Biology

Transcript 0:05 Hi, I'm Dr.
0:06 Eugenia Gold, and this is Science on the street.
0:09 When I say toxic spills, you may imagine this or this.
0:14 After all, we were raised with imagery like this
0:17 and this seriously.
0:20 Again, with Captain Planet, Don't we have any other reference we can use?
0:24 A massive tanker is run aground on the Central Coast
0:26 line, spilling millions of gallons of oil on Baby SEAL Beach.
0:29 Don't we have anything from this century? No.
0:35 Okay.
0:35 Well, besides now familiar images of oil spreading through the ocean,
0:39 toxic spills can really look like this.
0:42 These are nurdles.
0:43 And even though they sound like a new pasta based casual dining restaurant,
0:47 Nurdles are lentil sized pellets of pure plastic
0:50 that are used to make many of the plastic products we use.
0:53 It's plastic and it's almost basic form.
0:56 In 2021, 1680 metric tons of these wee nurdles
1:00 were swept off a shipping container in the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka.
1:04 That's about 463 elephants worth
1:07 or about 1 million big ketchup bottles.
1:10 Nurdles can be difficult to clean up because of their small size,
1:13 but they also can and do become a toxic hazard because of their chemical makeup.
1:18 Nurdles can attract bacteria and hazardous compounds that either
1:22 wash ashore, infecting the coastline or get
1:25 eaten by marine wildlife, which poisons and kills them.
1:29 And if it's hard to clean up toxic spills that we can see,
1:32 imagine how difficult it can be when chemical spill into the environment.
1:36 That's exactly what happened
1:37 with the February 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
1:41 When that train crashed, five tank cars
1:44 spilled 115,000 gallons of vinyl chloride gas.
1:48 Vinyl chloride is the VC in PVC,
1:52 the plastic compound that's used to make pipes
1:54 for plumbing, among other plastic items.
1:57 The cleanup was
1:57 partially managed with a controlled burn, which led to the real life
2:01 version of Hexxus hovering menacingly over the skies of Palestine.
2:05 This was a, quote unquote, slow burn.
2:07 So they burned off the vinyl chloride
2:12 so it did not cause an explosion.
2:17 And one of the reasons that that's done is, of course,
2:20 you don't want to have an explosion, but also
2:24 vinyl chloride, once it gets into the water,
2:27 the groundwater, it can hang out there for years and years and years.
2:31 So it's almost as if dealing
2:34 with the air pollution
2:37 was the lesser evil, which of course is still evil.
2:41 Then dealing with potential groundwater contamination for decades to come.
2:46 And it wasn't just the air that was the problem.
2:48 The chemicals from the derailment also made their way into local streams
2:52 affecting wildlife, though officials were confident
2:55 that those chemicals did not penetrate the municipal water systems.
2:59 But with fish dying and Hexxus looming overhead, concerns
3:02 about toxicity With the East Palestine train derailment persist,
3:06 toxic
3:07 chemicals can be even harder to clean up when they get into the waterways.
3:10 In the 1970s, two contaminated water wells and Woburn, Massachusetts,
3:14 caused a spike in leukemia cases at four times the national average.
3:18 The contamination was traced back to two companies,
3:21 but the litigation took years, and several people, including eight children, died.
3:25 My father owned a site work
3:28 company in the early eighties, and
3:32 and people were getting in ground pools or septic systems or home foundations.
3:37 So he's literally, you know, in the digging the trench,
3:40 so in the trenches, of that contaminated waste.
3:44 And he got a very rare form of leukemia,
3:49 he he died ten months after he was diagnosed.
3:53 And then every single one of his employees also got sick
3:58 and two of them are still alive today.
4:02 Despite $21 million in cleanup,
4:04 the wells were still contaminated 30 years later.
4:07 Irresponsible companies, shipping container accidents and train
4:11 derailments are partially why increased regulations are so important.
4:15 If these compounds are classified as hazardous, they are subjected to more
4:18 stringent containment measures, which keeps them encased
4:21 if they fall off the ship or if the train carrying them crashes.
4:25 It seems like a straightforward solution that will end the apparent dystopian
4:29 Groundhog's Day scenario of continued toxic spills we keep finding ourselves in.
4:34 Except instead of Punxsutawney Phil, it's billions of nurdles.
4:39 Science on the street is brought to you
4:41 by the Suffolk University College of Arts and Sciences and filmed in Studio 73.