- Thank you so much for coming.
I would like to go ahead and introduce you real quick
to Heather Gall, she's an Assistant Professor who is going
to discuss our EDC Footprints, okay.
- Well, thank you so much for having me here.
It's really a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you.
I've given this talk a few times now,
so thank God that's one of the reasons why we're going ahead
and recording this so that way it can reduce the number
of times I'm giving this seminar across campus.
But I'm really thrilled
that there's so much excitement about it.
And just a little bit of background,
I do serve on our department's Green Team.
So all of you are Green Team members is that true?
No, oh, okay.
- [Audience Member] No.
- I was under the impression that that was the case
but anyway, it's really awesome to get a chance to talk
with you today.
If you have any questions
as I'm going through my presentation feel free to stop me.
I'm more than happy to entertain questions
as I move through it.
And so I thought,
given the topic that we're going to be talking about today
that it might be useful
to sort of just give you a brief overview
of sort of the history of water regulations in our country.
And so we first started regulating water,
surface water bodies back in the late 1800s
and the purpose of that was actually to make them navigable.
So we wanted to be able to use our harbors and our rivers
for navigation related activities for trading.
And so this was mostly associated with dredging those rivers
and harbors and that means just taking the sediments out
if they accumulate so that there's space
for the boats to navigate safely.
And then we started looking at discharge of human wastes
so we had modern septic systems
and wastewater treatment plants today
but that was not always the case.
And so this was first regulated at the State level
in the early 1900s
and then began being regulated at the Federal level
in the mid-1900s
with the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.
And so, clearly, that wasn't sufficient
for making sure that we had clean,
safe water for us to drink and recreate in.
Sort of a smoking gun that led to the creation, ultimately,
of the EPA was the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio.
So I'm not sure if any of you have heard of that happening
but this was in 1969
and there was so much industrial waste in the Cuyahoga River
that it actually caught on fire.
And so when your rivers catch on fire
that probably is a good indication that something is wrong
and so this led to, ultimately,
the creation of the EPA in 1970.
And so then we had the Clean Water Act in 1972
and it has some pretty bold goals
of reducing many different types
of pollutions into our surface water bodies.
And basically to eliminate toxic discharges
so that we can have water that would be safe to fish in
and to recreate in.
And can anybody think
why we might need this at the Federal level?
Why might State level regulations have been insufficient?
What is it about water, by nature,
that makes it an interstate issue?
- [Audience Member] Well, rivers cross state boundaries.
- Exactly, so yeah, most people generally tend
to know the answer.
so it's an interstate resource so it makes sense
that we need to regulate at the Federal level.
And so if you think about Chesapeake Bay
and all we're trying to do to protect and restore her today,
clearly, there are many states that are contributing
to that problem and so it takes the EPA,
at the Federal level, then to create the legislation then
that allows us to improve the water quality.
And so, when we think about standards for water is sort
of depends on what that water's purpose and use is.
And so we have more stringent regulations for drinking water
than we do for recreating in it, or fishing,
or for restoring something for a specific habitat purpose
for an endangered species, perhaps.
And even with all of these regulations, though,
we're still facing issues of course across our country.
And so this is a map of sort of the threatened
or impaired waterways based on whatever the recreational
or drinking water purpose is.
So however that water body is supposed to be used
if the drinking water standards or whatever standards
for that particular end use are treated then,
let's see if I can get this thing to work,
then you have a redder or a dark brown color.
And so, I actually grew up in New Jersey
and so you can maybe see why I started
to become very passionate about our water.
There's a lot of water issues when it comes
to the state of New Jersey.
And so our modern drinking water standards
actually went into effect in 1977
but they haven't really been updated
that much since the early '90s.
And so we have these primary drinking water standards
that are regulated compound by compound
and so if you look at the...
Usually, annually,
your drinking water company will give you a report
to make sure that you know that the water
that you've been drinking has been safe
and if there's any excedents, since they're required
to let you know.
So that's true
for what we call primary drinking water standards
but there's also secondary drinking water standards
and these are things related to, so how the water looks,
aesthetics or how it might smell.
So they're not necessarily health related
but they might make the water undesirable to drink
if the secondary water standards are exceeded.
So your drinking water treatment plant is required
to meet primary but only recommended
to meet the secondary drinking water standards.
And over the past maybe 10 or 15 years or so,
they started to create this Contaminant Candidate List
and that's sort of where my emerging area
of research around these endocrine destructing compounds
and what we call emerging contaminants comes into play.
And so we're starting to see pharmaceuticals,
and personal care products,
and astringents in the environment at very low levels
and because they can have endocrine destructing effects
they're on this Contaminant Candidate List
to eventually become regulated.
So we don't know enough about them to regulate them yet
but that's the goal, is to ultimately get them regulated.
And so what are these emerging contaminants?
So they're basically, generally,
chemicals that are found in the environment
at very low concentrations, a very trace level,
much smaller than most of the drinking water standards are
for some of the things that are on
that primary drinking water list.
They typically don't have, basically,
they're not generally things
that we sample for in the environment
because they're not regulated.
So they're often things that we're just becoming aware of.
Even though they may have been in the environment
for a long period of time,
we're sort of just becoming aware
of their presence in the environment.
