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Doing Your Hair May Expose You to as Much Pollution as Standing in Traffic
Blow-drying, straightening, or curling your hair in the morning might seem harmless — but it could be filling your lungs with as much pollution as standing on a busy highway, scientists warn.
A research team led by professor Nusrat Jung and Ph.D. student Jianghui Liu of Purdue University, Indiana, found that a 10–20-minute heat-based hair routine can release more than 10 billion tiny particles into the air — which may then be inhaled into the lungs.
These can cause health problems like breathing difficulties, lung inflammation and even cognitive decline.
“This is really quite concerning,” Jung said in a statement. “The number of nanoparticles inhaled from using typical, store-bought hair-care products was far greater than we ever anticipated.”
Modern Dentistry Is a Microplastic Minefield
If you are like me, you brush your teeth — too vigorously, I’m told — with a plastic rack of plastic bristles. You use your plastic brush to lather a paste pushed from a plastic tube. When you have a cavity, you go to a dentist who might fill the hole with a plastic composite then sand it flush right there in your mouth.
Say you grind your teeth at night. Your dentist might prescribe you a fitted piece of cured acrylic to grind into instead, the surface of which eventually gets visibly rough and worn. Perhaps your teeth are not very straight, so you contemplate getting aligners — thin sheets of thermoplastic that would be heated and then molded to the contours of your mouth and that you would need to wear almost constantly. The retainers you’d wear afterward to keep your newly straight teeth in place might also be plastic.
Nearly every part of modern dentistry and orthodontics involves — and is enhanced by — this remarkably useful material. In some cases, it’s part of necessary medical treatments: A cavity must be filled to prevent worse damage, and at least the plastic-glass composite filling your cavity won’t leach mercury, like the silver fillings that were more common for prior generations. But in cases that are purely aesthetic — tooth straightening can fall into this category — the trade-offs may look different.
Kaua‘i Pediatrician Who Warned About One Toxic Pesticide Sees a Bigger Threat
Hawaii Business Magazine reported:
Hawai‘i isn’t often at the forefront of national policymaking, but its 2018 ban on a widely used but controversial pesticide set the stage for other states, the federal government and even the EU to follow suit. With much fanfare, then-Gov. David Ige signed the bill into law in June of that year after a heated public debate in Kaua‘i. Residents there had raised alarms about seed companies spraying the pesticide chlorpyrifos on fields near schools.
Now, a soft-spoken Kaua‘i pediatrician who helped focus state lawmakers’ attention on the health risks of chlorpyrifos back then is again sounding the alarm. This time, the looming showdown is over a seemingly innocuous 71-word section of the appropriations bill that the U.S. House of Representatives will take up next week when lawmakers return from their summer break. “It’s a sleeper poison-pill,” says Dr. Lee Evslin, describing the provision that opponents argue could prevent Hawai‘i and other states from again setting their own pesticides restrictions.
Opponents of the provision say it would also shield chemical companies from lawsuits by people harmed by pesticide use and would limit research that might document hazards posed by chemicals already on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s approved list, such as glyphosate, the prime ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides.
Texas Power Plants and Chemical Companies Benefit as Trump Eases Pollution Rules, Experts Say
For Donna Thomas, smokestacks are a typical sight from her home in Fort Bend County. Since she was a child, she has seen the coal and natural gas-powered W.A. Parish Generating Station puff clouds of haze during the day and light up brightly at night. The facility — which has been around since 1958 — is both part of the background and all she thinks about.
Thomas is not alone. For decades, residents have expressed concerns over the pollution emitted from the Parish coal plant — a separate facility from the natural gas plant — and called for its closure. The plant, located about 30 miles southwest of downtown Houston, is ranked by Texas environmental regulators as one of the worst polluters in the state for certain hazardous emissions. These include mercury, a toxic heavy metal particularly harmful for children and pregnant people.
This year, mercury has been top of mind for environmental activists and residents like Thomas. In April, President Donald Trump announced an exemption for companies from implementing stricter Biden-era mercury regulations for two years. Of the 163 eligible coal plants, 11 are in Texas and six have been approved, including Parish’s operator, NRG Energy. In Missouri and Illinois, five coal plants have been exempted, and in Pennsylvania, all 12 of the coal plants seeking approval have been approved.
