton, another huge residential area, and previously Denver’s primary airport:
“At the former Stapleton Airport, which is also being redeveloped, the TCE is 35 to 40 feet deep, according to Tom Gleason, spokesman for Forest City Stapleton Inc., the private developer overseeing the building.
He said it won't have any effect on the redevelopment, which will include homes and commercial areas.”
Indeed, it didn’t. The redevelopment happened anyway. And now I’d guess it’s in the air, water, and of course the soil.
There seems to be a crazy amount of chemical waste all over the metro Denver area. I don't live in Lowry, but I play hockey maybe once every 1 to 2 months at Big Bear Ice Arena, which is in that neighborhood.
There's also the Rocky Flats nuclear site, the chemical plant in Lakewood, and also the wildlife "refuge" north of the city.
Seems somewhat ironic given Colorado's reputation for pristine natural beauty.
TCE is widely used in industry (and was introduced as a replacement for more toxic and persistent solvents like chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, etc.). Such non-polar solvents remain critically important for a wide variety of manufacturing processes, e.g.
> "TCE the solvent ENTEK uses is essential to ENTEK's separator manufacturing
process TCE has a unique combination of chemical properties that , together , facilitate the controlled removal of process oil while allowing ENTEK to efficiently recover and recycle previously used TCE for reuse in both the lead- acid and lithium separator production processes in a manner that minimizes worker exposure while resulting in a product with the characteristics demanded by the battery customers . TCE possesses the following properties critical to ENTEK's use and reuse" (ENTEK TCE rulemaking report to EPA, July 14 2021)
The fundamental issue (that led to widespread contamination in the past) is that capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.
There are some approaches to replacing organic solvents entirely (supercritical CO2 for example) but they're often quite expensive.
> capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.
This isn't a problem, us future generations can just engineer our way out of it at a cheaper cost than it would have been to deal with it in the first place.
Well one problem is that "Some of the most populated zones of" everywhere are superfund sites. Another, I learned long ago in the real estate business, is that superfund sites are just the sites they've taken the trouble to bother "cleaning up". As the article alludes to, it's not the documented TCE sites we need to worry about, it's the undocumented TCE sites that will likely get the average person. This same rule applies to real estate development.
One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought.
I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
There are small TCE plumes virtually everywhere in urbanized California. Every dry cleaner in history was just dumping waste TCE and PCE into holes in the ground. If you click around on this map, half of these sites are TCE/PCE (the other half are usually gas, diesel, and MTBE).
I lived near the Fairchild superfund site for many years. I remember when it was a hollow husk of a concrete building. And then the paved it over and put a supermarket and whatnot there.
Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild".
I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
Curious, Treasure Island (in the San Francisco Bay between SF and Oakland) is absolutely a Superfund site, but isn't marked on that map. Oh huh, apparently it avoided getting classified as a Superfund site[0]. Really makes me think that designation isn't all that useful anymore.
This paragraph from the article explains the significance of the reported result (and the motivation behind the study):
>> About 90% of Parkinson’s cases can’t be explained by genetics, but there have been hints that exposure to TCE may trigger it. The new study, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), represents by far the strongest environmental link between TCE and the disease. Until now, the entire epidemiological literature included fewer than 20 people who developed Parkinson’s after TCE exposure.
That is to say, the relation between TCE and Parkinsons had, until now, no strong evidence to support it. It seems (not sure, not my field) that now it does.
Also note, from the article:
>> “Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
They only studied TWO military bases and compared the rate of Parkinson's. There could be any number of environmental differences between these two locations besides the TCE levels in the water.
The other issue is that there is an active class action lawsuit about this exact military base. When a study is published that directly reinforces the claims of one side of an active lawsuit, you always need to be cautious about taking it at face value. There could be some conflict of interest or even just sympathy from the scientists that introduces bias in their research methodology.
If I remember right, the phase-out happened in the 1990s, just when a lot of manufacturing was leaving the U.S.
A few years back I found an internet search for “United States TCE” would turn up articles about Camp Jejune. A search for “China TCE” would turn up a picture of a truck with a bunch of barrels and an offer to buy it on Alibaba.