And so these are things that are found in products
that we use every day.
So if you did laundry recently, again,
you are releasing some
of these emerging contaminants into the environment,
maybe inadvertently but.
And then household cleaners, and health and beauty care,
personal care products all contain some of the ingredients
that we would refer to in the environment
as emerging contaminants.
And so, basically, I get a lot of questions especially, yes.
- [Female Audience Member] Oh, I saw a cup of coffee there.
- Yes, some caffeine.
Caffeine is indicative of wastewater
so if you see that in the environment it's likely
because you've had release of wastewater.
It passes through you after you've drinken it
and winds up actually going
somewhat through the wastewater treatment plant.
So our wastewater treatment plants aren't required
to remove these things.
So that there's no wastewater standards for these
so they wind up in the environment
and just like it causes behavioral changes
for us at the levels in the environment it could cause
or potentially cause low level behavior changes
in non-target organisms as well.
I wouldn't discourage you necessarily
from drinking caffeine it is a natural ingredient
though it doesn't break down in the environment
but it is one of the things that's on the list
of emerging contaminants.
So I talked a little bit about these trace levels
and one of the questions that I get is,
"Okay, well, what does it mean
"to have a nanogram per liter of level?"
It's a very low concentration.
So a nanogram is 10 to the minus nine grams
and if you think about
what a gram is you can think about grain of sand
or a paper clip.
And so, just kind of did a back
of the envelope type calculation
to try to explain what that means.
And so if you took a football field
and basically stacked 10 single story houses high
and filled that with water then
that would be 10 to the nine meters.
And so then if you put a paper clip into that water
which has a mass of one gram then that concentration
of that paper clip in
that massive amount of water would be 10 to the minus nine,
so nanograms per liter level.
And so that's how to think about the levels at
which these emerging contaminants
are active in the environment.
Okay, so we talked a little bit about the sources
of these emerging contaminants,
so they're things that we're using in our every day lives.
They wind up in our wastewater stream.
So after we shower, after we flush the toilet,
however we're using it in our household
it'll wind up in our wastewater treatment plants.
The treatment plants don't necessarily have
to remove these contaminants
so they can be released into surface water bodies as
that wastewater treatment plant that treated effluent
is being discharged back into our rivers.
In some cases we might have a combined sewer overflow event
and I'll go over what those are in a moment
but that's actually the release
of raw sewage into the environment.
And so many old cities have these combined sewer pipes
that are carrying both storm water and sewage
and so during a rainfall event
sometimes those systems can become overwhelmed
and there's not enough capacity to actually treat
that amount of water
and so these pipe systems actually wind up diverting water
from the treatment plants
and directly discharge it into receiving water bodies.
And so then you basically have untreated waste
getting discharged and there's a lot of efforts
to now remove these combined sewer systems
but they still do exist for the time being.
And another source of these emerging contaminants
is concentrated animal feeding operations.
And so if you think about
how animals are raised in these systems,
they're in very close proximity to each other
and so if one of those animals were to get sick
then you would have the spread of disease quite rapidly
through those concentrated animal feeding operations.
And so they're often given low levels of antibiotics then
to consistently to make sure the spread of disease is low
and so that can actually lead to the discharge then
of pharmaceuticals from these sources into the environment.
So lots of times we're using the waste
that those animals generate as a fertilizer
so we're applying that in either solid or liquid form
to our agricultural systems
and then so during rainstorm events
you can actually get runoff from those fields
that's carrying that directly
into the receiving water bodies.
And so just to give you a little bit of perspective
on the scope of these
concentrated animal feeding operations in the U.S.
this is a map of their density.
The brighter the red the higher the density
of these facilities.
This one's showing all different kinds
of animal feeding operations.
You can also use this map to just look at cattle, dairy,
hogs, broilers, and layers, chickens.
And you can see sort of in the Southeastern part
of Pennsylvania we tend to have a high amount
of these concentrated animal feeding operations
and so that actually turns out
to be a pretty significant source of nutrients
as well as other contaminants into the Chesapeake Bay.
And so there's a lot of work being done right now
to try to figure out how to cope with those issues
in the Southeastern part of the state.
And for a combined sewer overflow systems
or combined sewer systems they tend to be in older cities
across the United States
and so very prevalent on the East Coast
and also down the West Coast
but not so much in the Central United States.
So predominantly those were installed back in the 1800s
or early 1900s before we really thought
to have those be separate systems.
And so how many of you have heard
of pharmaceuticals in the environment
or in your drinking water?
Is that something some of you are aware of?
- [Audience] Mmhmm.
- Okay, so I guess one of the ways you can discover
that the general public is becoming aware of something
that you're doing in your research is cartoons.
We see cartoons that are sort
of emphasizing your research area in the newspaper,
you say, "Okay, maybe this is something
"the general public is starting to learn about."
and so this is just a sort of joke that says,
"Since the pharmacy is closed
"the doctor said you should have three glasses of water."
And there's this little newspaper clipping
that says pharmaceuticals are in our tap water
and so it's just kind of a nice indicator
that this is something
that the general public is becoming increasingly aware of
and concerned about.
