Computer Chemical Health Hazards (And Some Workarounds)
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The other side of the coin for some of us struggling with this illness is that computers contain a lot of plastics, and plastics tend to gas off chemical vapors. Computers, especially newer ones, also tend to run hot, which amplifies their chemical emissions.
However, computers may also be a significant health hazard to people who are not environmentally ill. Last week, a report released by a coalition of environmental advocacy groups including the Computer Take-Back Campaign (CTBC), Clean Production Action (CPA), and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition said that in the first nationwide tests for brominated flame retardants in dust swiped from computers, neurotoxic chemicals were found on every computer sampled. The highest levels found were a form of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) called deca-BDE — one of the most widely used fire retardant chemicals used in the electronics industry.
The report abstract notes:
"These results indicate that there is exposure to certain brominated flame retardants and that computers are likely to be a significant source of deca-BDE exposure in the dust of homes, offices, schools, and businesses. There is evidence that these chemicals could be hazardous to human health. All exposures, no matter how small, are of concern because deca-BDE is a bioaccumulative substance. This means that multiple exposures to low levels of deca-BDE add up over time and build up in the body. There is no safe dose associated with these chemicals...."
The report goes on to note that Brominated flame retardants (BFRs), especially PBDEs, are persistent in the environment and contaminate the food chain, building up in the body tissues of animals, and people.
"The capacity of PBDEs to bioaccumulate in fatty tissue and biomagnify up the food chain, in combination with their persistence and toxicity make this class of chemicals of high concern to the environment and human health. PBDEs and related compounds are turning up just about everywhere scientists look for them, up and down the food chain, in sediments, beluga whales, seals, bird eggs, and human milk, serum and adipose tissue.
"Of grave concern is the research showing that women in North America have the highest levels globally of these chemicals in their breast milk and evidence continues to mount about their effect on the neurological and endocrine systems. These levels are doubling every two to five years in the North American population."
For more information on this survey, visit:
http://www.computertakeback.com/the_problem/bfr.cfm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8826113.htm
http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/pubs/poisonpc2004.htm
This isn't the first time flame-retardant chemicals have been identified as a health hazard associated with computers. Another flame retardant chemical known to emit from computer monitors is triphenyl phosphate, which is known to trigger allergic reactions in some people such as itching, nasal congestion, and headaches. A Swedish study led by Conny Ostman of Stockholm University was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a peer-reviewed publication of the American Chemical Society, found that triphenyl phosphate emissions levels dropped sharply after eight days of continuous operation, but remained 10 times higher than the background level even after 183 days - roughly the equivalent of two years of normal use.
"Even in offices with adequate ventilation, this compound could be a potential hazard for computer users," Ostman is quoted saying.
Ostman's team found that some monitors contained as much 10 percent of the allergenic compound, but that concentrations seemed to vary among various manufacturing plants, and may also be different at various times within the plants, which could explain my personal experience of reacting severely to one example of a particular computer model, but not to another seemingly identical one.
You can read more about the Swedish research here.
There are reportedly about 175 different types of chemical flame retardants. About 40% of PBDEs are used in the outer casings of computers, printers and televisions and by far the largest volume PBDE mixture used as a flame retardant has been deca-BDE. Two of the three forms of PBDEs —penta- and octa-BDE— will be taken off the market by the end of 2004, but deca-BDE and other brominated flame retardants will continue to be used in the United States.
In the CTBA (et al.) survey, the highest single deca-BDE sample came from a new flat screen monitor in a university office with no other computers, and the researchers note that "computers that use brominated flame retardants, are likely to be a source of exposure and add to the growing body of evidence showing that deca-BDE is quickly becoming one of the most abundant congeners found in samples of indoor dust."
The report further notes that an international European convention on toxics has placed the entire class of brominated flame retardants on their list of hazardous materials targeted for phase-out, and that several European countries, including Norway, Germany and Sweden, have introduced legislation that will require companies to replace BFRs with safer alternatives. The European Union recently banned the use of all PBDEs and polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) in electronic products starting in 2006.
Maine has banned penta- and octa-BDE as of January 1, 2006, and deca-BDE by January 1, 2008, becoming the first U.S. state to ban deca- BDE assuming safer alternatives exist. Washington state's governor signed an Executive Order in January instructing the Department of Ecology to develop a phase out plan by December of 2004 for all PBDEs including deca-BDE. California also passed legislation in 2003 calling for a ban and phase-out of penta-and octa-BDE, and several other states, including New York, Massachusetts and Wisconsin are planning to legislate bans.
