Bullseye Glass, Portland, Pollution and Shallow Politics
i know many of you have heard of bullseye glass. it's a household name throughout most of north america, as well as a supplier of material for nearly 500% of every industry in the united states.
no?
yeah, i might have misspoke in several instances during that characterization. however, bullseye glass in portland, OR is a cornerstone of the modern american soft glass industry. if you own or have seen stained glass work, or slumped glass, or even blown art glass since ~1979, there's a good chance the raw materials came from bullseye.
tl,dr: bullseye glass is being pilloried in portland for polluting the environment. and poisoning the children and the kittens, with evil things like selenium, arsenic, cadmium and, well, glass shards. check it out. i'm not going to get into the EPA's acceptance of bullseye's emissions. i'd rather focus on the numbers.
mea culpa: i've admitted publicly to being a glass artist. i work with a great deal more heavy metals and other toxic chemistry than bullseye's soft glass, because i work in borosilicate (pyrex) which has a working temperature that is almost double the working temperature of soft glass. boro cadmium colors, for example, have a great deal more cadmium than soft glass, because cadmium boils before the borosilicate medium starts to soften. thus, the color chemistry has to be a bit more saturated than something like soft glass in order to maintain color density in a high-quality raw glass. boro workers deal with this by installing hilariously large ventilation systems in our studios. i work under an 1150cfm fan, and i'm probably putting a frightening amount of toxins into the atmosphere in my back yard.
(good lord, drugs.)
the mulberry bushes don't seem to mind, though. neither does the paper mill a block and a half from here.
the specific complaints in the article posted above reference certain amounts of detected chemicals at a school. let's look into that for a second.
DEQ establishes safe air goals known as Ambient Benchmark Concentrations (ABCs); for cadmium the figure is 0.6 nanograms per cubic meter (ng/m3) of air; for arsenic, it's 0.2 ng/m3. The monthly average DEQ obtained in 18 samples it collected with the current gold-standard monitor from October 6 to November 2 was 29.4 ng/m3 for cadmium and 31.7 ng/m3 for arsenic according to Armitage.
arsenic is the scaaaary one, so let's start there. 31.7 nanograms per cubic meter is 3.17e-5mg per cubic meter. that's 0.000317mg/m3. at a minimum, you'd have to breathe ~221,000 cubic meters of this concentration of arsenic a day and absorb 100% of the material to kill you. above average adult breathing (female, running at 5mph) is ~50L/min. (sitting rate for an adult female is something near 7LPM.) now, a cubic meter is 1000 liters; at the adult female running rate, 50L/min, one would have to run for 4,420,000 minutes, absorbing 100% of the arsenic in the described atmosphere, to reach a minimum lethal dose.
that's running at something like 75% sprint for 8 years, and something like 150 days, while absorbing 100% of the material in the atmosphere. in one day.
note: every day you have to intake this amount of arsenic for a lethal dose... as if you'd been running at a near sprint for 8 years and ~150 days. (feel free to check the math)
i'm the first one to speak out against pollution, especially when it's my industry creating it. however, i feel like this is yet another case of uninformed media overreach, focusing on OMG FRIGHTENING CHEMICALS in concentrations dwarfed by the output of the paper mill down the street. or a road. or people smoking tobacco outside a bar.
or any industry that burns anything. the commenters in the linked article are demanding bullseye glass shut down after being fined out of existence. i'm worried that this is mass hysteria driven by more breathless, excessive media coverage. maybe my math is off, and i'm certainly biased. forgive me.
what kind of pollution are we willing to accept for things like glass? what kind of pollution is reasonable for whatever industry, even if it's arsenic, or heavy metals? i'm interested in some differing views.
(gratuitous raw glass shot)
Comments
well.......I know a family that lives across the street...
from the school and they're concerned about their kid. There's a difference between what will kill you and what will affect you and there's a difference between what will affect you and what will affect a 4 yr old.
Bullseye has said they're going to fix it, right? So they're not making the argument that you're making, that the level is so low it's safe enough. They might think it, though.
