Researchers at the University of Vienna have discovered particles of plastic in mice’s brains just two hours after the mice ingested drinking water containing plastic.

Once in the brain, “Plastic particles could increase the risk of inflammation, neurological disorders or even neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s,” Lukas Kenner, one of the researchers, said in a statement, although more research is needed to determine the relationship between plastics and these brain disorders. In addition to potentially severe degenerative consequences, the researchers also believe that microplastic contamination in our brains can cause short-term health effects such as cognitive impairment, neurotoxicity and altered neurotransmitter levels, which can contribute to behavioral changes.

In the course of their research, the team gave mice water laced with particles of polystyrene – a type of plastic that’s common in food packaging such as yoghurt cups and Styrofoam takeout containers.

Using computer models to track the dispersion of the plastics, researchers found that nanoplastic particles – which are under 0.001 millimeters and invisible to the naked eye – were able to travel into the mice’s brains via a previously unknown biological “transport mechanism”. Essentially, these tiny plastics are absorbed into cholesterol molecules on the brain membrane surface. Thus stowed away in their little lipid packages, they cross the blood-brain barrier – a wall of blood vessels and tissue that functions to protect the brain from toxins and other harmful substances.

While the Vienna study focused on the effects of plastics consumed in drinking water, that’s not the only way humans ingest plastic. A 2022 Chinese study concentrated on how nasally inhaled plastics affect the brain, with researchers reporting “an obvious neurotoxicity of the nanoplastics could be observed”. In basic terms, the inhaled plastics lead to reduced functioning of certain brain enzymes that also malfunction in the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

Of course, we eat plastic, too, and new research on plastics and brain health is emerging alongside breaking studies on how the contaminants affect our gastrointestinal health. Much like the blood-brain barrier, the gastrointestinal barrier is also vulnerable to interference by nanoplastics – which can cause inflammatory and immune reactions in the gut, as well as cell death.

At this point, it’s clear that plastics have infiltrated most parts of the human body, including our blood, organs, placentas, breast milk and gastrointestinal systems. While we don’t yet fully understand how plastics affect different parts of our bodies, many chemicals found in various types of plastic are known carcinogens and hormone-disruptors, linked to negative health outcomes including obesity, diabetes, reproductive disorders and neurological impairments in foetuses and children.

This spring, the Boston College Global Observatory on Planetary Health led the first-ever analysis of the health hazards of plastics across their life cycle and found that “Current patterns of plastic production, use, and disposal are not sustainable and are responsible for significant harms to human health … as well as for deep societal injustices.”

None of this is encouraging news – especially in light of the fact that plastic production is still accelerating. Yet, improving our understanding of plastic’s implications for human health is a crucial step towards banning plastic – a move 75% of people globally support. Encouragingly, more than 100 countries have a full or partial ban on single-use plastic bags, and policymakers in some countries are thinking about plastics more in terms of their costly externalities, including pollution and effects on health. Yet global plastics regulation is still vastly out of step with both scientific and public opinion.

In 2021, the Canadian government formally classified plastics as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The move means that the government has more control over the manufacture and use of plastics, limiting the kinds of exposure that threaten health. In response, plastic producers including Imperial Oil, Dow Chemical and Nova Chemicals formed a coalition to try to crush these regulations.

More countries must designate plastics as toxic and increase its regulation, doubling down on the message that when plastic affects our health – even going so far as to alter our brain function – it infringes on our human rights.

• Adrienne Matei is a freelance journalist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The newest flashpoint in a political battle between environmental groups and the plastics industry over “chemical” or “advanced” recycling has to do with the kinds of claims that can be made and still be truthful with American consumers.

The Federal Trade Commission is weighing its first changes in 10 years to its Green Guides, which establish guidelines for companies’ environmental advertising and labeling claims. The FTC’s review goes far beyond plastic recycling and includes concepts such as “net zero” related to greenhouse gas emissions, biodegradability, sustainability and organic products.

But recycling is front and center in the FTC review, which comes amid a global recognition of a plastic crisis, United Nations negotiations toward a treaty to curb plastic waste and the awareness of the widespread failure of plastic recycling. Tens of millions of Americans still dutifully sort their household plastic to be recycled, even though most of it ends up in landfills or is sent to incinerators. 

Plastic manufacturers are also pushing hard now with media, advertising and lobbying campaigns to gain public acceptance of advanced or chemical recycling, which requires new, largely unproven kinds of chemical plants that seek to break down plastic waste with chemicals, high-heat processes, or both, and then turn the waste into feedstocks that can be mixed with fossil fuels or incorporated into new plastic products.

The industry says that through advanced recycling a “circular” plastics economy can be created that reduces the need to tap virgin fossil fuels to make its products. Environmentalists say advanced recycling is in many cases tantamount to “greenwashing”—an energy-intensive process with a high carbon footprint that essentially incinerates much of the waste and turns a small percentage into feedstocks for new plastics, or more fossil fuels.  

Whichever way the FTC comes down on the question could go a long way toward reinforcing recycling policies across the country for the next decade or longer. So could the potential for new scrutiny of certain kinds of chemical recycling by the Environmental Protection Agency, announced in a draft plastic waste strategy issued late last month. 

To date, the EPA has tended to view these “advanced” processes as incineration, not recycling, though the agency in its 2021 National Recycling Strategy said it would “welcome” further discussion of chemical recycling—a position it is now partially walking back.

Taken together, the FTC and EPA actions stand to affect the growth potential of the nascent advanced recycling industry across the United States. That includes one of the largest proposals—Houston-based Encina’s plan to erect a $1.1 billion chemical plant on 100 acres next to the Susquehanna River in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, which has run into local opposition. 

The plant is being designed to convert end-of-life plastics into benzene, toluene and xylene to be used to manufacture new plastic products, according to the company.

The United States has about 4.3 percent of the world’s population but generates nearly 11 percent of global plastic waste and has the biggest plastic-waste footprint of any country, generating approximately 486 pounds per person annually, according to the EPA.

A study last year by the environmental groups Beyond Plastics and The Last Beach Cleanup, found plastics recycling in the United States had fallen to below 6 percent.

Businesses cannot be trusted, said Jan Dell, founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, based in Southern California. Dell has recently put digital trackers in plastic bags or containers labeled as recyclable, dropped them off at recycling stations, then traced them to local landfills.

“There are thousands of products labeled with false recyclable labels,” she said.

A Call for Clearer Guidance or Mandates

The FTC first issued its Green Guides in 1992 and they were revised in 1996, 1998 and 2012. They provide guidance on environmental marketing claims, including how consumers are likely to interpret them and how marketers can substantiate them to avoid deceiving consumers, according to the agency.

More than 7,000 people, businesses and organizations submitted written comments by the FTC’s April 24 deadline, which marks the beginning of a drawn-out process that will include the agency reviewing the comments, holding workshops, drafting revisions to the Green Guides and then seeking more public comment, an agency spokesman said. The agency has posted nearly 1,000 of the comments.

Environmental, business and industry groups are all calling for clearer guidance on claims that consumers rely upon to choose what products to buy. Environmentalists want new mandates.

The Consumer Brands Association, whose members include beverage,  food and drug companies and retailers including Amazon, for example, told the FTC that a comprehensive update of the guides is needed for clarity. 

“The distinction between environmental benefit claims as opposed to instructions which direct consumers how to recycle products have amplified confusion in the marketplace, and consequently the potential for consumer deception,” the association wrote. “At the same time, there is a lack of clarity for (the) consumer and regulatory certainty for industry that has been exacerbated by lack of uniform federal standards, a patchwork of state approaches to environmental claims and recycling systems, as well as litigation.”

Strong reforms are necessary around recycling claims, said John Hocevar, oceans campaign director with the environmental group, Greenpeace USA.

“The FTC has an opportunity to stop the widespread greenwashing about the recyclability of plastic packaging,” he said. “It is clear that the current approach has not been successful, so it is time to codify and start enforcing the Green Guides. Once corporations stop misleading their customers that all this throwaway plastic packaging is recyclable, it will be much easier to have honest conversations about real solutions.”