The survey summarizes that while "there is universal agreement that preventing fires and reducing burn time is critical in buildings, transportation vehicles and consumer products.... in the face of new evidence and increasing chemical contamination of the general public, the United States can no longer ignore the evidence that deca-BDE and other toxic fire retardants pose a high risk to public health and the environment...."
A report by Mercury News' John Boudreau last week notes that "Past research has shown that California women have three to 30 times more of PBDEs in their breast tissue than do Europeans or Japanese women," and that "North American women have the highest levels of PBDEs in the world, close to the levels shown to damage memory, behavior and learning in laboratory mice." North America also has the world's highest level of computer and other consumer electronics use.
However, it would be foolhardy to imagine that removing PBDEs from computer plastics, as commendable as that will be, amounts to any sort of panacea in addressing the issue of the toxic chemical miasma most of us live in nowadays. Computers are far from being the only problem in this context.
In a recent column, Low End Mac's Jeff Adkins noted that the smell of a new Mac is "kind of like that new car smell you get when they open the door to a brand new car for the first time. It's never even been sweated in by a burly car trailer guy moving the car onto the lot so it could be sold. Macs have a scent like that as well. I'm beginning to suspect Apple is deliberately spraying something in the box to give it that piquant odor...."
Gak! I certainly hope not! The unintentional stink is bad enough. And seriously, even if one is not knowingly afflicted with chemical sensitivity, there should be concern about what these chemical emissions are doing to anyone's immune system. A fellow MCS sufferer who works in a university science laboratory says there are two types of people: environmentally ill and not-yet-environmentally ill. In a world as saturated as ours is with chemical and electromagnetic pollution, that's only partly tongue-in-cheek.
A reader named N. Brooks wrote to my The Road Warrior Mailbag column responding to an archived article on chemical sensitivity and computers:
"Please help!! I am so glad I saw this article. I could not understand what was happening to me when test driving new cars. I get pressure headaches, dizziness, tightness in my throat, and I feel really nervous and I couldn't understand why? I have never suffered with allergies in my life, but all of a sudden my senses have become very sensitive.
"In July of 2003 I bought a used car and I think it had mold in the air filtration system, and I became very ill while driving the car, so that's why I started looking for new cars but that's when I noticed I have a reaction every time I test drive new cars. I can smell all the chemicals in the new cars. What can I do?"
The symptoms described are fairly typical of MCS onset. Some types of mold can be potent sensitizers, and it is very rare that one remains sensitized only to the original irritant trigger substance. I had no history of allergies before I developed Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. Strictly speaking, MCS is not a classic allergy, and usually will not show up in conventional allergy testing. That is one reason why many in the medical profession are skeptical about MCS as a diagnosis Allergies tend to be irritant-specific. MCS is, well, multiple.
Commonly the syndrome will "cascade" into sensitivity to many common substances, especially, but not limited to, synthetic chemicals. New cars can be especially bad, and it is topical to note here that auto upholstery and interior plastics are treated with flame retardants. Even wearing a charcoal respirator, I'm not a happy camper in vehicles newer than about five years old. On the other hand, I find my two old Toyotas (1989 and 1990 models) quite tolerable without a mask.
A 1995 analysis by Santford V. Overton & John J. Manura of the air in a new Lincoln Continental ( http://www.sisweb.com/referenc/applnote/app-36-a.htm ) identified more than 100 volatile organic chemicals in the air samples analyzed. The air samples studied produced 50 or more volatile organics which were identified in addition to many more that were either too weak to identify or in which a good NBS library match was not achievable, suggesting that new-car smell is a mix of plasticizers, lubricants, solvents, adhesives, gasoline, and no doubt some bits from the vinyl. None of these things is good for you, and as a cocktail who knows what the cumulative effect is? If you're chemically sensitive they can certainly make you acutely ill in the immediate term.
The BBC has reported that researchers in Australia say the smell of new cars can be toxic and can even cause cancer. A two-year study by an Australian government research organization found gases from vinyl and plastic materials in new cars cause headaches, nausea and drowsiness. The chemicals involved included benzene — a known cancer-causing agent — which was found in one case at five times the recommended exposure limit.
The study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) found emissions can take just a few minutes to take effect and may actually be responsible for many traffic accidents. The CSIRO study found total volatile organic compound (VOC) concentrations initially very high -- up to 64,000 micrograms per cubic metre -- in two Australian-made cars three to 10 weeks after manufacture. Levels decreased by approximately 60 percent in the first month, but still substantially exceeded the NHMRC indoor air goal of 500 micrograms per cubic metre.