And then I think in 2012,
I forget the exact date on this AP story
but they actually looked at major drinking water supplies
across the U.S. in big cities.
So Philadelphia was one of the water supplies
that they tested and if there's a red dot
that means at least one pharmaceutical was found in
that drinking water supply.
This doesn't tell you the levels at which they were found
but red means they had at least one hit
and then the gray would mean that it wasn't tested
for pharmaceuticals and green would mean
that it was tested negative.
So not so many green dots,
certainly more red dots than green dots across the U.S.
And so a common question then is,
should you worry if this is in your drinking water
and do you need to be worried about
what this might be doing to you?
And so from a human health perspective
the EPA recommends an intake
of about two liters of water per day.
And so this is just a suite of different pharmaceuticals
and their associated dose in milligrams.
And so based on the concentrations
of these different pharmaceuticals are
found in the drinking water supplies
this is the number of liters you would need to drink
of that drinking water in order to get one dose
of that pharmaceutical.
And so if we're talking about hundreds of thousands
of liters or more than a million liters of water
you might not think that this is a significant issue
for human populations.
And so that might be generally true
but when we think about people
who might be immunocompromised,
or infants who might be exposed to this,
or pregnant women there are questions
around the safety associated with consuming even low levels
of these in the environment.
And there can also be interesting interactions
among different kinds of pharmaceuticals
and emerging contaminants
and so if they are being used in the same way
to treat something in a common method
then they can actually kind of combine together
in this interesting synergistic ways
and their effects can be more than
what you expect them to be if you were just
to add the effects of them separately together.
And so there's some interesting toxicology questions around
what it means to have multiple
of these emerging contaminants
in the same drinking water supply.
And you think about
how the EPA currently regulates drinking water,
it's compound by compound.
And there's some suggestions that might not be sufficient
for us to sort of get a handle
on the emerging contaminants issue
if multiple compounds are causing the same effect
then we need to regulate the effect instead
of the individual compound.
And so, there's just some interesting repeat around that.
Okay, so maybe it's not so much of problem
from a human health perspective,
at least for the general population
but what about our filter ecosystems and so these would be
where fish and amphibians may be exposed
to these compounds more consistently.
And so this is just another cartoon
that's showing a fish that's being exposed
to whatever is in that combined sewer system
so both garbage, and then pharmaceuticals,
and maybe pesticides, or something like that.
And so there have been a lot
of exposure studies done in the lab
and also observed in the field that are starting to see
either masculinized female fish or feminized male fish.
And so if any of you have seen some information
that's come out recently
from the Susquehanna River Basin there's a lot
of concern around intersex characteristics
in our Smallmouth bass populations.
Something like 90% of our Smallmouth bass, male populations,
are showing indicators that they have eggs inside of them
and so clearly that's a problem.
It's being linked back partly to these emerging contaminants
but also a lot back to pesticides
that can also have feminizing effects.
And then you can also see these have all sorts
of implications
for abnormal hind limb development in amphibians.
And so these sensitive applied organisms can have affects
at environmentally relevant concentrations
of these compounds.
And sort of just to give you a perspective on
what we see across Pennsylvania there is a study done
by the U.S. Geological Survey 2012,
so this is summarizing concentrations and detections
of different pharmaceuticals
and personal care products in the environment
and across Pennsylvania from '06 to '09.
And so basically they look toward places
where they might expect there to be an impact,
either from concentrated animal feeding operations,
runoff from agricultural fields,
streams that were receiving municipal wastewater effluent,
streams that are used for drinking water sources,
or streams that are used as indicators of fish health.
And so they have identified various locations across
the sort of southeastern part of the state to sample
for impacts from animal feeding operations.
And then across the state each one
of these orangish dots is one of their sampling locations,
related back to fish health or our drinking water intakes.
And so some of the things that they looked for are
what they call these organic wastewater contaminants
and so these would be compounds
that are passing through the wastewater treatment plant
that have human origin.
And so, or potentially veterinary as well
so we'll talk about that in a second.
So natural hormones are something that they look for
so this is something we all excrete naturally
and so it does wind up
back passing through our wastewater treatment plant
and into receiving water bodies.
And so, of course, humans produce these
but animals do as well and so we see these natural hormones
from both animal and human sources.
So medications both human and veterinary medications,
I talked a little bit about the use
of antibiotics in concentrated animal feeding operations
and so you might see veterinary medications
winding up in the receiving water bodies,
both prescription and over the counter drugs
from a human health perspective.
And then household products so detergents,
fragrances, flavors, lots of things that we use
to enhance the quality of our lives
can wind up into the environment as well.
And so they have designed their experiment
to look at the effects of upstream
and downstream locations relative to things
that they think might be sources
and so animal feeding operations that these AFOs.
So the left side of your screen is the number of hits
that they saw for various pharmaceutical compounds,
upstream of an animal feeding operation
and then this side is downstream
of animal feeding operations.
And so you can see they maybe had one, two, three,
or four hits of these pharmaceuticals upstream
and the number of hits downstream increased a little bit.
So maybe they went to have it from one or two
to three or four hits that they were getting
from these different pharmaceuticals.
And what about wastewater treatment plants?
And so this is basically the same kind of graph
but now we're looking at upstream
of wastewater treatment plants sites and downstream.