> But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee, dry cleaning, carpet cleaning, and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor.
The things we did with (now known) hazardous chemicals in the 20th century are really disturbing. My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
My guess is no, certainly not with every product imported from other countries. We joke about sketchy smelling products from China, and you occasionally hear about imports being recalled or blocked. How much of it are we missing, both known and unknown chemicals?
On the other hand, it's also easy for people disposed to anxiety to go down a rabbit hole where the only conclusion is you should go live off the land in the middle of nowhere...
>My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
Nope. For instance some of the chemicals in sun screen never had to pass rigorous safety testing because it was assumed they couldn't enter the blood, but in fact that's not the case, and already at least one is known to have negative effects on reproductive health:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2733085 . Who knows what other chemicals are floating about in various cosmetics entering the bloodstream through the skin without ever being safety tested for that.
TCE was originally conceived as a replacement for chemicals such as chloroform and ether, which were deemed to be too toxic to the liver for anesthesia. Once the toxicity of TCE was discovered, it started being phased out in various industries.
For degreasers, it was replaced by 1,1,1-Trichloroethane, a chloroalkane later banned by the Montreal Protocol. It's use in refrigeration was replaced by 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane, a hydrofluorocarbon banned in the EU today for global warming potential. And finally, its use as a general anaesthetic was succeeded by Halothane, which doesn't seem to have any major health affects (beyond those coming from being an anaesthetic). However, that too was later replaced by Sevoflurane, which is suspected to accelerate Alzheimers.
Also both those anaesthetisc are greenhouse gases.
So no, we are definitely going to have more problem chemicals in the future, because chemistry is complicated.
> are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
I doubt it. One obvious example is plasticizers: there was a big ruckus about BPA a few years ago, so manufacturers phased it out and switched to different plasticizers, many of which are incredibly chemically similar to BPA. It's seems very plausible that they have similar negative health effects, but there's no regulation (or even disclosure, in most cases) of which plasticizers are being used.
For chemicals that cause illnesses that take decades to show up, it's my guess that we will never find all of them, and there are likely a lot of them out there. It's a hard problem. Maybe it can be helped by using modelling techniques to extrapolate effects over time.
You can look into how many studies are done in currently used chemicals, spoiler is about 10%, when the chemical is declared unsafe like biphenol, they come up with a a non studied version. Ie: biphenol b and so the games goes
I remember my chemistry teacher in high school telling how they used to use 'tri' (that's how they called it) a lot to wash their hands in. Until they discovered that it was highly carcinogenic.
But yeah, that chemistry class was in the early 80's, so it is now ages ago that tri was still widely used.
> TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
the groundwater route still seems pretty troubling
Fetal toxicity and concerns for carcinogenic potential of TCE led to its abandonment in developed countries by the 1980s.
The use of trichloroethylene in the food and pharmaceutical industries has been banned in much of the world since the 1970s due to concerns about its toxicity.
Historically, TCE was used as a surgical anesthetic and inhaled analgesic. The Food and Drug Administration banned such use in the United States in 1977.
Anytime you see something unnecessarily and deliberately non-specific in a headline it's always some alarmist bullshit. "Famous actor is arrested for drunk driving" and they had one role in TV twenty years ago. "This everyday snack leads to kidney stones" and it's fish-butthole-flavored chips that were produced in Japan for six weeks in 1998.
Did you read the article? Your comment almost made me dismiss this altogether, but imagine my surprise when I started reading the article:
> However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
Yikes.
> Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
>"But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee" ...
This is exactly the reason I never touched decaf coffee until I found Swiss water process (SWP) decaf. It never made sense to me to use hydrocarbon solvents in a food application
> It never made sense to me to use hydrocarbon solvents in a food application
I get your point, but isn't this kind of a broad statement? After all, ethanol is a hydrocarbon solvent, and it's been used in food applications for a long time.
Ethanol is also a horrible toxin, it just happens to be common enough in nature that our bodies, and animal bodies as well, have had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve some mitigations against.
Ethanol is not a hydrocarbon, nor is TCE. By definition, a hydrocarbon is composed of carbon and hydrogen. Ethanol contains oxygen, while TCE contains chlorine.