Greenpeace USA joined other environmental groups including Beyond Plastics, the Center for Biological Diversity and The Last Beach Cleanup in written comments calling for FTC to give the Green Guides, which critics describe as largely voluntary, the full force of federal law while encouraging the agency to adopt California’s 2021 Senate Bill 343. The bill requires products to meet benchmarks in order to be advertised or labeled as recyclable, and is designed to help consumers to clearly identify which products are recyclable in California.

Across the country, seven categories of plastics currently include the so-called “chasing-arrows” symbol— numbered 1-7—as a sign that the material is recyclable, even though often it is not.

Of those seven, plastic bottles and jugs numbered 1 and 2  made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET)  and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) are the most commonly recycled, according to a 2022 Greenpeace report that included Dell’s research. Numbers 3-7  (polyvinyl chloride, or PVC; low-density polyethylene, or LDPE; polypropylene, or PP; polystyrene, or PS; and mixtures of various plastics), are rarely, if ever, recycled, Dell said.

The environmental group Californians Against Waste described SB 343 as prohibiting “the use of the chasing-arrows symbol or any other suggestion that a material is recyclable, unless the material is actually recyclable” in most communities “and is routinely sold to manufacturers to make new products.”

The environmental groups told the FTC that it is not enough to say a plastic product is potentially recyclable. In the current plastic waste stream, only certain types of plastic bottles are actually recycled and reused again as plastic bottles. Most plastic waste, even when it contains the chasing-arrows symbol, ends up in either a landfill or an incinerator. 

Environmental groups are also pressing the FTC to crack down on misleading claims of “circularity,” a new industry buzzword with no widely accepted definition that is used to suggest products are repeatedly made from waste without tapping new natural resources.

“The Guides should require that any ‘circular economy’ claim necessitates showing a decline or, at a minimum, a cap on virgin resource extraction, production, and product manufacturing and an overall reduction in emissions and toxic pollution throughout the lifecycle of the material,” according to written comments from the Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit that works with local communities to hold oil companies accountable for climate impacts.

Recycling plastics, the group argues, should not be considered circular because the plastics industry has no intention of minimizing resource extraction, and because new recycling and plastic-to-fuel technologies “have enormous adverse impacts on human health and the climate system.”

For its part, ExxonMobil offered up advanced recycling as a solution to the most difficult kinds of plastics to be recycled—mixed, post-consumer wastes made of a myriad of chemicals that are often incompatible with the recycling process.

“To facilitate a circular economy, it is critical that society embrace solutions that enable a broader range of plastics to be recycled and a broader segment of industry to participate,” the company wrote. “Advanced recycling provides such a solution.”

Groups Fight ‘Magical’ Accounting System

The chemical industry hopes to catch a break with the FTC on advanced or chemical recycling and is advocating technical methods that it says can be used by companies to quantify how much recycled plastic is contained in new plastic products or packaging.

The American Chemistry Council, a lobby group, claims in its submittal that polling suggests 88 percent of Americans consider advanced recycling to be recycling. The industry group has told the FTC its Green Guides should embrace this technology. 

But environmentalists and even some plastic recycling advocates are pushing back hard, saying FTC should limit environmental claims around chemical recycling or not even consider it recycling. Some are calling the chemical industry’s recycled-content accounting methods a hoax.

Depending on what the FTC does, the result could give chemical recycling legitimacy or curtail certain types of recycling because environmental claims of recycled content in plastic packaging or products cannot be supported by the facts. 

The industry is pushing a form of advanced recycling based on a process known as pyrolysis. It heats plastic waste at high temperatures in a vessel with little or no oxygen, sometimes with a chemical catalyst, to create synthetic gases, a synthetic fuel called pyrolysis oil and a carbon char waste product. 

“The crux of this is, if they can’t count this make-believe recycled content as recycled content, then pyrolysis is out of business,” said Dell, head of The Last Beach Cleanup and a former engineer in the oil and gas industry.

With pyrolysis and a similar process known as gasification, much of the waste plastic is lost in the process, which critics have said makes it hard to describe those processes as recycling. 

In fact, a recent research paper from the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado reported that only 1 to 14 percent of the plastic sent through those processes can be retained as plastic, though industry sources have argued those numbers are out of date.

Most plastic recycled in the United States is done through a mechanical process, in which plastic waste discarded by consumers is sorted, washed and shredded before a small percentage of the waste is molded into other plastic products. 

Mechanical recycling produces plastic pellets that can be traced and accounted for, allowing for companies to determine what percentage of new plastic products are derived from recycled plastic.

That can’t be done with chemical recycling, which mixes feedstocks made at recycling plants with virgin fossil fuel feedstocks, such as polyvinyl chloride or polyethylene.

So the industry is proposing a contentious accounting method to calculate the percentage of recycled content in packaging from chemical recycling known by the arcane term, “mass balance.” 

It’s an accounting method intended to estimate inputs and outputs from plastic waste recycling plants. “Mass balance accounting provides an important pathway for the plastics industry and major brands to track the amount of recycled material included in their products, and increase transparency for marketers and consumers,” according to the American Chemistry Council.

But in a report to Congress last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology found “many unsettled issues, ill-defined terms, and conflicting objectives with regards to the application” of mass balance calculations of plastics.

And the Association of Plastic Recyclers, a group that represents recycling companies including mechanical recyclers, consumer product companies, plastic resin producers and plastic packaging producers, urged the FTC to reject mass balance methods for estimating recycled content. 

Those methods provide “little to no physical traceability of recycled content compared to other chain-of-custody tracking. Consumers must trust there is actual recycled content in the actual product, and claims must be as representative of this intention as possible,” the association said. 

In The Last Beach Cleanup, Beyond Plastics and Greenpeace USA comments, the environmental groups say mass balance calculations can easily be manipulated.

Dell said that mass balance calculations disguise the fact that only trivial amounts of chemical recycling feedstocks are being mixed with vastly larger amounts of fossil fuels feedstocks, just so companies using plastic packaging can claim products are produced with recycled content when, for all intents and purposes, they are not.

“It’s a magical allocation based on bookkeeping,” she said. “It’s a hoax.” Available certification systems have weak rules and are ineffective, Dell said.

“This is a brand new playground here,” she said of chemical recycling, adding that the FTC needs to get it right. What the chemical industry is doing, she said, is “trying to deceive the American people.”

EPA Says Converting Plastic to Fuels Isn’t Recycling 

In a separate matter, the EPA late last month unveiled its new Draft National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, which identifies proposed actions to eliminate plastic waste from land-based sources by 2040.

In it, EPA said it does not consider activities that convert plastic waste to fuels or energy production to be recycling. Further, EPA said it was concerned about environmental risks posed by impurities in pyrolysis oils generated from plastic waste recycling. 

The agency said it will make companies submit new pyrolysis oil chemicals for testing under the Toxic Substances Control Act prior to their approval, and then conduct ongoing testing to ensure there is no variability in the plastic waste stream that is used to generate the pyrolysis oil.

A spokeswoman for Encina, the chemical recycler planning the Pennsylvania plant, said the company will comply with whatever rules on chemical recycling that the EPA requires.

Hocevar, with Greenpeace, said he was encouraged to see “some positive signs from the EPA” regarding chemical recycling, a process he said will “not stand up to scrutiny.” 

But Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond Plastics, said the EPA should have rejected chemical recycling outright in its draft plastic waste strategy.

“It is enormously disappointing that the EPA is not slamming the door shut on every type of chemical recycling, including pyrolysis,” said Enck, a former EPA regional administrator. “EPA needs to provide actual leadership in policies that reduce the generation, use and disposal of plastics and do not prop up pyrolysis and other chemical recycling false solutions.”

Correction, April 26, 2023 at 10:35 a.m.:

An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the dimensions of some tanks in ITC’s “2nd 80’s.” The tanks were 40 feet tall and 120 feet in diameter.

This story is the second of a two-part series by The Texas Tribune and Public Health Watch. Read part 1 here.

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DEER PARK — A week after the massive chemical fire that spewed toxic smoke over this Houston suburb had been extinguished in March 2019, Mario Ochoa cradled his 4-year-old son and prayed the child’s cough would ease so they could both sleep. Castiel kept waking Ochoa up with “horrible and terrifying” snoring.