And so the number of hits goes up significantly downstream
of wastewater treatment plants.
And so it's a pretty good indicator
that humans are a big source of these, yes.
- [Male Audience Member] Just 'cause I can't read
what those are on the bottom. - Uh-huh.
- [Male Audience Member] Could you just mention a couple
of them. - Yeah, so we have...
- [Male Audience Member] Were those overused?
- Sure, so there's some painkillers,
acetaminophen is on here, caffeine is on here,
some prescription medications related to antibiotic use,
or an epilepsy drug is on here.
So these aren't necessarily things we would recommend
that people not take, right?
I mean these are things that we sort of rely on
for modern day health but it is an indicator
that they're relatively absent upstream
of a human wastewater source
but then downstream of that source we do see it
and this is treated effluent
that's being discharged into receiving bodies.
So it's an indicator that they're persisting through
that treatment plant process.
And then the red, so these different colors,
when you think about how these are being detected
and with the gleam of the instruments that we have
there are different levels at which we deem acceptable
to detect these.
And so the blue would mean that we were actually able
to give the concentration a number.
And the red means that we see it
but we don't have enough confidence in the level at
which we're seeing it
to actually assign a concentration to it.
So you can just kind of think of that as a positive hit,
whereas these blue bars were numbers we're actually able
to quantify for the concentration in that.
And so, again, if we look at the different kinds
of endocrine obstructing compounds or emerging contaminants
so this, again,
are different sampling sites across the state,
the number of hits, and then the different bars are sort
of showing the contributions.
The pink is from pharmaceuticals except antibiotics,
the green is antibiotics, the yellow is hormones,
and then the orange
are these organic wastewater contaminants
which are basically coming from our personal care products.
And so if you look at this you can kind of see
that the dominant contributor
for the most part across these sites
are these organic wastewater compounds.
And so when you think about ways
that we can reduce them in the environment
the prescription medications aren't necessarily
the biggest contributor.
So the problem then if it turns out it's things
that we're using in our everyday lives then
that sort of comes back to, sort of,
what are the low hanging fruit
for reducing their presence in the environment.
And so, if we know
that we're seeing these chemicals in the environment
because there's no standards necessarily
for wastewater treatment plants to reduce them to,
there's no drinking water standards
so they wind up in our drinking water,
they persist in the wastewater effluent,
and they're found in surface water bodies
not just across Pennsylvania but are across the U.S.
but across the world as well, particularly downstream
of wastewater treatment plants.
And so we think that maybe one
of the best ways we can reduce them now in the environment
is actually to just reduce their source.
So how can we increase awareness of what the sources
of these problems are and give people tools
that they can use to maybe make informed choices in
what they're using in their everyday lives?
And so, sort of inspired by that vision we set out back,
I guess in the summer of 2014,
we started working on this EDC Footprint Calculator.
And so have any of you used like a water footprint tool,
or a carbon footprint tool before,
or heard of something like that?
Okay, good, most of you are nodding.
So we were sort of inspired by that idea
to develop this EDC Footprint tool.
So you basically answer a series of questions on the kinds
of products that you own
and in the end it'll spit out a mass for you
of what your footprint is.
And what's kind of most exciting
for me about this project is it was actually entirely done
by undergraduate students.
So I've had three undergraduate students
that have come through my lab,
one that started on this in the summer of 2014
and then I had two in the summer of 2015
that worked on it again
and we sort of completed our first version of it that fall.
And then we sort of more broadly launched it
just at the end of last year.
We wanted to get our documentation together
to be able to share so the people didn't just have the tool
but they had some information they could actually have
accompanying them with that.
And so we published a conference paper over the summer
and then we launched this, officially,
at the end of last year.
And so, what this basically looks like,
if you were to download it this is the interface.
It's basically an Excel spreadsheet that you can download
and there's three different product categories
so your cleaners, household cleaners, laundry detergents,
and laundry related items,
and then health and beauty products.
And so, basically what you do is you fill out the mass
or volume, depending on whether it's a solid or a liquid
of each of these products that you have.
And then this is sort of
where the undergraduate students then totaled their time,
figuring out what numbers need to go into each
of those boxes.
And so this is a suite of different classes
of endocrine destructing compounds
and each one of these boxes has a concentration associated
with how much of each of these are in each product.
And so in the end,
then it can give you a number on what your footprint is
and so it's sort of the power behind this.
There was a study that was launched
from the Silent Spring Institute in 2012
that was looking at a bunch
of different personal care products or household products
to try to quantify
how much of these emerging contaminants are in each of them.
And so, for example, they would take 10 different brands
of toothpaste and combine them together
into a representative sample and analyze that
and then figure out
which of these compounds were in that toothpaste.
And so you can't necessarily say,
I have Colgate Whitening Toothpaste
and it'll give you a number
but it will give you a general number for toothpaste,
at least that's where we're at right now.
And so if you look at the numbers,
the higher the red or the more intense the red
or the brown the higher the concentration.
But there's actually a very broad range
that was recorded in this report
and they didn't actually have, like,
the raw numbers associated with it.
So the biggest range then
is just greater than a 1,000 micrograms per gram
and so we didn't know based on that
what to put into our calculator
so for the rest of the ranges we just used the average.
