I have talked Bob Greene, industrial chemist and compliance man into writing for JunkScience.
It was a good idea.
Mostly my motivation was to get some hard science help, since biology is soft and I am on the soft end of that softer Science.
Greene has a highly tuned brain, much experience, and knows the workings of gov and agency apparatchiks and regulatory regimes.
I proposed to him that the formaldehyde found in the restaurant water samples in Charleston could be just ambient contaminants, since formaldehyde is ubiquitous.
Here’s his usual direct and lucid comment. I surely do admire an uncluttered mind.
I’m not sure where the formaldehyde came from or whether the analyses are significant. It seems to have been found in one location and not in all samples. If it had been produced by American Water as a result of the spill, then it should have been found in numerous locations. I can’t find anything I think is plausible for converting MCHM to formaldehyde in water by chemical means.
You’ve got the biological bit down. 20 plus years ago I had some consultants do some environmental sampling for formaldehyde. They found up to a ppm or so in the soils of well kept lawns, blood samples and all kinds of interesting places. The sources could have been biological, internal combustion engines or industrial. The state had ambient air monitors about and were picking up stuff in ppb levels.
All internal combustion engines produce some amounts of formaldehyde. If you have an oxidative catalyst on the engine, it should be removed. Unless you are in places that require oxycats on small engines, it’s likely that all those engines are producing small quantities of formaldehyde. The chemical company I worked for made the world’s premier melamine-formaldehyde crosslinker for paints and tire adhesives. It released formaldehyde as a byproduct of crosslinking when heated. It was used in any enamel paint application that required heating to crosslink the paint (cars, furniture, pop cans…). It was also the adhesive agent for bonding rubber to steel belts. We used about 80k gallons per week of 55% formaldehyde.
In West Virginia you could be getting it from industrial processes, IC engines, almost anywhere. I bet you can find it almost anywhere.
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Good to see Bob elevated to writer. I have been reading his comments for years. Good Choice.
That circles back to the old question, why is biodegradable a good thing? I always wondered why enviornmentalists had a problem with an inert material that’ll stay where you put it for a million years without changing as opposed to organic materials that break down and leech spooky chemicals into the ground water.
In west Africa, they used to put formaldehyde in beer, to prevent it from going bad too quickly. If you drank too much, you would get a headache before you sobered up. Hangovers were excruciating.
Of course, that didn’t stop us from sampling the products, weekly.
I wonder how much of environmental HCHO comes from thermal decomposition of PF resins or their biodegradation. One ubiquitous source of that stuff is bamboo furniture and tableware imported from Asia. Speaking of old phones, is Bakelite still around? What about ion exchange beads in water softeners? None of these materials is extremely stable, so I would expect them giving off HCHO at far higher than ppb levels. Perhaps enough to explain the observed variation.
Yet again we have proven detection of trace amounts of a chemical, but no proof that those trace amounts are doing any harm.
Back in the olde days, when there were coin operated telephones, the phone companies would sometimes have the phones cleaned with a formaldehyde – water solution. The public was in no danger and the phone was cleaner than before.
This “scare” is more proof of media searching for headlines.
Formaldehyde is also a product of photolysis and oxidation of methane and methanol in the air, both are common.