I thought the SWP involved supercritical carbon dioxide, but apparently it just involves solubility tricks and sacrificial beans, and CO2 is the new, new method.
Halogenated solvents should definitely be avoided at all costs but I'm generally not too concerned about how hexanes are used to extract cooking oil, for example.
I am very sensitive to caffeine and recently switched to decaf only after drinking coffee daily for 20+ years. I drink mainly Mountain Water Processed coffee, which is the same thing but from coffee sourced in South America. It is roasted by a local roaster in Minneapolis. I honestly can't tell the difference between the decaf and regular (except for the lack of caffeine).
Also, SWP or MWP coffee removes nearly all caffeine unlike the more heavily processed versions.
- SWP is a means of treating green coffee beans pre-roast. They can be roasted any which way afterwards.
- Any type of bean can be treated this way.
- The process is pretty specific in targeting just caffeine. In removing caffeine though, the total dissolved solubles in the end coffee will be lower for the same amount of beans. Probably a lessor body unless you use more.
In practice, it's far easier to find good single-origin roasts than to find good decaf options. I've actually never been able to find anything lighter than medium roast in SWP -- not sure if that's for some functional or taste reason, or just because it's a sliver of a sliver of the market.
Coffee can also be decaffeinated by supercritical carbon dioxide, which was the first process I learned about (as an intro to supercritical fluids in a thermodynamics course).
Not sure I'd call it clickbait, and they do mention it right away. It'd be like putting a mathematical expression in the headline of an article about neural networks.
1. The authors only studied two military camps. One with high TCE levels, and one with low TCE levels. But, obviously, there might be any number of other factors that are different between the two camps with a causal relationship to Parkinson's Disease.
2. There is an active class action lawsuit from this military camp. Doing a limited study that benefits one side of a class action lawsuit should always be taken with some extra skepticism and evaluated for conflicts of interest.
Not that it proves anything but one of my uncles was a marine who spent a lot of time at Camp Jejune. He died of ALS, another neurodegenerative condition, and he got care for it through the VA as the marines thought it was a service-related condition.
I think the phrase "linked to" should be banned in science-adjacent journalism. It's too vague. "Antibiotics are linked to disease", just negatively. Any correlation can be called a "link". Far too vague.
If memory serves me this is the chemical at the basis of the John Travolta movie A Civil Action, which is based on the true story covered in the excellent book of the same title.
I disagree strongly. The article very quickly discloses the identity of the chemical the title alludes to, and including the full chemical compound in the title is a poor choice for a variety of reasons.
"But that “really means nothing for what’s already in the environment,” De Miranda says. Mitigating against exposure is tricky, she adds, because, unlike with pesticides, underground TCE locations aren’t always documented."
> I used to go fishing in a river near paper mills and eat the salmon I caught; I've been to a lot of farms; I smoked a lot of pot in high school when the government was poisoning the crops. But you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out
Fortunately it's a big increase in relative risk and not absolute risk:
By 2021, 279 of the Camp Lejeune veterans, or 0.33%, had developed Parkinson’s versus 151 of those at Camp Pendleton, or 0.21%. After adjusting for differences in age, sex, race, and ethnicity, the scientists found veterans from Camp Lejeune had a 70% higher rate of Parkinson’s disease than the Camp Pendleton group.
I guess it can be encouraging news for some people. My mom died with Parkinson's and I've almost certainly had less exposure to TCE than she did. I'm aware that there isn't really a known genetic link, it's just nice to occasionally see evidence that it can be exposure related. The increase in prevalence mentioned in the article isn't good, but that can be due to better techniques for diagnosing it.
Never exchange the "devil you know", especially if it's natural and has been used for centuries by billions, for some novel lab-made crap, proprietary owned, and marketed to death.
Not to mention when getting it has been the whole point of drinking coffee in the first place.
Given that drinking coffee lowers your risk of getting Parkinson's by up to 80%, the lack of caffeine is probably doing more for your Parkinson's risk than whatever chemicals were used to decaffeinate it.