“It was like watching your son drown right in front of you,” Ochoa said. “[He was] gasping for air in his sleep.”

A group of massive tanks, some containing millions of gallons of highly flammable chemicals used to make plastic and gasoline, had caught fire at a chemical storage facility owned by Intercontinental Terminals Company, a Texas-based company owned by Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Group. The fire began after a tank’s pump failed and began to leak naphtha, a highly flammable liquid.

As the fire at ITC spread from tank to tank, an ominous black plume of smoke spiraled over the Houston skyline. Ten of the tanks — each big enough to hold more than 3 million gallons of chemicals — collapsed, sending chemicals gushing into the nearby ship channel and killing birds and fish. Ash rained down on nearby neighborhoods.

Twice, city officials advised residents of Deer Park, the city closest to the fire, to shelter indoors. The first lasted 18 hours immediately after the fire broke out, and the second came three days later when air monitoring detected extremely high levels of benzene — an invisible, sweet-smelling hydrocarbon often found in crude oil and cigarettes. It’s known to cause cancer after repeated exposure and can irritate the throat and eyes. When inhaled in large quantities over a short period, benzene can affect the central nervous system and cause symptoms including dizziness, a rapid heart rate and headaches.

But what Ochoa and other residents weren’t told by federal, state and local officials at the time was that long after the fire was extinguished and life seemed to go back to normal, an invisible danger remained.

Benzene emissions spiked to abnormally high and potentially dangerous levels for more than two weeks after nearby residents were told it was safe to return to school and work, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air-monitoring data. The data was collected by a mobile laboratory that roamed the area for two months after the fire erupted — one of many air quality devices deployed to monitor pollution at the time.

Almost 1,000 people swarmed to temporary mobile health clinics in Deer Park that operated for three days after the fire started, and Texas Poison Center Network records show its hotline received almost 200 calls reporting chemical exposure from the ITC fire over a more than two-week period. The most frequent symptoms were headache, throat irritation, nausea, coughing, dizziness and vomiting.

The fire had been out for days when Ochoa, a 39-year-old pipe fitter at an industrial construction company, sat awake late into the night worrying about his son, who complained that his head hurt. Ochoa grabbed a few pillows and tucked himself in a corner, hugging his son tight. He felt helpless. “I was watching him and knowing, he doesn’t even realize he’s suffocating,” he said.

He took his son to the hospital the next morning.

A few days into the crisis, officials from the EPA, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Deer Park had to make a crucial decision: How much benzene in the air is too much for people to breathe? They decided they would issue public warnings only when benzene levels reached 1,000 parts per billion in the air over one minute — a level that scientists who study benzene now say was too high.

The federal, state and local officials who formed a “Unified Command” near the ITC facility after the fire erupted had to choose a threshold on the spot because there’s no accepted national standard for how much benzene in the air should be considered dangerous. They adapted it from the federal workplace standard, which allows worker exposure up to 1,000 parts per billion over an 8-hour work day.

Anita Desikan, one of the authors of a December 2022 study of the ITC fire and a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the action level used during the ITC incident was “out of line with basically every other measure I’ve seen [for] benzene.”

“It’s concerning that would be the case for an emergency situation,” she said, adding that “you will see people hurt and harmed if it’s your only number for taking action.”

At a March 26 press conference — nine days after the fire started — an EPA official said the agency would “get it out to the community to take action” if it detected benzene levels above that level. “So you can trust that if it’s 1,000 parts per billion … we will let you know.”

But those warnings didn’t always come. Or, they came too late for residents to take action.

The EPA data that the Tribune used for its analysis, which was originally obtained by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, shows that benzene spiked above 1,000 parts per billion on at least seven different days after the second and last shelter-in-place advisory expired — although it’s unclear from the data whether those spikes lasted for an average of 1 minute.

On six of those days, the spikes occurred in industrial areas near the ITC facility, but on March 31 — a full two weeks after the fire began — benzene spikes above 1,000 parts per billion were recorded in a residential area of Deer Park. Data from TCEQ’s stationary and handheld monitors also indicated elevated benzene concentrations near the same times and locations as the EPA’s mobile lab.

The benzene drifting through Deer Park “was a health threat to the community that went basically unshared,” said Elena Craft, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“I don’t think anyone really understood the magnitude,” Craft said. “Or, they still don’t.”

When a reporter asked Deer Park Mayor Jerry Mouton about the strong smells that continued to waft through the city almost a week after the fire was extinguished, the mayor said those smells were “normal.”

“There are random times when we have smells,” said Mouton, who declined repeated requests for an interview. “We are monitoring the air continuously, and there’s nothing that’s even come close to registering any kind of action item.”

ITC said in a statement to the Tribune that there were “no longer-term public health impacts to the community” from the incident, pointing to an analysis by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The report found that health effects from benzene “were not expected to have occurred” due to the “short” amount of time high levels were detected.

The analysis did not take into account the fact that hundreds of people actually sought medical care during the incident.

Jennah Durant, a spokesperson for the EPA, said both the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry — a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — reviewed the action level “and had no objections.”

The city of Deer Park and ITC contracted with a company called CTEH to conduct hand-held air monitoring. In a written statement, Pablo Sanchez-Soria, a senior toxicologist at CTEH, said that using short time frames to measure benzene levels — in this case one minute in the community — help officials “take early action” to reduce human exposure.

“Based on our experience, the [1,000 parts per billion] action level for 1 minute for benzene across community areas was highly conservative,” Sanchez-Soria said. “Sufficiently protective values must be balanced against the inherent risk associated with actions such as evacuation.”

But Seth Shonkoff, an associate researcher of environmental health sciences at the University of California-Berkeley, said it’s “inappropriate to use occupational standards in a community setting” because they are designed for workers who are typically healthy adults trained to prevent chemical exposure with equipment such as respirators. Those workplace standards, he added, were a compromise between now-outdated benzene science and the economic impact on businesses.

Texas has guidelines that define what level of exposure to various chemicals could affect people’s health; for benzene, it’s 180 parts per billion in an hour. The state health agency used that number when it analyzed the potential for health problems from the ITC fire, but TCEQ spokesperson Victoria Cann said the number “does not constitute a bright line” for health impacts and is “precautionary in nature.” Emissions above that level don’t trigger any regulatory action by the agency.

A group of mostly Houston-area scientists using the most recent science on benzene exposure said that officials should have used a much more conservative threshold — 27 parts per billion in two consecutive hourly readings — and issued seven more shelter-in-place orders and 17 air quality alerts after the fire broke out. Their study, commissioned by the Houston Health Department, is awaiting peer review.

Adrian Garcia, a Harris County commissioner who represents Deer Park, said the county was “scrambling” to get current air quality data from the company or from federal and state agencies to inform their decisions.

“One of the things that I think the government tries hard to do is to be fair to everyone without being too quick to overly react,” Garcia said. “We were really trying to get to a place where we were being fair to the industry, but also transparent to the public about … whether there was still harm.”

“I’m not sure whether we really got there,” he said.

Four years later, Deer Park residents who fell ill — some of them children, elderly or otherwise at higher risk — said they sensed at the time that they were more exposed to chemicals than they were told. Many, like Ochoa, say they are still scarred by the experience.

“That kind of turmoil is haunting,” said Ochoa, who is now 43. “My soul remembers.”

Fire rages as residents fall ill — March 17-19, 2019

Deer Park resident Eddie Guevara, 19, was working a Sunday shift at a chemical plant in La Porte, a town just east of Deer Park, the day the ITC fire broke out. He was checking the windsocks mounted around the plant and jotting down the direction of the wind to help the plant workers plan the best evacuation route — just in case.

That’s when he first saw the smoke coming from the ITC tank farm.

“Anytime you see any kind of black smoke out there, it’s not good,” he said.

He glanced again at the fluttering orange windsocks. The wind was blowing the smoke toward his own home.

Guevara, who has worked in industrial plants since he was a teenager, called his dad and his brother, Anthony, to warn his family of the smoke approaching their orange brick, two-story house located just four miles from ITC.

Soon, the smoke blanketed their home. Then, their city.