And so there is going to be an error associated
with the number that we're producing
but at least it gives you some sort
of a reasonable representation
of what you might expect in your products.
But for that number
that's just greater than a 1,000 micrograms per gram,
you really couldn't put a number on that
with just the study.
And so we started looking on where we might be able
to get more information.
And I don't know if any of you are familiar
with this website,
I wasn't until I started doing this project.
But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
actually has this database
where you can basically look at everything
that's in any product that you have in your house
and so this could be for poison control related issues.
If your dog or your child accidentally consumed something,
well, you want to know more about what's in it
or how to respond then you can come here
and look up what is that, whatever it is that they consumed
and figure out what was in it.
Or for people who have allergies,
if they need to avoid a certain ingredient
they can use this website.
And so we decided to sort of mine this then
for that additional information of levels
that were above the biggest number in the previous report
that I described.
And so you can come here
and see the personal care products tab
and then inside the home
and so those would be the two places where we were looking
for more data.
And so just an example of how we use this,
so if you owned an antibacterial soap this specific one,
this Dial, and there are different percentages
where various ingredients some
of which we are using in our calculators.
So triclosan is the active ingredient
in most antibiotic hand soaps
and it's actually being phased out,
starting this year in 2017.
So this is something that we had included in our calculator
and here we would be able to get the percentage
of that particular ingredient that's in these products.
And so we sort of pretended
we were combining different brands together
and got an average then to feed it into our calculator.
Sort of mimicking what the (mumbles) had all studied
from Silent Spring Institute had done.
And so that was the way for us to get numbers
to put into the calculator for items
that had concentrations above that biggest threshold.
Okay, so what actually is it
that we have in our calculator then?
So there's these eight different categories.
I believe that's eight maybe it's more
but sunscreens, and then a bunch of different things
that are in our personal care products,
so solvents and cleaners are these glycol ethers,
cyclosiloxanes are in silicones or anti-foaming agents
that are used in our detergents.
Fragrances, so this is a picture of dryer sheets,
I know that might be hard to see and then alkylphenols
which are your surfactants, detergents,
and other cleaning products.
Ethanolamines which are your glass cleaners
and laundry detergents.
Antimicrobials like triclosan that's actually the main one
and it's metabolite we also covered that.
BPAs, so that's probably the most commonly known
of these emerging contaminants in the environment
and people are very well aware of that.
Many of you have reusable bottles
that you're using right now,
probably to help reduce the BPA that you have in the water
that you're drinking throughout the day.
And then phthalates and parabens,
if any of you are looking at your personal care products
or maybe makeup, or shampoos, and conditioners,
things like that, a lot to them tout being phthalate
or paraben-free and so that's just one of the ways
that we're sort of trying to reduce the presence
of these in the environment because we know
that they can cause these issues after we use them.
Okay, and so then what does this all look like inside
of our calculator?
So these are those different categories of contaminants
or contaminant classes and different items
that you might have in your household.
So these range from surface cleaners, floor cleaners,
glass cleaners, air fresheners, down to liquid dish soap.
So these are just different items that you might have
and then you can see fragrances, alkylphenols,
and phthalates are sort of some of the dominant chemicals
that are in many of those products.
Same thing holds true for laundry products,
so laundry bleach, laundry detergent,
and dryer sheets are the three products
that we surveyed for here.
And again, fragrances, alkylphenols,
and phthalates are present in most of those items.
And then health and beauty products is our longest list
and so this would have everything in it from soap, shampoos,
conditioner, shaving cream, body lotion, and makeup.
And so you would just enter the amount
of each of these products that you have.
Fragrances of course is in almost every single one of these,
nobody wants to use a body product that doesn't smell good
so most of them have fragrances, alkylphenols.
Some have antimicrobials, BPA, phthalates,
and parabens as well so just a suite of different chemicals
that are in these products that we're using.
And so the way that our calculator works then
is it gives you pie charts in the end
that you can sort of use to help make decisions about ways
to reduce your footprint.
And so I had a student and myself,
the Family A and Family B, that took this survey,
that used this tool to provide some example output.
And so you can see for Family A that laundry products
were the biggest contributor to the total footprint
and for Family B health and beauty products
were the biggest contributor
and so we had different total footprints.
Family A has five people and is from Long Island
and Family B has three people and is from locally.
And so then we can look at the contribution
of each of the chemical categories to our total footprint.
And so for the first family, so it looks like ethanolamines
and maybe fragrances were the biggest contributors.
And for Family B it looks like glycol ethers
and ethanolamines were the biggest contributors.
And so this sort of gives you an idea of what your portfolio
of your footprint looks like.
But probably the most useful and of interest is
that it actually will rank the top 10 products
that are the contributors to your footprint.
And for both Family A and Family B
that turned out to be laundry detergent
and so if you wanted to think about ways
to reduce your footprint then you could maybe go
to the grocery store
and look for a plant-based laundry detergent instead
of whatever it is you're typically buying
that may have more synthetic chemicals in it.
And so we're not making specific recommendations
but this is just supposed to be a general way
that people can think about ways
to strategically reduce our footprints.
