From the University of Washington comes news of a terrible scourge of air pollution coming from America’s suburban wasteland. Yes, it’s the unregulated clothes dryer vent. I see a whole new division of the EPA just for this major threat and compliance teams confiscating fabric softener sheets with that cute little bear on the box and boxes of Cheer nationwide.
Scented laundry products emit hazardous chemicals through dryer vents
The same University of Washington researcher who used chemical sleuthing to deduce what’s in fragranced consumer products now has turned her attention to the scented air wafting from household laundry vents.
Findings, published online this week in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health, show that air vented from machines using the top-selling scented liquid laundry detergent and scented dryer sheet contains hazardous chemicals, including two that are classified as carcinogens.
“This is an interesting source of pollution because emissions from dryer vents are essentially unregulated and unmonitored,” said lead author Anne Steinemann, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering and of public affairs. “If they’re coming out of a smokestack or tail pipe, they’re regulated, but if they’re coming out of a dryer vent, they’re not.”
The research builds on earlier work that looked at what chemicals are released by laundry products, air fresheners, cleaners, lotions and other fragranced consumer products. Manufacturers are not required to disclose the ingredients used in fragrances, or in laundry products.
For the new study, which focuses on chemicals emitted through laundry vents, researchers first purchased and pre-rinsed new, organic cotton towels. They asked two homeowners to volunteer their washers and dryers, cleaned the inside of the machines with vinegar, and ran full cycles using only water to eliminate as much residue as possible.
At the first home, they ran a regular laundry cycle and analyzed the vent fumes for three cases: once with no products, once with the leading brand of scented liquid laundry detergent, and finally with both the detergent and a leading brand of scented dryer sheets. A canister placed inside the dryer vent opening captured the exhaust 15 minutes into each drying cycle. Researchers then repeated the procedure with a different washer and dryer at a second home.
Analysis of the captured gases found more than 25 volatile organic compounds, including seven hazardous air pollutants, coming out of the vents. Of those, two chemicals – acetaldehyde and benzene – are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as carcinogens, for which the agency has established no safe exposure level.
“These products can affect not only personal health, but also public and environmental health. The chemicals can go into the air, down the drain and into water bodies,” Steinemann said.
The researchers estimate that in the Seattle area, where the study was conducted, acetaldehyde emissions from this brand of laundry detergent would be equivalent to 3 percent of the total acetaldehyde emissions coming from automobiles. Emissions from the top five brands, they estimate, would constitute about 6 percent of automobiles’ acetaldehyde emissions.
“We focus a lot of attention on how to reduce emissions of pollutants from automobiles,” Steinemann said. “And here’s one source of pollutants that could be reduced.”
The project’s website also includes letters from the public reporting health effects from scented consumer products. Steinemann says that people’s reports of adverse reactions to fragranced air coming from laundry vents motivated her to conduct this study.
Steinemann recommends using laundry products without any fragrance or scent.
Co-authors are Lisa Gallagher and Amy Davis at the UW, and Ian MacGregor at Battelle Memorial Institute.
For more information, contact Steinemann at acstein@uw.edu. She is best reached via email.
More information about the research, including a copy of the article, is at http://depts.washington.edu/exposure/
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Not to worry. ‘Global Warming’ has this covered. Clothes driers are an unacceptable use of household energy (most of which is generated by burning carbon based fuels) and can simply be banned to save the polar bears. Just like light bulbs.
New green industry: Catalytic converters for your dryer vent. Of all the unbridaled demonstrations of “too much time on one’s hands”…..
People’s reports about adverse reactions???? WTF??? They must have been lining up!
God help us all.
A hundred years from now, little children in China will be told to clean their plates with the admonition, “Think of all the starving children in America.”
Nanny state is alive and well…also stop breathing to help mother earth?????
Isn’t the waste heat causing global warming?
It’s amazing we’ve all lived so long, isn’t it?
You’d think the average lifespan in this country was dropping rapidly. Somehow, with the junk food we eat, the mercury in the air and drinking water, chemicals in our homes, transfats, saturated fats, HFCS, etc., etc., not to mention our non-government run healthcare system, we keep living longer and longer.