Deer Park is one of a string of suburbs hugging the Houston Ship Channel, which is lined by chemical plants, refineries, smokestacks and flare towers that burn like enormous candles over a massive industrial skyline. Shell Oil Company built the first refinery in the area in 1928, and since then, generations of Deer Park residents have crossed state Highway 225 to work in the petrochemical industry.

Locals say they love their community — where block after block of single-family homes are surrounded by lush yards — because it’s quiet, safe and has great schools. And the refineries and chemical plants are a boon to their economy: The city of more than 34,000 people has a median household income of about $81,500 — higher than nearby Houston, where the median household earns $55,500.

But the risk of explosions and chemical fires always hangs over them. A 1997 explosion at Shell Oil Co. injured several workers and sent residents scurrying to shelter in their homes. A massive 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, about 35 miles to the south next to Galveston Bay, killed 15 workers and injured nearly 200 others.

In Deer Park, the sirens that warn the public of industrial accidents are tested every week, and schoolchildren are drilled on how to shelter in place twice a year, with the assistance of “Wally Wise Guy,” a cartoon turtle who “knows it’s wise to go inside his shell” when there’s danger.

Fewer than 10 miles from where Guevara stood, firefighters rushed to the ITC facility and put their lives on the line in a war against the fire — fueled by 12.3 million gallons of highly flammable chemicals — that would burn for 64 hours straight. According to a preliminary report from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the fire began in tank 80-8 and then spread to other nearby tanks. Since at least 2002, EPA and TCEQ inspectors had reported high emissions of benzene and other chemicals from that same area.

Bob Royall, then-assistant chief for the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office, said it was one of the longest fires that he had battled in his almost five-decade career.

“It was a very challenging, very dangerous situation,” Royall, who is now retired, recalled. “With possible catastrophic consequences if we failed.”

Firefighters and other first responders were ordered to wear respirators if the benzene level hit 500 parts per billion over 5 minutes, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

The fire prompted Deer Park officials to advise residents to shelter in place that Sunday. But Deer Park City Manager James Stokes said air monitoring readings looked “favorable” as the fire burned off the dangerous chemicals. Meanwhile, residents, news reports and meteorologists anxiously tracked the black smoke plume that snaked over the Houston area.

Throughout the response, a plane brought in by the EPA flew above the fire and the plume, monitoring the air and providing eyes from above, while TCEQ and Harris County employees on the ground recorded benzene levels on hand-held air monitors, in addition to CTEH’s monitoring efforts for the city and company.

One Harris County official estimated that all together, more than 400 personnel took air samples throughout the response.

Despite the large monitoring effort primarily led by the feds and the state, the results were “limited,” often delayed, and not always immediately provided to local officials, according to a Harris County report. Some devices, including the EPA’s air monitoring bus, were not deployed until days after the fire broke out.

Garcia, the Harris County commissioner, said it felt like “pulling teeth” to get information about air quality. He said county officials didn’t feel they were being told everything they needed to know.

Meanwhile, an untold number of people were breathing benzene fumes without protection. In Deer Park, Guevara said his eyes burned and his heart fluttered that first evening after he went home — he said he wasn’t aware of the shelter-in-place advisory. When he stepped out to the backyard, a sanctuary where his family usually grills and gathers around a table to gossip, he said he experienced chest pains.

“I’d be out here looking at the fire and start to feel my heart going crazy,” he said.

By the next morning, the fire had spread to five additional tanks at the ITC facility, according to TCEQ and city of Deer Park records. Seven were now burning; the tanks contained naphtha, xylene, gas blendstock and pygas, a blend of chemicals that’s rich in benzene.

Deer Park city officials lifted the shelter-in-place advisory at 5:30 a.m., stating no air quality readings had exceeded “action levels.” They reopened state Highway 225, which borders the cluster of petrochemical plants and is residents’ main route to drive into Houston for work.

Despite the all-clear from city officials, Deer Park School District remained closed that Monday.

“There have been multiple reports of community members experiencing a range of symptoms from discomfort to difficulty breathing,” an email message from the school district to parents said that morning.

Ochoa, the single father, left home at the usual time Monday morning and worked a 12-hour shift outdoors in the Houston Ship Channel installing pipes. He smelled smoke and began to experience pounding headaches.

That day, his managers called him and his work team of about 10 people into the lunch room. They said the fire was nothing to worry about because the wind was blowing the danger away, but employees could go home if they were personally concerned.

Ochoa said he and his fellow workers were indeed concerned. They could smell the chemicals in the air.

But they kept working. He said they needed the money.

“I’m a single father, I had to work,” Ochoa said. “Even if I didn’t want to, I had to.”

As he installed pipes, he said his lungs ached when he took deep breaths. After two days of vomiting and “a piercing headache, behind your eyes,” he said, he drove himself to a nearby hospital Tuesday morning.

The staff checked him out and took his temperature, then told him to take ibuprofen or Tylenol for the headaches and over-the-counter nausea medication. Ochoa said he asked whether his symptoms were related to the chemical fire. The doctors said they didn’t know.

He went back to work.

With fire out, officials declare victory — March 20, 2019 

By Wednesday afternoon, four days after the ITC plant ignited, federal, state and local officials hosted a press conference to announce the fire was finally out.

Mouton thanked first responders for their service.

“I’m very proud to stand here as mayor and recognize all of the officials and volunteers who waited in line to take their turn to fight for our community,” Mouton said. “Today, we are Deer Park strong.”

In a press release that day, the city assured the public that the air quality in Deer Park was not a concern. The TCEQ, meanwhile, advised “sensitive populations” — including elderly residents, pregnant people and children — to limit outdoor physical activity and told everyone to avoid any black smoke still drifting through the area.

As officials declared victory, Mario Ochoa’s mother could hardly breathe.

Mary Ann Conteras, a 58-year-old assistant director at Rosewood Funeral Home, noticed the black dust accumulating on her van’s windshield as she drove flowers to a Pasadena cemetery seven miles from the ITC facility. She then watched as the smoke plume settled above the mourning family during the funeral service. She could taste the smoke; she had the distinct sense that the smell would stick to her all-black attire and linger in her firmly pressed curly hair.

Leaving the cemetery, Contreras said she began to get headaches and feel nauseous as she drove to visit a friend in the Heights, a quiet Houston neighborhood known for its Victorian-style homes.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is not a migraine — this is totally different,’ ” she said. “I was gasping for air.”

She stopped along a highway median, opened her car door and threw up. Cars zoomed past her. She drove herself to an emergency room, not knowing yet that her son had gone to the hospital a day earlier for the same symptoms.

Contreras, now 62, said the doctor who saw her said her symptoms were caused by “high exposure to chemicals.” He advised her to drink lots of water and stay indoors.

An analysis of air quality data from a TCEQ’s stationary Deer Park monitor southwest of City Hall shows that benzene emissions had risen early that morning to 61 parts per billion in an hour. That was below the 1,000 parts per billion threshold set by Unified Command, but it was 12 times above the highest concentration of benzene typically found in the area. In Deer Park, benzene concentrations usually top out around 5 parts per billion in March, according to an analysis of TCEQ data by Ebrahim Eslami, an air quality research scientist at Houston Advanced Research Center.

ITC said in a statement that morning that air monitoring readings were “well below hazardous levels.” Deer Park said in a statement later that day that the city was obtaining “normal levels” of air pollutants. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo assured the public during a press conference that afternoon that the county was using “very conservative estimates to determine the threshold of dangerous levels of air quality.”

Yet throughout the area that day, residents from Deer Park and surrounding cities swarmed the pop-up county health clinics complaining of eye, ear, nose and throat irritation, severe headaches and trouble breathing. County health providers screened more than 900 people and referred the worst cases to local hospitals.

“We didn’t realize the amount of people that were going to actually show up,” said Michael McClendon, the director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at Harris County Public Health.

At one area hospital, a pair of medics who were helping respond to the fire were evaluated for benzene exposure that day, records show.

A second shelter-in-place when benzene “rears its ugly head” — March 21-22, 2019

At the ITC tank farm, the fire was out, but a new danger emerged. The remaining chemicals in the collapsing tanks were venting into the open air.