And some ways to think about how we interpret the results,
so if you looked at these numbers, right,
these are grams.
So how do you convince somebody that 200 or a 100 grams
of chemical is bad?
I mean that's a very small amount that might be in all
of your household items.
But again, remember, you're talking about these things
being active in the environment
at one nanogram per liter level and so the fact
that we are many orders of anything higher than that
in footprint then could potentially be an issue.
And so basically what we're trying to do is take
that really small number
and try to scale it up to get people a visual way
of thinking about what that mass is.
And so, basically, we take that footprint
and divide it by the number of people
that are in that household to get a per capita mass,
and then scale that up by the number of people in the U.S.
so roughly 318 million, and then basically convert that mass
to a mass of a commercial airplane.
And so Family A's footprint then,
if everybody in the U.S. had the same footprint,
would be roughly 40 of these commercial airplanes
and Family B would be roughly 32.
And so another way to think about that could be
what it might look like if you were to take that mass
and potentially dump that into Chesapeake Bay
so, of course, this is representing
what's in your household products
before it goes through a wastewater treatment plant.
So this is really not representative
of what actually makes it to the environment.
But still, if your footprint is 10
to 15 milligrams per liter
or if that's what your footprint times the number
of people in Chesapeake Bay divided by the volume
of the Chesapeake Bay's water actually turns out
to be roughly three to six orders of magnitude higher than
what we know effects aquatic ecosystems.
And so it's just another way to think about those results.
And so right now this Excel Footprint Calculator
is available to download.
One of the disadvantages of it is
that it doesn't give us any information back
and it doesn't allow you to see how you compared
to other users.
So it's sort of just a one way Excel tool that you download
and then it's on your computer
and what you choose to do with it is sort of up to you.
And we're in the process, now,
of turning that into an online survey tool.
I just wanted to sort of mention
this really hasn't cost us any money to do so far.
The students that worked on it all brought in funding
from various sources across campus
or through this off campus,
summer research opportunities program which brings students
from other universities to Penn State
to do research over the summer.
And we did work with Penn State's Extension group
from the College of Ag
so Bryan Swistock is our water resources group
and we wanted to have a way
to put this onto a more publicly accessible website.
If it's just on my research website nobody's really going
to find it and so we wanted a way for it
to be more broadly available and so we worked a lot
with Extension and to help us be able to do that.
And then sort of a big story broke at the end of last year.
I don't know how many of you saw this in Penn State's news
but basically the College of Ag decided
to do a story on this
and I think they were most excited not just
because of the content but because it was done
by undergraduate students.
And so that was one of the big selling points for this was,
"Wow, look at this cool thing that a couple
"of undergrads at Penn State worked on
"during their summer months."
And so it's been really fun to watch this take off
and to see my students faces light up.
Those who have graduated still see my Facebook feed
and follow what's going on with this
so it's been a lot of fun to keep the inspiration going
with this project.
And right now I have a postdoctoral research associate
in our department sort of working part-time in my group.
She's also working part-time
with another group in our department
to turn this into an online survey.
And so this is released now
but we're still working through kinks
but basically you can go to the sites.psu.edu/EDCcalculator
and access either the Excel version
or this online survey tool.
And so the Qualtrics tool then is the online survey version
so you can just go to calculator
and you can see the two different versions of it
and it's basically the same thing
which is two different ways of accessing it.
And so this is what it looks like.
If you start scrolling through the survey it's estimated
that you'll take 20 minutes to complete
if you already have, sort of, all your stuff gathered
and all you have to do is enter the masses or volumes.
And then you say how many people you have in your household.
And then enter the masses or volumes
of your surface cleaners, and then of your laundry items,
and then of your personal care products.
So basically those same three categories
that we have in the Excel version.
And then in the end we'll give you information
about the contribution of each of those
to your total footprint and your total footprint.
So right now the thing just says zero
'cause I just wanted to show what it looked like.
And again, you're doing this scale off to the size
of the commercial airplanes
and the number of commercial airplanes
that your footprint would be.
And so what we're trying to do then is take this
and ultimately turn it into a smartphone app
so I'm working on writing a grant right now,
hopefully will be able to do that.
And sort of our vision is that it's really difficult
for consumers to make informed choices
while they're shopping.
So especially for things that you're not ingesting,
product labels can be really confusing
and so especially cleanser
which you're not putting on your skin don't even have
to reveal all their inactive ingredients.
And so a lot of things like fragrances or other things
that might be on this emerging contaminants list
don't even have to be on that label.
And so how can you as a consumer make informed choices about
what it is that you want to buy
if you want to reduce your footprint.
So what we'd like to do is ultimately have this app
that connects back to the household database
that I showed you
and basically you can scan different products
and maybe it'll make a recommendation on
what the lowest footprint would be.
So that's sort of our idea for that.
We would also like to use this as a research tool
so the university has this unique setting
where all the wastewater generated from the university goes
to a university operated wastewater treatment plant.
And so if we can survey a cross section of students
and people who are on campus we might be able to predict
what the wastewater treatment plant would expect to see
coming to the treatment plant.
And so I serve on the wastewater treatment plant sort
of advisory committee
and so there is interest in the treatment plant operators
to have that information.
