UC Systemwide Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program

UC Toxics News: Spring 2003
Table of Contents      Next Article

 

 

 

The 16th Annual TSR&TP Research Symposium began Friday evening, April 25th with Director Jerry Last welcoming all 170 participants – UC students, faculty, staff, TSR&TP committee members and guests.

The Friday evening agenda featured talks by TSR&TP associate directors and a keynote address from the Vice Provost of Research at the UC Office of the President. Associate Directors John Knezovich and Tom Harmon spoke briefly on their new directions for the program. John Knezovich’s efforts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to integrate the facilities they have with UC research have been focused on developing ecosystem assessment tools. Tom Harmon has been looking at remote sensing techniques and remediation for contaminated soils.

Larry Coleman, Vice Provost for Research at the UC Office of the President spoke on his View from the Top. There are approximately 35 Multicampus Research Units (MRUs), of which the TSR&TP is one of the largest in the UC system. The University of California holds a broad spectrum of intellectual power, and MRUs allow UC to put together people from different campuses who are interested in researching a particular topic. Coleman emphasized the importance of the TSR&TP because the results of toxics research can directly influence government policy. He said it is especially important for UC faculty and graduate students to remember that they must prove themselves worthy as objective scientists to the public and the policy makers. Coleman reminded students in the program to be mindful of conflict of interest and the perception of conflict in their research.

The Saturday program of the symposium featured poster sessions and two keynote speeches by Oladele Ogunseitan of UC Irvine, and Antonio Machado of UC Los Angeles, recipients of TSR&TP’s first Interdisciplinary Research Team Grants.

Oladele Ogunseitan presents his team research project on reducing lead in electronics at the 2003 Symposium in Oakland.

E-Waste: Removing Lead from Electronics
Oladele Ogunseitan spoke about his UC Irvine team research project on e-waste, focusing on lead in electronics as a threat to public health. He said that $4.3 billion per year in health care costs are attributable to lead in the environment. Lead contamination comes from the areas of energy, water, construction, and electronics from gas, batteries, paint, cathode-ray tube monitors and televisions, and solders on circuit boards. Though lead was removed from gasoline in the U.S., contamination is still a problem, especially around landfills and in urban areas where ambient air concentrations of lead are high.

Lead is also an international problem - US products containing lead often end up in other countries and vice versa. More than 1.5 million obsolete computers and even more cell phones enter the waste stream every year. Europe and Japan have already passed laws requiring manufacturers to pay for managing post-consumer waste. By 2006, the UK will impose a per-household limit on e-waste. Japan currently has a voluntary initiative so manufacturers can label their products as green. The U.S. has been slower to respond. In February of 2003, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control established regulations that ban CRT disposal into landfills, but as of April, there were no regulations to reduce lead use in electronics manufacturing.

Ogunseitan’s group has decided to focus on cell phones because the contribution of lead from cell phones is higher than most other electronics. The team is trying to quantify what the benefits of removing lead solders from electronic production will be. They are also evaluating whether cell phones should be considered as hazardous waste. Besides the lead, there are other toxic materials in electronic devices. If lead in solder is the only thing addressed, cell phones would still be categorized as hazardous waste due to the other compounds in the electronics. The engineers on the project are looking at what it will cost per unit to make hazard-free electronic products, and the economists in the group are researching the costs and benefits of going to hazard-free products and how the policy can best be implemented.

Ogunseitan concluded his talk stating that we need consistent worldwide regulations. Perhaps the results of this research can be used as a framework for defining policies to apply to other phaseout situations.

For more information, visit the team’s website at http://www.industrial-ecology.uci.edu

Tony Machado of UC Los Angeles addresses the audience at the 2003 Symposium.

Low Level Toxin Interactions as a Possible Cause of Birth Defects
Antonio Machado spoke on behalf of Jon Fukuto's team at UC Los Angeles that is researching the effects of combinations of toxins at low levels on neural tube defects such as anencephaly and spina bifida.

Machado began with a suprising statistic: 1 in 33 babies in the US is born with a serious structural birth defect. The estimated public health costs of spina bifida alone are more than $18 million per year.

Birth defects are caused by a variety of nutritional deficiencies and excesses, drugs, environmental chemicals, and maternal conditions such as diabetes. If perturbations exceed a certain threshold, then a malformation results. The EPA reports that subthreshold levels of known toxins do not cause birth defects, but Machado’s group isn’t so sure.

Cadmium, arsenic, and retinoic acid are all teratogenic (birth-defect causing) in animal models. Machado’s group is looking at cadmium and arsenic particularly because they share the same oxidative stress mechanisms. These two compounds show reverse strain sensitivity in mice.
So far, the results of the group’s research have shown that subthreshold levels of known toxins can combine to produce birth defects, but not everything has an additive effect. They’ve found that retinoic acid and cadmium do interact to the exclusion of arsenic, but all three compounds have more in common than they have differences. Compounds of cadmium and retinoic acid at below threshold levels in the group’s studies did produce birth defects about 20 percent of the time, but combinations of cadmium and arsenic did not produce birth defects. Machado said the question now is, why don’t these two compounds show additivity? Perhaps they do have different pathways or there could be other things going on such as a heat-shock response. The next year of the project will help answer these questions.

Table of Contents      Next Article