First responders transitioned from firefighting to frantically spraying the ruptured tanks with enormous amounts of industrial firefighting foam, hoping to create a blanket to tamp down emissions. But the foam ripped apart with each big gust of wind and quickly dissolved on the hot chemicals like whipped cream melting on hot coffee.

And benzene escaped.

“After the fire fight was over, that’s when the benzene issues began to rear their ugly head,” said Royall, the former assistant chief of Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office.

Rodney Reed, an assistant chief at the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office who worked in the county’s emergency operations center at the time, said when officials spotted spikes in benzene emissions, they called Unified Command, “and they’d [say] they had a break of the foam blanket.”

When more foam was applied, he added, the benzene levels would drop. The operation turned to tamping down benzene emissions and emptying the chemicals from the ruptured tanks.

By 4 a.m. Thursday, TCEQ inspectors found benzene emissions exceeding 1,200 parts per billion had wafted across Highway 225 and into Deer Park.

In a statement to the Tribune, the EPA said that when benzene readings topped the 1,000 parts per billion threshold in neighborhoods for at least a minute, Unified Command directed air quality inspectors to the area to take more measurements and confirm whether the concentrations were expected to linger in the area. Then, Unified Command notified local authorities.

The emissions prompted the city of Deer Park to issue a second shelter-in-place advisory. Schools canceled classes again, this time for one day.

The EPA warned in a press release that exposure could cause headaches and nausea, and then Harris County Public Health Executive Director Dr. Umair Shah encouraged residents to call the “Ask a Nurse” hotline if they experienced symptoms.

ITC spokesperson Alice Richardson choked up during a press conference after the second shelter-in-place advisory, outlining how the company and first responders were attempting to reduce the emissions.

“ITC cares,” she said, as her eyes filled with tears. “We care a lot. This is personal.”

Before noon Thursday — after a little under eight hours — the city of Deer Park lifted the shelter-in-place advisory. Robert Hemminger, Deer Park’s emergency services director at the time, told the public that benzene emissions had “significantly reduced” since that morning.

TCEQ’s stationary air monitor indicates that benzene concentrations in Deer Park had reduced to more typical levels by the late afternoon.

That day — four days after the ITC fire began — the EPA finally deployed its air monitoring bus, the rolling lab that could sample the air while it drove. The bus recorded several spikes of benzene above 1,000 parts per billion on Friday afternoon outside of the San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site, a popular tourist destination just down the road from ITC (it was closed to the public during the fire).

While benzene levels continued to spike near the ITC facility, neighboring chemical plants were warned to shelter in place Friday afternoon — the nearby community was not.

Durant, the EPA spokesperson, characterized such spikes as “instantaneous” measurements in industrial areas that would not have prompted notification to local officials.

Meanwhile, a portion of a dike wall surrounding the tank farm collapsed, sending petrochemicals, firefighting foam and contaminated water gushing into Tucker Bayou. Fire flared up again briefly in one of the tanks, which were melting from the heat. Then another tank collapsed.

“That almost killed some firefighters,” Royall said. “It just imploded on itself and went down in a matter of seconds.”

Benzene pollution lingers as life returns to normal — March 25-29, 2019

As fire crews fought the last remnants of the fire, life in Deer Park returned to normal. By Monday — eight days after the disaster began — students returned to school, to gym class and sports activities. Kids played kickball outside on the high school football field.

“I can stand here today and tell you with assurance, that safety to the public is priority No. 1,” Mayor Mouton said that day at another press conference. “We feel safe at this time.”

In the same press conference, Adam Adams, the federal on-scene commander for the EPA, said that air monitoring results, “have been consistent — no detections [of benzene].”

In a statement, EPA spokesperson Joe Robledo clarified that benzene readings below the 1,000 parts per billion action level did not prompt notifications to the public.

But the EPA’s air monitoring bus continued detecting elevated levels of benzene as it drove through the industrial areas lining the Houston Ship Channel early that week, the Tribune’s analysis shows. That Monday afternoon, the same day as the press conference, the bus recorded three benzene spikes well above 1,000 parts per billion across the street from the ITC facility between 4 and 4:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, EPA and TCEQ officials held another press conference and said that they had “no notifications of air monitoring results” above 1,000 parts per billion. If any readings crossed that threshold, Adams said the agencies would notify local officials and the public.

Hemminger, the former Deer Park official, said in an interview that the city only warned residents if emissions exceeded the “action level” within the city’s boundaries and were expected to linger, based on weather forecasts and subsequent readings. The high readings along the highway likely wouldn’t have prompted a response, he said, because the benzene levels quickly dropped again.

“We didn’t want to alarm the public needlessly,” Hemminger said. He added that the city verified high benzene readings with multiple sources before deciding whether to tell residents to go inside.

In the Wynfield Estates neighborhood, where many of the homes are two-story red brick and shaded by big oak trees, Anthony Guevara, Eddie’s 14-year-old brother, didn’t go to school that Monday because his eyes were burning and his throat stung.

“You don’t know what you are inhaling or putting in your body,” Anthony Guevara said. “It was scary.”

The benzene continued wafting from the broken tanks: On Friday, March 29, the EPA’s air monitoring bus again recorded benzene spikes above 1,000 parts per billion, this time across the ship channel in an industrial area near Channelview — about three miles northwest of the ITC facility. No shelter-in-place advisory was issued for Channelview residents.

Luoping Zhang, a researcher and adjunct professor of toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley, said after reviewing some of the EPA’s data that she was shocked the samples were collected outdoors in the middle of the day because benzene typically breaks down quickly in the sunlight and open air. The EPA bus typically only took measurements from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“Oh my god,” Zhang said after seeing the benzene readings the EPA gathered near Channelview on March 29. “That spike, to me, is really pretty high.”

Benzene drifts into Deer Park, but residents aren’t warned — March 31, 2019 

On March 31, two weeks after the ITC fire erupted into flames, the EPA mobile lab was still driving around Deer Park, testing the air. Motoring down East 13th Street, the van passed brick houses, a United Methodist Church and an elementary school with a playground nestled in the shade of tall, skinny pine trees.

That Sunday morning, it drove through an invisible cloud of benzene — logging a reading above 1,000 parts per billion near San Jacinto Elementary School.

It wasn’t the first sign of trouble: Around 11:30 p.m. the night before, a neighboring industrial facility near ITC reported “high benzene detections” and said one of its workers was vomiting and being sent to a hospital, Unified Command records show. A few hours later, around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, two people working on cleanup operations at the ITC plant became ill and went home.

Climbing benzene concentrations near the facility led the EPA and TCEQ to send inspectors into Deer Park, where they found benzene was drifting through neighborhoods near where Eddie Guevara and his family of five live. TCEQ inspectors recorded three benzene spikes on handheld air monitoring devices above 1,000 parts per billion on East Boulevard the morning of March 31. One of the readings occurred two blocks south of the elementary school, in a neighborhood near the intersection of East San Augustine Street and East Boulevard.

Later that morning, EPA inspectors with handheld devices also recorded elevated benzene concentrations in the same area — including one reading above 1,000 parts per billion.

Benzene drifted for miles through the community. One of TCEQ’s stationary air monitors near Spencerview Athletic Complex, about four miles south of San Jacinto Elementary School, was recording an average hourly concentration of about 40 parts per billion at 9 a.m. — about eight times higher than the highest concentrations usually recorded at that location.

The public was not warned the entire day.

Shonkoff, the environmental health sciences researcher at UC Berkeley, called the levels of benzene recorded by the EPA’s air monitoring that day “crazy” and “very high.”

“They are striking concentrations of benzene,” Shonkoff said. “Absolutely striking.”

The Tribune’s analysis shows that benzene levels continued to spike close to, but not surpassing, 1,000 parts per billion for the rest of that Sunday morning in residential areas of Deer Park.

The air monitoring “seems like a waste” if the public wasn’t immediately told about the danger, said Craft, one of the authors of the study that concluded that more shelter-in-place advisories and air quality warnings should have been issued during the ITC disaster.

“It seemed like [the EPA] was going out and doing this monitoring between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and it wasn’t clear what their intention or purpose was,” Craft said. “It was a missed opportunity because [the data from the EPA’s mobile lab] could’ve been used to inform some of the public health decisions, but it doesn’t seem like it was.”