So we might be able
to use it as a research tool in that way.
I also think
there's some interesting social science related questions
if you think about socioeconomic classes,
or majors on campus,
or all sorts of other variables we might be able
to sort of look at how different footprints
vary as a cross section of people
or where they're located as well.
So if any of you are familiar
with certain food desert issues the city is
where people have access to shopping nearby if you want
to reduce your footprint.
It might be a lot easier to do if you have a Trader Joe's
or a Whole Foods down the road
but if your shopping options are limited then
that might be driving
why your footprint may or not be higher
and so there are some questions we'd like to do around that.
And most importantly, though, I think it's to have fun
and to aid everybody to be better citizen scientists
and to be thinking about ways that their personal actions,
every day, impact our environment.
So a lot of people are thinking about these things
from a drinking water perspective
but they might not link that, necessarily,
back to items that they use every day.
So just to have a way that people,
who would like to make more informed decisions
about reducing their footprint, are able to do that.
So those are our broad goals
and with that here are the websites
that you can use to access our footprint tool
and my email address if any of you have any questions
but thank you for listening, I appreciate it.
(audience applauding)
- [Male Audience Member] When you enter information,
is that information, is that volume per year or week?
- Yeah, so a lot of these footprint tools
have a time component associated with them, right,
but this one really doesn't right now
and that might be something we're ultimately able to get to
but then we would have to estimate
how much toothpaste people are using per day
or something like that. - Yeah.
- Or how long it would take them to use a stick of deodorant
so I think a time component right now is a bit harder
for us to get at, so right now it's just a snapshot.
So whatever own at the moment is
what would be represented in your home for virtual.
- [Male Audience Member] Oh, okay.
- So if you go home and open your laundry cabinets,
and your personal care products cabinets, and enter.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- That's just representative
of what your household footprint is right now.
- [Male Audience Member] I see.
- Yeah, so there's no time component associated with it,
it's more just a snapshot, so if you just were to...
- [Male Audience Member] So before I go shopping,
not after 'cause it wouldn't matter.
- Yes, right, exactly so if you just stocked up on something
from Costco then your footprint total might be a lot higher,
even though it's going to take you maybe a year
to use all of those products. - Yeah.
- So if you wanted to think about
from your own personal perspective,
a time frame that you're interested in quantifying
then you could think, okay, well over the next month or so
what would I be using and reflect that in your calculation.
But right now there's no time component to it.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- So hopefully we can get there.
We thought about but I think
to keep the undergraduate students
from drowning too much in this we decided not
to take it quite that far but it is,
I do think we'd like to get there ultimately, yeah.
- [Male Audience Member] Yup, yup, yup.
- Anything else? Yeah.
- [Male Audience Member] Is the source
of human pharmaceuticals in waterways,
is that improper disposable of excess
or passed through... - It's a great question.
- [Male Audience Member] ...through the system?
- It's both.
So I think as people become more aware
of how to properly dispose, there's less flushing.
I'm sure some of it is still flushing.
I haven't seen any reports that would quantify contributions
from one particular activity,
whether it's from excretion versus improper disposal.
I do know that disposal issue can become problematic
because if you're,
to do a collection somewhere requires a police officer there
and so just organizing those,
I think the townships try to do them
but they're maybe once a month.
- [Female Audience Member] Pick a dump time at Bellefonte.
- Bellefonte, okay.
- [Female Audience Member] An officer told us that.
- Oh, that's really good to know.
- [Female Audience Member] And I remember reading somewhere
that I thought State College was going to start too
and it's just inside their...
- Inside the police department, okay.
- [Female Audience Member] Bellefonte has one.
- Okay, yeah, good.
- [Male Audience Member] Were there any pharmaceuticals,
basically, if somebody takes it that,
through biological process,
does it come out in a safe manner or?
- Yeah, so some of it is not absorbed so you do release
a fraction of the... - Stuff that's not absorbed.
- ...active ingredients and there's also the biochemistry
of these is such
that even if the parent compound breaks down,
the metabolite can still be active to some extent.
And so we traditionally think of,
okay, to get rid of the main compound
then you've gotten rid of the problem
but for these pharmaceuticals
that's not necessarily the case.
So there's also a lot of interesting work.
We have to identify all the breakdown components as well
and that's not all known yet for all these parent compounds,
if that makes sense.
- [Male Audience Member] Do you know what's done
with the captured pharmaceuticals?
- Incinerated, it's incinerated.
- [Male Audience Member] They're incinerated.
- Mmhmm, yeah.
- [Male Audience Member] And there's covers on that.
I mean isn't it displacing the problem or what?
- At least what I've heard is
that it's usually done in the same place as
where pets get cremated.
I don't know if that's true or not for here
but that's at least what I've heard.
So I know some places have, what I've heard,
would be necessary for these specific kinds of compounds.
- [Male Audience Member] So there's specialized incineration
of some type?
- Yeah, yeah, I know it's incinerated.
I don't know in all cases how that incineration is done
or what proper controls on the air emissions
for that might be.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- Yeah, or even what's done with the ashes, not really sure.
- [Male Audience Member] Right, what's up with that, right.
- Anything else?
You're all going to go take the footprint tool now?