An interesting topic. I don't know enough about it to argue one way or the other.
they're
not making any argument. they're paying the fine.
if they were to fight the fine, they'd be up for more explanation.
how long has the family you know lived across the street? are they dead? do they all have cancer? have they had any impacts upon their health since they moved in?
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For those of us who live in the affected area we have real
concerns. We have children, and animals, we grow a lot of our own food. I am not happy that there are toxins being spewed out and affecting our lives. Companies do not have the right to poison the environment. Sorry if I come off too strident, but I am tired of manufacturing polluting our world.
I feel the same way.
I think tourniquet makes a good point, though; we should be going after the worst offenders first. That would include cement factories, but also things like coal-fired power plants. And cars.
i appreciate your concerns,
but to what degree must we allow companies to poison the environment? at what point does such a miniscule amount of output become acceptable?
i haven't looked into the chemistry, but i've got a feeling that you're going to be taking in a much greater share of nasty chemicals, carbon monoxide etc, just by living in a suburban area with roads... or as some of the commenters from the article mentioned, right down the street from a rail yard.
there's bullseye, less than a block from a mile-long rail yard.
i guess my question is: they're already practically buried in an industrial area... where do they go if people aren't willing to accept such a trace amount of material?
what i'm seeing here is a relatively small company being scapegoated, it's had an effect on the entire glass industry from momka's in washington to northstar, also in portland, to any other boutique producer of raw glass as well as a large network of glass distributors, not to mention artists like myself that might never be able to buy certain color again, and it's frustrating.
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This tends to be the issue with Portland
Because it seems to be designed with a neighborhood adjoining an industrial area at least in the older neighborhoods. But the problem here is not Bullseye as much as what else you have around you that they are not telling you about.
I will tell you why I moved from that neighborhood. I used to make it a habit to run early on Saturday and Sunday mornings as soon as it got light. In the afternoon of one Saturday I noticed my face hurt it felt like I had a very bad sunburn it even peeled like one. I had no idea how it happened. A month later it happened again except this time l felt a sting. There was a train going under the bridge. What ever was out gassing from those tank cars was the cause. They were running this fuel or chemical through when there was less likelihood of people being outside. No matter that it was hot and people were sleeping with open windows. If it burned my skin what does it do to people's lungs?
They are holding up Bullseye so you won't look at the other culprits. As I said earlier Hexigonal Chromium is not a ingredient or by product of glass. The only time it would appear is if glass was ruined to the point it lost its color. It would have to be severely overheated for a long period of time. The only time I have seen it happen it also ruined the furnace. For health data look to Corning New York. It has had a glass factory for around 100 years and has produced colored glass for 80 of it.
There are by estimate 30,000 people in the Northwest and BC that make their living using Northwest glass it basically means bad news for them. It is in every bodies best interest to solve the problem and find the truth. Not just the scape goat.
The problem I see
Is that the Oregon air quality is not expanding its search. They have focused on Bullseye as their sacrificial lamb. He atonal chromium is not a glass component. If tempeture rises so high as to create hexigonal chromium the color will blow out. These are high quality state of the are computer controlled kilns. It simply doesn't happen. However hexigonal chromium is also a product of cement manufacture like the plant right across the street. There is a rail yard two blocks away with tons of hazardous chemicals rolling through daily yet they have focused solely on a glass factory. Creating almost a witch hunt and costing more than a few their jobs. I know what I am talking about I have been making my own colored glass for blowing nearly 25 years now. Many of the statements made by Oregon Air Quality are based on zero understanding of the process and flat out can not happen. Very familiar with the area because I used to live there.
tourniquet's got a point.
Remember the cautionary tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"?
Some of this kind of faux environmentalism reminds me of it. These people make a big stink over any form of contamination no matter how slight; and eventually the ordinary folks come down with a "yawn" attitude about it. Then, when a real, serious environmental catastrophe arises which could really use these folks' full-bore passion and having the ordinary people behind them, the "so what?" attitude prevails. And then the real wolf -- the real environmental threat -- shows up and merrily commences eating the people's children.