Several school administrators who worked for the district in 2019 did not recall being informed about high levels of benzene near the elementary school on March 31, Matt Lucas, director of communications for Deer Park ISD, said in an email.

More than 800 students returned for classes at the elementary school the next morning.

Residents didn’t learn of the high benzene levels until a 10 a.m. press conference on Monday, when Adams, the federal on-scene coordinator for the EPA, said there was a benzene spike that weekend above the action level “in the community” — he didn’t say where — and added that the agency notified local officials.

But Adams said the EPA concluded that the high levels did not last long enough in the area to prompt action.

“If we get something sustained above [1,000 parts per billion], we notify the local governments to evacuate or shelter-in-place, whichever is more appropriate for the community,” Adams said.

Brent Weber, who was ITC’s “incident commander” during the fire and is now the company’s president and CEO, said during the same press conference that the company had encountered issues pumping the chemicals out of the damaged tanks over the weekend that caused an increase in benzene emissions.

Deer Park officials appeared to rely more on air monitoring readings from its hired contractor than the EPA’s. The city also released a statement that day to its residents: “We did not receive any readings above actionable levels over the weekend,” it said, citing data from CTEH, the company the city and ITC had contracted to conduct air monitoring.

CTEH is known as an industry-friendly environmental consulting firm and is frequently hired by companies during chemical emergencies.

An air quality report provided by CTEH shows that it did not not detect any concentrations of benzene above 1,000 parts per billion in Deer Park, Pasadena, Galena Park or Channelview on March 31, however, the report does not indicate at what time the readings were taken.

Stokes, the Deer Park city manager, declined to answer questions about the high levels of benzene recorded on March 31 by the EPA and TCEQ.

Eddie Guevara, who’s now 22, said officials should have been more honest with the public.

“You want to be able to trust officials and ITC representatives telling people you will be OK,” Guevara said. But, “of course they are going to downplay it.”

Uncertainty looms over benzene exposure

Guevara worries that his family won’t know the full impact of their benzene exposure for years.

“To me, it’s no joke,” he said, adding that he worries about whether the fumes he breathed could increase his risk of cancer.

While scientists have found that years of repeated exposure to benzene causes cancer, the long-term impact of being exposed to brief but high levels of benzene is less certain.

It’s notoriously challenging to determine whether cancer was caused by exposure to a specific chemical or pollutant. Some experts who study benzene said the spikes that wafted through Deer Park and the surrounding areas over that two and a half week period could increase residents’ risk of cancer, but others said it was unlikely.

“I would definitely say that [people nearby] have an increased risk,” said Zhang. But she added that it would be difficult to determine for sure.

Stephen Rappaport, a leading environmental health sciences researcher who studies chemical exposures and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, said there is “no safe level for a carcinogen,” but added, “the evidence shows it tends to be people who have a fairly high exposure for fairly long periods of time [who develop cancer].” Studies have typically focused on workers who are exposed to the chemical over years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed air monitoring data from the incident and found that the concentrations of benzene exceeded what the agency considers safe — but did not believe they were high enough to cause widespread cases of cancer.

“These concentrations are higher than we would normally consider protective,” Richard Nickle, an environmental health scientist at the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said in an April 2019 email to Harris County officials.

The CDC did not recommend further health monitoring in the community. Texas’ health agency similarly concluded that although benzene is a carcinogen, exposure during the incident “is not expected to increase people’s risk of cancer.”

“Benzene is associated with cancer usually after long durations (decades) of exposure,” DSHS spokesperson Lara Anton said in a statement. “The duration of exposure related [to the ITC fire] was much shorter. … Therefore, no evaluation of cancer risk posed by exposure to benzene from this event was carried out.”

Four years later

Four years after Ochoa, his 62-year-old mother, his son and countless others were sickened by the ITC fire, federal regulators are still investigating. A final report is expected this year.

Ochoa and Contreras are two of more than 300 Houston-area residents who are suing ITC, claiming they suffered severe health impacts, including headaches, coughing up blood, respiratory infections and emotional stress during the 2019 fire — which Ochoa is fighting to forget.

“I try not to think about it, because when I do think about it, my heart feels it,” Ochoa said. There are still moments — often late into the night, when he remembers that week of the fire — when those same feelings of panic come flooding back through his mind.

“I can still feel that sorrow,” he said.

The lawsuit also asks that the company pay for residents’ future doctor visits and tests for cancer.

Some local officials now say more should’ve been done to communicate with the public when air quality worsened — and they’re working on changing their protocols.

Loren Hopkins, Chief Environmental Science Officer of Houston’s health department, said she realized that when officials issue shelter-in-place advisories and nothing else, the message to the public is confusing: “It’s all fine, up until all of the sudden it’s terrible,” she said.

“People need to be able to make their own decisions,” Hopkins said. “The data needs to be available to the public with some kind of interpretation.”

Harris County Pollution Control Executive Director Latrice Babin said in an interview that telling citizens to shelter in place is “a really hard call to make,” noting that even when high levels of chemicals are recorded, interpreting air quality testing also depends on weather conditions and location. For example, sunshine can cause chemical reactions that transform the pollution into smog, strong winds can quickly dissipate the pollutants and samples taken near highways could also detect pollution from vehicles.

In 2020, the city created its own benzene guidelines that are far lower than what was used during the ITC incident: The guidelines say officials should consider a shelter-in-place advisory if benzene levels exceed 72 parts per billion over one hour and evacuations if the level hits 200 parts per billion for an hour.

Harris County produced an analysis of what went wrong during the response. For example, the report said Harris County Pollution Control, which has a special team to respond to fires involving hazardous materials and other chemical incidents, had meager staffing and “antiquated” or out-of-service equipment during the 2019 fire. Harris County commissioners invested more than $11 million to implement the report’s recommendations. The county has created a community air response monitoring program, expanded staffing and purchased more disaster response equipment, said Dimetra Hamilton, a Harris County Pollution Control spokesperson.

Harris County is also using a $1 million grant from the American Chemistry Council to create a new guide for emergency response to chemical disasters. But a draft shared with the Tribune shows that while it identifies 22 chemicals, including benzene, that could threaten residents’ health, it does not set a specific threshold for issuing a shelter-in-place advisory.

The city of Deer Park didn’t respond to questions about whether it has changed its policies for responding to community benzene exposure.

The disaster also exposed confusion over who should be responsible for telling residents to shelter in place during a chemical release.

Rodney Reed, an assistant chief at Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office, said that each city, as well as multiple county agencies, have the authority to issue shelter-in-place advisories. But when an incident occurs at a facility like ITC that’s located in an unincorporated area of the county, deciding who has jurisdiction can be complicated. In the end, officials decided that Deer Park and ITC would lead response efforts.

The TCEQ, for its part, has beefed up its ability to test for airborne chemicals, adding new air monitors in the ship channel area since 2019 and purchasing three new air monitoring vehicles.

Still, the state renewed the chemical permit for ITC’s Deer Park facility less than a year after the fire. ITC’s operational permit is up for renewal this year and some residents have raised safety concerns about the facility ahead of the permit renewal; a public hearing will be held in May.

In 2021, TCEQ approved a rule that allows the agency to consider major explosions or fires when it decides whether to issue permits to a company — a change that agency staff pushed because of the ITC fire.

The TCEQ referred the ITC case to Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office typically handles major industrial accidents. Paxton’s office sued the company in 2019, but the case hasn’t moved forward since 2021, according to Travis County District Court records. The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for an interview.

ITC said in a written statement that it continues to implement “enhancements to safety, environmental integrity and emergency response capabilities” at its Deer Park location. The company said it has installed additional gas detectors and emergency shutdown valves in multiple areas of its facility.

Some residents still blame the incident for lingering health problems. Castiel, Ochoa’s now 8-year-old son, struggles with sinus infections. The chatty little boy — who told a doctor that his breathing problems felt like “bugs getting in my nose, like little tiny worms” clogging his nostrils and lungs — is now wary of playing outside at playgrounds, his father says. Instead, they spend more time indoors playing video games.

Ochoa quit his job as a pipe-fitter and found a job that doesn’t expose him to chemicals.