This isn't really true, there are a few different methods to decaffeinating coffee beans:
"Like regular coffee, decaf coffee begins as green, unroasted beans. The hard beans are warmed and soaked in liquid to dissolve and remove the caffeine in one of four ways: using water alone, using a mixture of water and solvents (most commonly methylene chloride or ethyl acetate) applied either directly or indirectly, or using water and “supercritical carbon dioxide.”"
I drink it because when I need caffeine, decaf has enough for me. When younger, I drank it to fit in.
With enough sugar and milk, it tastes great, but so would anything. I am sure high-end coffee is great, but it’s never worth the effort to me, so I don’t know about that.
Any chemists here know if use of TCE has been phased out in school and graduate labs? When I was doing my degree I recall benzene was out in favour of toluene - which adds a methyl group to the ring, massively reducing toxicity.
I'm pretty sure we used TCE however, its distinct smell still lives in my memory, and the fact if you got any on your fingers you could taste/smell it within seconds. Butanoic acid was the other one you didn't want to get on your fingers.
All this was 25 years ago, I assume things have changed since then. I'm surprised I remember any of this.
Readit News
the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. The movement disorder afflicts about 1 million Americans, and is likely the fastest growing neurodegenerative disease in the world; its global prevalence has doubled in the past 25 years.
It’s used today mainly in producing refrigerants and as a degreaser in heavy industry.
But in the 20th century, TCE was used for many purposes, including making decaffeinated coffee, dry cleaning, carpet cleaning, and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor. TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
Whilst there are many who call decaffeinated coffee a crime against humanity, it is somewhat disconcerting that at one stage, it actually was just that.
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[0] https://garmentcleaningsupply.com/picrin-1-gal-streets.html
[1] http://www.cleanairsupply.com/CleanAir_Web_Image/Chemical/MS...
[2] https://henryschein.com.au/impression/accessories/finale-sol...
Proven to cause neurological damage, horrifically acutely toxic and chronically toxic, causes colorblindness of all things...
Oh yeah, when it thermally decomposes into phosgene, a WWI-era chemical weapon. Spray brake cleaner on hot brakes and you're pretty much instantly dead.
Does it remain in the fabric after use? Is there danger to the wearer of dry-cleaned clothes or only to the people working at dry cleaner businesses?
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This article is from 2000, before the housing development began. People knew TCE was there but the housing development happened anyway
https://extras.denverpost.com/news/news1126.htm
It’s also at Stapleton, another huge residential area, and previously Denver’s primary airport:
“At the former Stapleton Airport, which is also being redeveloped, the TCE is 35 to 40 feet deep, according to Tom Gleason, spokesman for Forest City Stapleton Inc., the private developer overseeing the building.
He said it won't have any effect on the redevelopment, which will include homes and commercial areas.”
Indeed, it didn’t. The redevelopment happened anyway. And now I’d guess it’s in the air, water, and of course the soil.
There's also the Rocky Flats nuclear site, the chemical plant in Lakewood, and also the wildlife "refuge" north of the city.
Seems somewhat ironic given Colorado's reputation for pristine natural beauty.
> "TCE the solvent ENTEK uses is essential to ENTEK's separator manufacturing process TCE has a unique combination of chemical properties that , together , facilitate the controlled removal of process oil while allowing ENTEK to efficiently recover and recycle previously used TCE for reuse in both the lead- acid and lithium separator production processes in a manner that minimizes worker exposure while resulting in a product with the characteristics demanded by the battery customers . TCE possesses the following properties critical to ENTEK's use and reuse" (ENTEK TCE rulemaking report to EPA, July 14 2021)
The fundamental issue (that led to widespread contamination in the past) is that capturing and recycling TCE after use is fairly expensive, and since it was cheaper to buy new TCE, manufacturers would just dump their dirty used TCE, creating superfund sites etc.
There are some approaches to replacing organic solvents entirely (supercritical CO2 for example) but they're often quite expensive.
This isn't a problem, us future generations can just engineer our way out of it at a cheaper cost than it would have been to deal with it in the first place.
/s - For sarcasm, and sorry.
https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-...