Long-term exposure could cause cancers and abnormalities in unborn babies. Some of the air toxics emitted inside new cars during the CSIRO study included: carcinogenic benzene as previously noted; acetone, a mucosal irritant; cyclohexanone, a possible human carcinogen; ethylbenzene and MIBK -- systemic toxic agents; xylene isomers, a fetal development toxic agent.
Overton & Manura note: "Potential health risks exist due to the toxic nature of many of these components. Individually, the contribution from any one product may not be significant, but the cumulative levels of emissions from these products are increasingly becoming a major concern. Because many of the volatile emissions and by-products from these products are toxic... Although the concentrations of VOC's were significantly reduced over time in a new automobile, the exposure of the public to such compounds that were identified should be of concern to both the automobile industry and health officials. These air samples show that the public is constantly in contact with a wide variety of potentially harmful VOC's due to cleaning supplies, lubricants and fuel by-products. Because of the potential toxic nature of many of these compounds, additional knowledge of the levels of these organic compounds in the car's interior is required in order to determine human health impacts."
Like car interiors, computers and Video Display Terminals (VDTs) off-gas VOCs. The greatest amount of VOC off-gassing is around 175 µg/hr and goes down quickly within the first 300 hours of use. In proposed regulations to improve indoor air quality, the U.S. OSHA has listed the following chemicals as being emitted by computers/VDTs:
n-Butanol
2-Butanole
2-Butoxyethanol
Butyl-2-Methylpropyl phthalate
Caprolactam
Cresol
Diisooctyl phthalate
Dodecamethyl cyclosiloxane
2-Ethoxyethyl acetate
Ethylbenzene
Hexanedioic acid
3-Methylene-2-pentanone
Ozone
Phenol
Phosphoric Acid
Toluene
Xylene
Another nasty little chemical cocktail. Some of those chemicals are known or suspected carcinogens. While none would likely be emitted from computers in quantities that would exceed any established workplace health and safety limits, an unknown factor is how some of these chemicals may interact with each other to cause health problems many years in the future. And we MCS victims react to concentrations of chemical toxins far below any established safety standards -- sometimes thousands of times lower.
But you may not need to be chemically-sensitized to suffer harm from computer chemical off-gassing. Especially when the equipment is new, the off-gassing is prolific and noticeable even to people who aren't particularly sensitive; eg: that "new computer smell," One of the chemicals listed above, from the family known as Phthalates, are softeners used in plastic manufacture, don't bond with the material and leach out over time, and are suspected of causing kidney and liver damage and other health problems.
Both Apple and Dell stopped using PBDE flame retardants in 2002, and Apple's shift to metal computer cases obviously addresses that issue effectively, but unhappily for those of us who battle chemical sensitivity, computers still gas off a smorgasbord of chemical fumes, and now it's revealed that the older computers we find more tolerable in the context of lower chemical vapor emissions are apparently the ones that expose us to greater amounts of toxic dust ( he says looking around a house full of antiquarian Macs ). The only non-PBDE Mac I've got is my late 2002 iBook, and it spends most of its time in an externally ventilated isolation box.
Computers do tend to eventually stop gassing off. When it was new I had severe reactions to my 233 MHz WallStreet PowerBook, which I was for three and a half years obliged to isolate in a glass case, force-vented away from my work area, or wear an activated charcoal respirator when I used it. However, the fumes eventually died down, and these days I can use the now 5+ year old WallStreet hands-on as a laptop is designed to be used with no problem at all, save for that unfortunate matter of PBDE dust, presumably. Unfortunately, there's that awkward first three to five years that has to be worked around. And while Apple's metal-cased computers are obviously superior in terms of less PBDE dust-generating potentential, unfortunately their internal circuit boards are still way too pungent for many MCS people — in fact they seem to have gotten worse in that regard in recent years.
I've written from time to time here and elsewhere about my Multiple Chemical Sensitivity travails, and I hear fairly frequently from other folks encountering similar difficulties. Recently I received this note from reader Amy Neal:
Hello:
I was just wondering what kind of computer box you use? I have a steel box
with glass front and fan in the back that exhausts out the window. It has
always worked well for me (I bought my last computer in 1998) but now is not enough to control the problem with my computer I bought new in 2002. I've been running this computer in the basement for almost 2 years but in my office, in the box, I can't stand to be in the room more than 15 minutes.
Any recommendations you have for manufacturers or how-to books on this issue would be appreciated.