“People were telling me these horror stories from other refineries that were happening, people getting sick,” Ochoa said. “It’s horrifying, scary. And because I’m a single dad with a kid, I gotta find a different way.”

Now, Contreras is alert to strange odors in the air and watches for anything unusual at the nearby chemical plants — especially smoke. She has a grandson with respiratory issues and feels like it’s her duty.

“Do you have anything that you can cover up with?” she asks family and coworkers whenever she spots what might be dangerous.

“You know, to protect yourself?”

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About the data

The Texas Tribune used air quality data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) Unit that sampled air quality in both industrial and community areas surrounding Intercontinental Terminals Company’s Deer Park facility between March 21 and May 20, 2019. The data was originally obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund through a public information request, and shared with the Tribune. The data provided by the agency included both “field” data and post-processed data, and included measurements of benzene, toluene, and xylenes — all volatile organic compounds that could be harmful to human health, according to the EPA. The Tribune used the post-processed data to analyze benzene measurements, and excluded days for which only field benzene data was available — that included March 24, April 9, April 16, May 3-6, May 11-12, and May 15, 2019. The Tribune compared the measurements from the TAGA unit with those in the EPA’s Final Analytical TAGA Report, obtained through a public information request. As a result, the Tribune also excluded March 21, 2019 because its location data did not match the EPA’s.

The Tribune also compared the TAGA data to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s hourly stationary air monitoring data to inform our analysis. An air quality expert at the Houston Advanced Research Center, who was contacted by the Tribune, used the TAGA data to calculate average hourly benzene measurements using a standard methodology. The Tribune compared these hourly average values to those measured by the nearest TCEQ stationary air monitor that measures benzene to see whether the TAGA data correlated with the TCEQ’s data. The Tribune and HARC used data from TCEQ’s Houston Deer Park #2 stationary monitor to calculate the average maximum level of benzene in the air in Deer Park in March between 2014 and 2018. The Tribune compared the average maximum level of benzene in March to the benzene levels recorded by the same TCEQ stationary monitor during and shortly after the fire.

Public Health Watch reporters Savanna Strott and David Leffler contributed reporting. Jade Khatib contributed data analysis.

Disclosure: Environmental Defense Fund and Houston Advanced Research Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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It’s been over a decade since researchers began looking into microplastics in the Great Lakes.

Now, the issue is getting renewed attention amid broader concerns about the potential effects of microplastics on the human body and a possible future link to the hydro-fracking boom currently happening in the region.

Microplastics form as plastic pieces in the environment erode into smaller and smaller pieces, eventually becoming so small that they can’t be seen with the naked eye, according to Sherri Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State University’s Barr Campus on Lake Erie, who’s spent years researching microplastics in waterways.

Unlike other types of litter, the plastic bits will take far longer to disappear.

“If you were to see a paper bag on the side of the road, it’s unsightly, but within weeks it has completely, what we call, mineralized. There are organisms in the soil that can use it as a food source,” Mason told ABC News’ Start Here podcast host Brad Mielke.

Mason’s research has focused on Lake Erie, which has a concentration of microplastic that rivals the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating landfill that’s twice the size of Texas, according to multiple studies.

But the majority of plastic in Lake Erie is less than 5 millimeters in diameter, much of it approaching microscopic size “about the width of a human hair,” Mason said. She describes it as a “smog” of particles drifting around, which also makes it impossible to meaningfully clean up.

Mason and her students spent a year collecting samples of trash from Lake Erie and sorted them into different categories.

“Thousands of bottles is the No. 1 thing. Bottles and cups, and then a lot of chip bags. It’s mostly a lot of food packaging,” Mason said.

Before plastic gets pressed into a shape like a water bottle or bag, it starts off as plastic pellets that get fed into big machines.

The pellets, about the size of a grain of rice, are transported by millions on freight trains before being siphoned out onto trucks that take them to factories. Not far from the banks of Lake Erie, small piles of pellets litter the tracks where they’ve spilled out during this process, Mason said. When it rains, the pellets start making their way into nearby Mill Creek and later into lakes and oceans.

And it’s just one of the ways that plastic can end up in bodies of water, according to Mason.

What’s more, one study suggests that the average person may be ingesting about 5 grams of plastic per week, or the equivalent to the mass of a credit card, according to a study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. Microplastics have even been found in the lungs of living people, according to recent research. Mason said that microplastics are getting so small that in some cases they are able to find their way beyond the digestive tract.

“When you get a piece that’s smaller than a hundred microns or the width of a human hair, they can migrate across the gastrointestinal tract. They get carried in the blood. We have found them in the blood, and they can make their way into certain organs. They can make their way across the placental boundary,” Mason said.

The World Health Organization says that although more research is needed, so far it has found no direct evidence that microplastics make people sick. The Plastic Industry Association, which represents plastic makers, said in a statement that claims about microplastics “lack sound data,” and that plastic is overwhelmingly safe. In fact, the association said, plastics are essential to hygiene, which is why it is in so many medical products.

But Mason is concerned that the use of plastics shows no signs of slowing down.

The Midwest is currently in the midst of a hydro-fracking boom, and half of the fracking wells in Pennsylvania produce ethane. Ethane can be turned into polyethylene, which is the most common type of plastic.

“So now there is a connection between basically hydro-fracking and the plastics industry,” Mason said.

Last year, a new plant opened just north of Pittsburgh that converts this material into plastic, and two more facilities are being proposed in Ohio.

According to the Center for International Environmental Law, the health of the fossil fuel industry is deeply reliant on plastics, and these investments could cause plastic production to spike.

Mason believes that the ultimate responsibility to curb plastic usage lies with the companies that make and use them.

“You’ve given your money to that corporation. You end up with their container, which you don’t want, but then you also have to pay to get rid of it. You have to pay to clean it out of the water,” Mason said.

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THE BIG IDEA

GUIDING LIGHT — Companies are talking the talk on sustainability. The Federal Trade Commission is gearing up to make sure they’re walking the walk, Jordan reports.

As demand for sustainable products has skyrocketed, so have concerns about greenwashing. Public comments were due yesterday on the FTC’s first update in 11 years of its “Green Guides,” which are essentially advice for how companies can make environmental marketing claims.

The nearly 60,000 comments shed light on what companies, industry trade groups and environmentalists are fighting over:

— Recycling claims. Current FTC guidelines say companies should qualify claims of “recyclability” when products aren’t recyclable in at least 60 percent of their market. The EPA wrote that the bar “should be much higher,” while environmental groups want to clarify that at least 60 percent of products need to actually be recycled — not just collected. That coalition also wants to set a higher bar of 75 percent for store drop-off programs.

The Plastics Industry Association wants the standards to stay as-is: The FTC “should not further complicate the issue by adding hurdles,” the group wrote. It also wants take-back or drop-off programs to be equally eligible to make unqualified recycling claims.

— Corporate net-zero claims. Ceres, a nonprofit focused on corporate sustainability, wants the FTC to give guidance on how companies can use carbon offsets to make claims about their climate commitments and achievements. Sierra Club and a half-dozen other groups want disclosure of specific offsets’ climate benefits.

— Chemical recycling. The American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association want to make it easier to claim that chemical recycling — a set of technologies that involve melting hard-to-recycle plastic down into its components — counts toward companies’ recycled content and recyclability standards. The ACC submitted a new poll showing that nearly 90 percent of consumers believe chemical recycling qualifies as “recycling.” Green groups are pushing back.

— Enforcement. Environmental groups want the FTC to initiate a formal rulemaking process to codify the Green Guides (currently, the agency can bring enforcement action via violations of the FTC Act), with an eye toward California’s “truth in labeling” law. EPA seems to be on board, too, but the Plastics Industry Association opposes rulemaking.

How much does this all matter? The FTC doesn’t do a ton of enforcement of green marketing claims: It’s taken enforcement action under the Green Guides 36 times since 2013. It hasn’t taken enforcement action based on recycling claims since 2014 — although it does send warning letters, which can nudge companies into compliance.

The agency tends to pick big cases that send a signal — like its $5.5 million penalty last year against Walmart and Kohl’s over claims that they marketed rayon textiles as made from eco-friendly bamboo, when in fact converting bamboo into rayon involves toxic chemicals.