One of the dirty secrets of development is that we really have just poisoned a lot of our environment. Now you can work around that in real estate dev because there are creative ways to interpret disclosure regulations. But Mother Nature doesn't care about such tricks. She has a set of, (in this case chemical), rules and if they're broken, she'll happily punish you without a second thought.
I'm not sure how we solve the issue of toxins in our environment? It gets complex not only because of the competing interests, but also because research like this will continue to come out, and something we didn't think was a problem, will turn out to have been a problem. So you're in a situation where you know a lot. You even learn more everyday. But you don't know what you don't know.
https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2018-tce/
https://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/map/?global_id=SL60019...
Growing up I knew a lot of kids that were affected by it, they were called "fairchildren" or a "fairchild".
I was born elsewhere and my family moved to the area, the kids that were born there weren't so lucky.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-Treasure-Is...
If it's so cheap, and available in such large quantities, it's definitely getting used today, in massive quantities, in some parts of the world.
>> About 90% of Parkinson’s cases can’t be explained by genetics, but there have been hints that exposure to TCE may trigger it. The new study, led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), represents by far the strongest environmental link between TCE and the disease. Until now, the entire epidemiological literature included fewer than 20 people who developed Parkinson’s after TCE exposure.
That is to say, the relation between TCE and Parkinsons had, until now, no strong evidence to support it. It seems (not sure, not my field) that now it does.
Also note, from the article:
>> “Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
They only studied TWO military bases and compared the rate of Parkinson's. There could be any number of environmental differences between these two locations besides the TCE levels in the water.
The other issue is that there is an active class action lawsuit about this exact military base. When a study is published that directly reinforces the claims of one side of an active lawsuit, you always need to be cautious about taking it at face value. There could be some conflict of interest or even just sympathy from the scientists that introduces bias in their research methodology.
A few years back I found an internet search for “United States TCE” would turn up articles about Camp Jejune. A search for “China TCE” would turn up a picture of a truck with a bunch of barrels and an offer to buy it on Alibaba.
The things we did with (now known) hazardous chemicals in the 20th century are really disturbing. My question is are there now enough safeguards in place that we're unlikely to be repeating the same mistakes?
My guess is no, certainly not with every product imported from other countries. We joke about sketchy smelling products from China, and you occasionally hear about imports being recalled or blocked. How much of it are we missing, both known and unknown chemicals?
On the other hand, it's also easy for people disposed to anxiety to go down a rabbit hole where the only conclusion is you should go live off the land in the middle of nowhere...
Nope. For instance some of the chemicals in sun screen never had to pass rigorous safety testing because it was assumed they couldn't enter the blood, but in fact that's not the case, and already at least one is known to have negative effects on reproductive health: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2733085 . Who knows what other chemicals are floating about in various cosmetics entering the bloodstream through the skin without ever being safety tested for that.
For degreasers, it was replaced by 1,1,1-Trichloroethane, a chloroalkane later banned by the Montreal Protocol. It's use in refrigeration was replaced by 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane, a hydrofluorocarbon banned in the EU today for global warming potential. And finally, its use as a general anaesthetic was succeeded by Halothane, which doesn't seem to have any major health affects (beyond those coming from being an anaesthetic). However, that too was later replaced by Sevoflurane, which is suspected to accelerate Alzheimers.
Also both those anaesthetisc are greenhouse gases.
So no, we are definitely going to have more problem chemicals in the future, because chemistry is complicated.
I doubt it. One obvious example is plasticizers: there was a big ruckus about BPA a few years ago, so manufacturers phased it out and switched to different plasticizers, many of which are incredibly chemically similar to BPA. It's seems very plausible that they have similar negative health effects, but there's no regulation (or even disclosure, in most cases) of which plasticizers are being used.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bpa-substitutes-may-...
Was this meant to be reassuring?
Per the article, you won't find in retail products; but rather, in the soil and groundwater -- where it is "highly persistent".
~20 000 tonnes today vs. 250 000 tonnes in 1970.
> TCE is highly persistent in soil and groundwater; inhalation through vapor from these hidden sources is likely the prime route of exposure today. However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
the groundwater route still seems pretty troubling
Might even be unknowingly imported into other countries
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Untrue.