Lose-lose all around!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
This was the place where all the moss/lichens (?)
in the area tested higher than outside-the-area moss/lichens? These may be examples of testing long-lived organisms that take up much from the air, water around them. But further testing is in order, I believe. The tests may also have been targeted to detect heavy metals, and not things like Chlorine, I did not read the published paper -- if there was one. If all glass workers dealing with the heavy metal glass were to die like Mad Hatters then I might be alarmed. But I'll bet no epidemiology on those people.
My father developed bladder cancer, didn't kill him but did his bladder. He worked with aniline dyes at Dupont in an early career. There IS epidemiologic evidence for that particular cancer from that exposure.
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pswaterspirit has the thing in a nutshell: these small business
glass manufacturers and makers are sacrificial lambs. And no Oregon DEQ and other citizen protection agencies are not widening their research. This is the shiny object, look here while the big fish go free.
Here are my personal examples: The Oregon Pear Growers. There are only three major areas of Pear growing in the US: Yakima/Wenatchee in Washington; Hood River and Medford/Applegate Valley in Oregon.
For years they used Arsenic as a pesticide. It's still in the soils. Hood River can't drill wells because Arsenic. A person with a small in ground garden? Should be building large beds off the ground with new uncontaminated compost or dirt.
Using organochlorines such as DDT until it was banned; using Endosulfan (DDE) which became a world wide pollutant found in microparticles in the Antarctic much like DDT. Has been banned world wide, but the Pear growers were the last allowed to use it until this year. So they bought up the left overs and used the stuff over heavily in anticipation of the cut off. Its residues flow into many streamlets from orchard run-off and ironically join streams and bigger small rivers which are Salmon recovery environments. No one who wants to keep their job in the Oregon DEQ will deal with this.
Example: An off duty DEQ officer spotted a Ryan's Juice truck dumping stuff from their factory in a stream and reported it. A single call to a friend in the Oregon Legislature by Ryan got that staffer fired. DEQ went quiet. The orchardists are a much bigger fish, with more backing.
Example: many orchards surround schools. Even orchard families were for buffer strips and green screens agains pesticides and herbicides getting to the kids. There was a bill to do this. The lobby killed it.
So it goes. Do many people in these idyllic locations know about what is happening as they breathe the air, drink the water, plant their gardens? Some do and don't care; many from out side the ag areas moving (like me) don't know until we are confronted with health issues or neighbors willing to talk.
Organophosphates (RoundUp and Atrazine and neo nics) kill bees and other pollinators, central nervous system and hormone disruption. Think they don't affect people? How much can an immune system deal with? Maybe not one at a time, which is how they are tested, but in the aggregate? Or how about the metabolites internal to the fruit? Residues on the skins are tested for, but not the internal fruit. RoundUp industrial strength is sprayed on Pear rows to de-weed around the trunks. Goes right to the drip line. How much uptake is there into the tree from the roots? No one is even looking. The grass between the 20 foot spacing is mowed.
That's just a part of the year 'round spray program for Pears. Wine growers unfortunately, are a lot like Pear growers, but there is a stronger movement towards organic growing. The character of wine can be influence by microbes and nematodes in soils around grape plants. Sprays kill them. It's beginning to be artisanal to produce wine with character limited to a few rows or acres. Discerning drinkers, are beginning to look for the craft style of individual vintages.
Pears are a luxury crop, and unless they find a different niche, may find themselves extinct as the climate changes and it costs too much to buy.
You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know. ~ William Wiberforce
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So people smoking outside of bars cause more pollution?
Okay . . . I think this is a good point:
So as soon as we stop all of the cigarette smokers who are standing around outside of bars choking on cancer sticks we can start worrying about toxic waste from the brilliant colors in their glass kush pipes.
I think I'll smoke some kush and think that over.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
my point,
of course, was that we're not terribly worried about someone smoking a cigarette outside a bar.
you don't see a lot of hydrogen cyanide used in glass chemistry. nor formaldehyde, nor ddt. the air samples from the back patio at any bar must be a horror show, and they should probably be shut down until they can guarantee zero emissions from their property.
yeah, that's not really the best logic.
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