I wonder what’s wrong? Do we need a computer model, or do we need to adjust the data?
“… The chemicals can go into the air, down the drain and into water bodies …”
But do they? And in what concentration? What is the LD50 (or equivalent for carcinogens) for the compounds? For example, what is the concentration in ppm or ppb at 10m from the vent? 20m? 50? Compared to the exposure shown in controlled laboratory experiments to lead to x% increase in the probability of developing cancer of type A, B, or C over time t?
Careful methodology, limited data set, not controlled for variation in machines, no tie in to health effects, etc. In other words, is there any real science in this study? (I read the paper, didn’t see it. Maybe I missed it and someone else will spot it.)
We need scrubbers on clothes lines, so people who don’t use dryers in an effort to avoid dryer vent regulations can’t pollute.
Don’t let the aliens smell our drying clothes!!
I wonder what chemicals are being emitted from the Anne Steinemann’s deodorant, hair spray, shampoo and conditioner, perfume? Lets analyze those while we are at it. Personally I like the fragrance of a clothes dryer exhaust, much more than many of the perfumes and colognes wornby people today.
Maybe next she should look at all the air freshener sprays, the glade plug-ins, pot-pourri and scented candels? My guess it there are alot of other sources of pollution there they can use to control – err I mean protect the public.
Did they test the air going into the dryer first?
Maybe they should test the air coming from flowering plants, bet there’s loads of natural toxins there too! For example:
From Wikipedia:
‘Acetaldehyde occurs naturally in coffee, bread, and ripe fruit, and is produced by plants as part of their normal metabolism. It is also produced by oxidation of ethanol and is popularly believed to be a cause of hangovers…’
Now this research, if you can call it that, is out, no doubt we will hear of thousands of people suffering from deadly dryer-syndrome.
Meanwhile I’m going back to drinking my coffee, with acetaldehyde et al…
Affirmative action in action.
This may sound humorous and frivolous, but a friend of mine has chemical sensitivity and is strongly affected by these emissions from clothes driers. They cause him to quickly develop symptoms like those of Tourette’s syndrome and the muscles of his left side become almost crippled. He is affected for several hours afterward. Those fabric softeners are a definite hazard to him and the effect on him makes one wonder if the rest of us are also being affected, just to a lesser degree. Is it only coincidence that the incidence of asthma has increased in recent decades?
IanM
I wonder which generation of kids will get the idea of “huffing” off of dryer vents?
And people wear clothes washed in this sh*t. I don’t understand it. I mean everyone’s gonna die, but dying from industrial perfume-induced cancer is pretty stupid.
If I’m in the same room as scented detergent or dryer sheets or any other petroleum-derived perfume, I immediately get a headache that doesn’t go away for hours. Alcohol-based perfumes aren’t an issue.
This ubiquitous exposure to nasty chemicals for no good reason is one of my pet peeves. The others are small engines that really ought to be electric – your lawn mower causes more cancer and smog than your car, even if it is a four stroke – and giant 1 passenger trucks imperiling everyone else on the road in the name of safety – if you’re so scared of the road, take the bus.
Never did like all those added fragrances and softeners anyway . . . 🙂 Different people definitely have different sensitivities to these chemicals. I don’t know that it is worth regulating, but on a very local (household) level it is certainly the case that some people are better off without them.
From the first few comments, it is apparent that people think it is normal to add these over-scented washing and softening chemicals to their washing. I can’t stand the ghastly sickly smell of them and use as plain a detergent as I can find, with no softener, and I use a dryer only when the weather is too bad to hang the washing outside on a line. I bet our power bill is rather lower than those who assume there is no other way but to use a tumble-dryer!
My daughter gets a rash from scented detergents and softeners, so we use no softeners and unscented detergents (when in France on holiday we found a very subtly scented detergent which was very good, but where we live the choice is between way too much or nothing at all). But the best scent you can get is the scent you get when clothes are dried in the old fashioned way in fresh air!