Wiki isn't great, but here is what I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene
However, I can still find some pages about "TCE Vapor Degreasing", so it is still in use today: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...The saddest one I found: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Woah.> However, it’s detectable in many foods, in up to one-third of U.S. drinking water, and in breast milk, blood, and urine.
Yikes.
> Alarmingly, TCE vapor intrusion is widespread today and ranges from an elementary school situated on top of a former chemical facility in Shanghai, China, to multimillion-dollar homes built on a previous aerospace plant in Newport Beach, California,” the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA Neurology write.
Yikes.
Your comment was very misleading.
This is exactly the reason I never touched decaf coffee until I found Swiss water process (SWP) decaf. It never made sense to me to use hydrocarbon solvents in a food application
I get your point, but isn't this kind of a broad statement? After all, ethanol is a hydrocarbon solvent, and it's been used in food applications for a long time.
At this point, it looks like the solvent thing is probably overstated (in highly developed/regulated countries)). This page has info about the history of different solvents: https://www.coffeereview.com/coffee-reference/coffee-categor...
Also, SWP or MWP coffee removes nearly all caffeine unlike the more heavily processed versions.
- SWP is a means of treating green coffee beans pre-roast. They can be roasted any which way afterwards.
- Any type of bean can be treated this way.
- The process is pretty specific in targeting just caffeine. In removing caffeine though, the total dissolved solubles in the end coffee will be lower for the same amount of beans. Probably a lessor body unless you use more.
Interested to hear from someone who has tried it.
“Once widely used chemical in the 70s…” or a “Formerly widely used chemical” - was that so hard?
1. The authors only studied two military camps. One with high TCE levels, and one with low TCE levels. But, obviously, there might be any number of other factors that are different between the two camps with a causal relationship to Parkinson's Disease.
2. There is an active class action lawsuit from this military camp. Doing a limited study that benefits one side of a class action lawsuit should always be taken with some extra skepticism and evaluated for conflicts of interest.
"Activated carbon filtration can remove TCE from drinking water effectively."[1]
[1] https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/hazar...
Really disturbing.
> I used to go fishing in a river near paper mills and eat the salmon I caught; I've been to a lot of farms; I smoked a lot of pot in high school when the government was poisoning the crops. But you can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out
There's TCE in paper mill wastewater...
By 2021, 279 of the Camp Lejeune veterans, or 0.33%, had developed Parkinson’s versus 151 of those at Camp Pendleton, or 0.21%. After adjusting for differences in age, sex, race, and ethnicity, the scientists found veterans from Camp Lejeune had a 70% higher rate of Parkinson’s disease than the Camp Pendleton group.
I guess it can be encouraging news for some people. My mom died with Parkinson's and I've almost certainly had less exposure to TCE than she did. I'm aware that there isn't really a known genetic link, it's just nice to occasionally see evidence that it can be exposure related. The increase in prevalence mentioned in the article isn't good, but that can be due to better techniques for diagnosing it.
Not to mention when getting it has been the whole point of drinking coffee in the first place.
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"Like regular coffee, decaf coffee begins as green, unroasted beans. The hard beans are warmed and soaked in liquid to dissolve and remove the caffeine in one of four ways: using water alone, using a mixture of water and solvents (most commonly methylene chloride or ethyl acetate) applied either directly or indirectly, or using water and “supercritical carbon dioxide.”"
-> https://www.ncausa.org/Decaffeinated-Coffee
It's not exactly the most delicious drink.
I've dropped caffeine but still really like good coffee, so I'll occasionally go out and get a cup of decaf.
I drink it because when I need caffeine, decaf has enough for me. When younger, I drank it to fit in.
With enough sugar and milk, it tastes great, but so would anything. I am sure high-end coffee is great, but it’s never worth the effort to me, so I don’t know about that.
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I'm pretty sure we used TCE however, its distinct smell still lives in my memory, and the fact if you got any on your fingers you could taste/smell it within seconds. Butanoic acid was the other one you didn't want to get on your fingers.
All this was 25 years ago, I assume things have changed since then. I'm surprised I remember any of this.