Thank you,
Amy
My computer isolation boxes are ones I've fabricated myself out of glass and well-seasoned spruce lumber. Both of them can accommodate either a PowerBook or an iBook, and both are force-ventilated into remote airspace -- one through a window panel to the outdoors, and the other through the floor into the basement of my house.
The cases are shaped like an oversized PowerBook -- large "L"s with panes of glass on the front of the upright limb, and the top of the horizontal limb. The glass is set in 1/8" routed dados. I didn't use any sealants of any sort. For my purposes, the case does not have to be airtight -- in fact it needs to admit air to cool the computer.
This case is the first one I built, and it has served me well for five years. There is enough depth — just- to sit a Pismo, Lombard, or iBook on a Road Tools CoolPad for more efficient cooling.
With an extraction fan running sucking heated air away, I've found that the 'Books run at about the same temperature inside this case as they would running normally sitting on a desk or table. I have occasionally forgotten to turn on the basement fan (it is quiet enough that it's possible not to notice it) and experienced no difficulties. The glass area is large enough that I think it acts as a fairly efficient radiator, and of course this is Canada.
There is an aperture on one side of the case to accept an intake for the duct to the basement which is just a piece of two and one-half inch plastic plumbing drain pipe. The fan hangs from the bottom of the pipe on a flexible plastic tube secured with rubber bands, which minimizes noise and vibration. With the fan at the basement end, one barely hears it. The case is a little over 20 inches wide, which allows me to insert CDs on the right and PC cards on the left.
However, when I built the second case, I made the lower limb of the "L" shape deeper in section, which allows the computer to sit on a Podium CoolPad for even better cooling.
With both cases, the lid of the top is hinged to flip open for access to the ports at the back of the PowerBook. The glass panels over the keyboard are also hinged to lift up for access to the keys and the optical drives, PC Card slots, and side ports, and the second case also has a small flip-up panel for quick access to the ports on the left side of the iBook.
I built the cases out of basically stuff that I had laying around. I used glass panes from old house or car door windows, well aged spruce lumber which had very little smell, plywood paneling for the backs, and old computer cooling fans with power supplies salvaged from something or other. The wood frame components are relatively small-dimensioned, basically just scrap lumber.
My cases are bottomless. I just plunk it down over the open PowerBook or iBook on a table or platform. If all this sounds like a bizzare hassle, you wanna believe it is, but for some of us there's no alternative. One side-advantage of computer isolation boxes, I suppose, is that they should also cut down on PBDE contamination of the living environment.
However, it is not necessary to build one's own computer case. The MCS Relief folks make prefabricated computer isolation boxes for both laptop and desktop computers. All of their boxes are vented out a window by using a small computer fan, a 12 ft. aluminum flex hose (something I hadn't thought of) and an aluminum window exhaust insert.
The MCS Relief boxes are also targeted to people with electromagnetic sensitivities; the 20 gauge steel sides absorb electromagnetic emissions and the front glass will reflect non-ionizing radiation from the front of the monitor inward. Incidentally, I recently scanned my home with a gaussmeter, and discovered that while laptops registered no EMR emissions above background levels, my CRT monitors were the worst emitters in the house.
MCS Relief computer box models include:
Safe Lap Top Computer Box
This unit is designed to be placed on a desk or table and will hold most laptop PCs and Mac PowerBook or iBook computers.
Features:
• Measures 20" X 20 and will handle a screen up to 14" high.
• Made of galvanized steel (sides) with a glass top
• The small fan is mounted on the window exhaust insert.
The Lap Top Computer Box sells for $295.00.
Safe Computer & TV Box
• Measures 24" high, 24" wide and 24" deep.
• Made of 20 gauge galvanized steel, with a 24" X 24" low lead tempered safety glass in front for viewing and operation.
• Built-in computer fan and 12 ft. aluminum tube.
• Comes with a cut-to-size window exhaust insert.
• Will accommodate most desktop PCs, Macs or others of similar size.
• The Computer Box can also be used for TV viewing.
The Safe Computer & TV Box sells for $345.00.
Computer Tower Box
For tower desktops.
Price: $295.00
For more information, visit:
http://www.mcsrelief.com
I'll end this somewhat gloomy report on a positive note, I was delighted to read that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco recently signed a proclamation designating May "Chemical Sensitivity Awareness Month," and that Congress and public-health agencies are being increasingly lobbied to acknowledge MCS as a "real" disease; with one key goal to have it officially recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If we can get it established that chemicals in consumer products, etc. are making people sick, more effort might be put into pro-actively addressing the problem.
cwmoore@applelinks.com
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