In defense of the study, I’ll say it is a type of study that could be good to do. In this case it doesn’t seem to have turned up anything particularly dangerous. However, there have been similar styles of studies that have turned up significant dangers from unlikely spots.
Lead in paint is one of them. I’m old enough to remember when it was first discovered that lead in paint could be ingested to reach harmful levels. I remember a lot of scoffing about what a stupid study it was, how it was useless, and so on.
Today we recognize that it was a significant health threat. This drier study didn’t turn up anything (though it may be the basis for some sort of action anyway – never underestimate the desire of governments to create bureaucracy at the slightest excuse!) but let’s not toss out scientific investigation into what seems to be odd-ball things.
There have been some great discoveries by looking into silly, odd-ball topics.
So if clothes get dry naturally, those harmful fragrances will stay in?
3% of automobile emissions.. add the industry, natural sources and you are fighting over nothing.
It seems that some of the latest comments before mine are on similar lines.
There are far too many sickly over-scented items around and I feel nauseous when I’m in the part of a supermarket that contains them. I also feel sick when I have to walk into my other half’s study after he has been interviewing people who go for aggressive modern perfumes, both men and women. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they are polluting my home environment. Yuk! Whatever is it doing to their health too?
See it didn’t take long did it to get to the extreme of ‘we are all going to die horrible deaths because of clothes dryer smells,’ no wonder the warmistas have an easy ride!
There will be and always have been people with allergic reactions to life in general, do the rest of us have to have our lives regulated into a miserable greyness because of it? Ban the peanut, ban cats and dogs, ban pollen, ban dust, ban deodorants, ban gluten, ban Al Gore (well he really is irritating) ban…..
“I wonder what chemicals are being emitted from the Anne Steinemann’s deodorant, hair spray, shampoo and conditioner, perfume? ”
Betcha $10 she doesn’t use any of those things. Betcha another $10 she “suffers” from “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity” and enjoys making life miserable for any real woman who dares to enter her presence. You can smell it in her vocabulary.
“the agency [EPA] has established no safe exposure level”, but they occur naturally?
“Acetaldehyde has a widespread natural occurrence. Acetaldehyde occurs in nature as an intermediate product in the respiration of higher plants and can be found in ripening fruit such as apples. It is also an intermediate product of fermentation of alcohol and in metabolism of sugars in the body. It may form in wine and other alcoholic beverages after exposure to air. Natural sources include forest fires, volcanoes, animal wastes, and insects.” http://www.environment.gov.au/atmosphere/airquality/publications/sok/acetaldehyde.html
For Annie and vboring’s sake and those with perfume allergies, lets ban all fragrances from clothes drying, that will make the world a better place.
Seriously, this is a very simplistic study I would expect to see from a JR high science fair project not a real university study.
While admittedly in high concentrations such as store aisles an such, perfumes and smells can be overwhelming and perhaps even harmful, especially to those with sensitivity to them, but lets apply some common sense here people.
Condensed urban living, preferred by greenies who want to reduce land disturbance and carbon footprints from bigger houses and long commutes, virtually eliminates the ability to “naturally” dry clothes on a clothes line. Like any ” pollutant” concentration is the issue, if there is indeed an increased concentration of “hrmful” chemicals to the local environment then perhaps some action needs to be taken, but until a real scientific repeatable studies with several hundred dryers, gas and electric with samples of intake air and exhaust air taken over sustained periods of time with varying types of detergents, softeners, dryer sheets or other softening, static reducing methods, and at varying distances from the exhaust port in both urban and rural locations have been conducted and repeated, this is nothing more than alarmism.
Lets move along, shall we. Oh and hold your nose, something here stinks.
I so agree with the over-scented household cleaning product comments. I buy unscented when I can find it. If that laundry sheet smell is as good as the commercials say it is, why can’t you buy it as a perfume? Dish soap is the worst. I can smell and taste that stuff on plastic-based ware. It’s like having soap as a side dish on your plate and a mix for your drink. Yuk.