But officials are signaling willingness to wade into the details on new technologies such as chemical recycling.

“Our job is to not say what’s good or bad for society, it is to make sure that people aren’t lying,” James Kohm, associate director of enforcement in the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in an interview. “We wouldn’t necessarily hesitate to get involved in a situation. What we don’t want to do is contradict the EPA, and we’ve been careful in a number of areas to not do that. There are a bunch of trade offs — that you have less trash, but you might have more air pollution, for example. If we had enough information, and we weren’t contradicting the EPA, we would probably give advice.”

We could be in this for the long haul: The last time the Green Guides were updated, the process started in 2007 and didn’t end until 2012. There’s an initial public workshop on recycling scheduled next month.

Sustainable Finance

VENTURING OUT — Venture capital firms are coming together to set net-zero standards for themselves and their investments.

The Venture Climate Alliance launching today has 23 member firms, including Prelude Ventures, Galvanize Climate Solutions, Union Square Ventures and World Fund. They’re committing to reaching net zero emissions within their own operations by 2030 and to align their investment strategies with reaching net zero by 2050.

They’ve been working on it for more than a year and have gotten the blessing of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, the UN-affiliated umbrella group aiming to decarbonize the financial sector.

VCs say they need their own sector-specific alliance partly because they’re focused on building up companies, which comes with unavoidable short-term emissions.

“The question to ask that’s interesting is not, ‘Will your emissions go down from where they are today to tomorrow along a pathway to net zero to 2050?’” said Daniel Firger, managing director of Great Circle Capital Advisors and co-founder/lead adviser of the VCA. “We don’t exist today, and we will hopefully exist tomorrow and sell things to companies and have office space, so the question just philosophically begins from a different premise when you’re coming in thinking about venture investing as a category under net zero.”

The group isn’t envisioning excluding firms based on their investment strategies. “There are some oil and gas companies that have made these commitments, and so it really is for every industry, for every company to think about this,” said Alexandra Harbour, a principal at Prelude Ventures and founder and chair of the VCA. “Every industry has the potential to achieve or contribute to impact, and that’s kind of the goal.”

WORKPLACE

SLOW GOING — An Illinois law designed to diversify corporate boards is having mixed results, Shia Kapos reports.

The numbers are meh: While women’s representation on corporate boards has reached more than 20 percent on average, they are underrepresented in most companies compared with their workforce, according to numbers compiled as part of compliance with the 2019 law, which requires companies based in the state to list their corporate board makeup based on sexual orientation, race and ethnicity.

The state found that Illinois firms are more likely to have zero, one, or two female directors, as compared with S&P 500 firms, which are more likely to have three or more female directors.

Non-white minorities are even more underrepresented than women relative to the state’s population. Of the firms reporting, 32 had no Black board members. Fifty-nine reported having zero Asian directors, while 72 reported zero Latino directors.

The sponsor of the law, House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, said he’s optimistic representation will get better. “Corporations want to make improvements,” he said. “We got their attention. I think it will only continue to improve.”

YOU TELL US

GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. We deliver data-driven storytelling, compelling interviews with industry and political leaders, and news Tuesday through Friday to keep you in the loop on sustainability.

Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us all at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

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WHAT WE’RE CLICKING

— A U.S. startup is working with a Danish concrete manufacturing giant to develop a new form of cement mix that could dramatically reduce energy use and carbon emissions, according to Bloomberg.

— Near-shoring has been viewed as a way to ease supply chain problems, but it comes with its own set of problems, the Wall Street Journal reports.

– A Democratic senator is planning to introduce legislation that would protect mining companies’ rights to dump waste on adjoining federal lands. The Associated Press has that story.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this newsletter included an inaccurate list of firms joining the Venture Climate Alliance.

Antarctica is beautiful but is being changed rapidly by plastic pollution, climate change and krill fishing, a marine biologist has warned.

Demand for products such as Omega-3 supplements, farmed salmon and nylon clothes is changing the once-pristine continent, said Emily Cunningham.

Cunningham, 33, hails from Staffordshire and has just spent a season in Antarctica on a scientific vessel, using submarines to explore beneath the surface.

Speaking to Yahoo News, Cunningham said that as her trip to Antarctica unfolded, she began to understand the scale of the environmental challenges facing the continent.

Read more: Antarctic records hottest temperature ever

“At first, the impact it had on me was a feeling of, ‘Wow, how lucky am I to get to go to this incredible place,'” she said. “Then as I started to understand the scale of what is happening, my feelings turned to angst and grief about what we are losing.”

Antarctica is the world’s least-visited continent, and was only discovered in 1820. Cunningham posted a viral Twitter thread about her experiences to call attention to how human activity is now changing Antarctica.

Cunningham said she remains haunted by the continent’s beauty, but hopes to raise awareness of the threats to life in Antarctica from krill fishing, which is used to feed farmed fish and for Omega-3 supplements, as well as climate change and plastic pollution.

“I knew I was going to see lots of wildlife – that’s what drove me to take on the job, the opportunity to get to go to Antarctica and see the penguins and the whales. But the landscapes and the ice I hadn’t expected to be quite so mesmerising,” she said.

“I had the opportunity to get down in the submarine and see the undersea environment. It was just like nothing else on Earth. It’s just like a living carpet, everywhere you look is life, it’s just spectacular.”

Cunningham said that her season in the Antarctic – and speaking to veteran scientists who have spent 30 years on the continent – led her to realise just how much global warming is already impacting Antarctica.

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

“Global warming is happening five times faster there than the global average,” she says.

“It’s getting stormier, the weather patterns are changing and it’s already impacting the penguin colonies –we saw colonies that are 70% smaller than they used to be.”

Krill fishery – where ships harvest tiny crustaceans for use in Omega-3 supplements and food for farmed fish, among other things – is also posing a threat to the region.

Krill has already been impacted by climate change, thanks to the loss of sea ice – and the tiny creatures are at the heart of the Antarctic ecosystem and act as food for penguins, whales and seals.

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

“The krill fishery is becoming concentrated around the Antarctic Peninsula, where the warming is so fast, a lot of changes are happening,” she explained.

Plus, the impact of the lack of krill is being seen in animals such as chinstrap penguins and whales, where a dearth of krill leads to years where pregnancies plunge, threatening populations, Cunningham added.

But the demand for fish meal made from krill is growing by 10% each year, according to the marine biologist.

As such, scientists hope to see regulated areas where vessels can’t fish for krill. At present, the only rules are around how much krill each vessel can catch.

One of the projects Cunningham was involved in monitoring microplastics in the water – and she found plastic fibres that could have come from clothing in every sample.

Indeed, there is now a theory that Antarctica is a ‘sink’ for plastics from all over the world.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

“Other researchers have found microplastics that are present in the air or snow, seawater and the sediment in Antarctica. They’ve even found microplastics in freshly fallen snow. It’s likely that they come by wind or by oceanic currents,” she said.

Microplastics are also found in crustaceans like krill and that could mean they end up on plates around the world.

“If you think krill are being fished at an industrial scale to be turned into fishmeal that goes into a salmon and it’s not a long way for the salmon to being eaten by people around the world,” Cunningham warned.

Global warming has also seen invasive species such as king crabs flourish in Antarctica’s seas, putting the underwater communities at risk of irrevocable change.

“They are finding that animals are hitchhiking on the nooks and crannies on the hole or the outflows of ships – what we call biofouling.

“Antarctica is the least invaded habitat at the moment, but we need to make sure that it stays like that.”

Cunningham added that she shared her Twitter thread to change people’s minds that Antarctica is a pristine wilderness – because it no longer is.

“It’s an incredible place that is already being shaped by human activity, but we’re pulling up to a point of no return where we can no longer do anything about it.

“I hope that I can raise awareness for people that wherever they live in the world, what they do has an impact on Antarctica – and they can make things better.”

She said that the response to her Twitter thread was ‘amazing’, adding: “It was really heartening, because this fight can feel incredibly lonely.”

Finally, Cunningham advised that the best thing people can do is to work to raise awareness of the threats to Antarctica – so that governments and businesses will take action before it is too late.

She can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.