(laughter)
- [Male Audience Member] I don't want to downplay it
but I had some other questions, I'll be quiet though.
- Oh, I don't mind.
- [Male Audience Member] Are you familiar with,
are anyone here familiar with GoodGuide?
- No.
- [Male Audience Member] So there's an app,
I don't know to what extent, it's very similar,
it seems like.
But if you could, even on your phones right now,
go to GoodGuide.
So I've used it even to scan a barcode.
It's health and beauty products,
it's very similar to what you're talking about.
- Oh, great.
- [Male Audience Member] They claim to have,
I have it on my phone, 250,000 products.
They raised about 10 million dollars of private equity.
This is the guy that was at MIT,
now at Berkeley, Dara O'Rourke.
And what they started with initially was very ambitious
and I remember using this tool with students years ago
and it would actually give you a...
Well, a lot of times you scan a product
and it would say, "We haven't done this one yet."
But when you found a product like Suave shampoo,
it would give you an environments,
or you would get a human health score,
an environments score, and sort of a social score
which I think had something to
with like supply chains or a worker.
- [Heather] Yeah, sure.
- [Male Audience Member] Even the workers.
- [Heather] That's awesome.
- [Male Audience Member] But now they've changed it.
I think they thought that was too ambitious.
So just last night, my wife is a sociologist
and teaches in biobehavioral health,
she's, right now, in an environmental health class.
She's not a, well, she's a,
I shouldn't say she's not a natural scientist.
So she's doesn't test so much on the depth
of sort of the technical, the science part of it
but we were looking at just last night
and they're going to look at human health now.
So it seems to map very closely
to what you're talking about.
- Yeah, let's take a look at it.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- Yeah, it's great.
- [Male Audience Member] The GoodGuide is pretty cool
and then you can click on things
and kind of drill down into the ingredients.
And I don't know what's behind it
but they do share their methodologies,
it could be somewhat open sourced,
and you can look at their ingredients,
and they have some way of scoring the ones
that are of low, and medium, and high concern.
- That's great.
- [Male Audience Member] But that kind of thing.
- All right, that might reduce the amount of work
that we have to do on our end then,
if there's already a tool that's very similar
so that's great.
Yeah, even if there is a way if you wanted
to do your footprint of your own products
and can just sort of use your phone to scan
what you already own that would be really useful
so that you didn't have to go into the tool
and enter all that yourselves.
So I think there are some thing we'd like to do
with mobile technology even if it isn't,
ultimately, a consumer recommendation.
We have to be careful too,
from Penn State we don't want to be advocating
for certain brands. - Right.
- So there's a little bit of touchiness to that.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- So we just have to kind of see where this leads
but this is where we're at so far.
We'll see where it goes from here.
- [Male Audience Member] Well, I know the one thing
that GoodGuide doesn't have is it's not a footprint tool.
- Right.
- [Male Audience Member] It's really sort of a product
by product, so it would be interesting
if you could scan something in your house
and it can actually enter an amount
and then it would give you a,
'cause that's very interesting.
I haven't seen anybody that is doing a footprint calculator
for anything disrupting.
- And I was quite surprised that
that was the case when I first had this idea,
I was like, well, somebody must have already done it?
And then sure enough they hadn't so we were pretty excited.
- [Male Audience Member] Do you do any work with sort of,
I'm not thinking about the people
that actually design the chemicals
and from a product development sort
of chemical engineering perspective.
- Right.
- [Male Audience Member] So I have a good friend
and he's a chemical engineer.
Is there any work being done to kind of get this upstream
so that we actually just design these things out
of the product.
- Yeah, and there's a lot more being done
with that now on the pharmaceutical side as well.
So how can we design drugs
to be more environmentally friendly
so that when people use them and they bypass,
some percentage of them bypass through us
that they degrade safely in the environment.
So I have not collaborated directly with people
who are doing that kind of work
but I think it's better understood for the, I guess,
for the household products side then it is
for the pharmaceutical side.
So it would be interesting to see how it goes
and there's a lot more efforts now for our campus
to collaborate with Hershey Medical Center.
So I have started conversations with toxicologists on campus
but we haven't yet put anything together yet.
- [Male Audience Member] Yeah.
- I've only been here for three and a half years
so hopefully.
- [Male Audience Member] What is your area?
- I'm actually an environmental engineer by training
but I'm in ag and bioengineering so I do more work on
how these things are moving in the environment
and how things like rainfall events move them.
And designing from an agricultural perspective ways
to reduce what they're leaving in the field,
like vegetative filter strips,
or green best management practices, and things like that
to help reduce their transport.
So I deal with things on that end,
not so much on the source reduction
so this has been our first,
more source reduction kind of perspective.
And yeah, this is definitely different
that means this tool is very different
then the traditional research that I'm doing.
- [Male Audience Member] Can you imagine one
that's agriculturally focused, where a farmer gets grade?
- Yeah.
- [Male Audience Member] 'Cause this is sort
of household focused and it would be interesting
to have one for agriculture.
- Right, and I think that's mostly related
to antibiotic usage and so things...
Yeah, I mean if you're giving all of your cattle low levels
of a pharmaceutical, what might that impact be?
And that's also being very driven now
by antibiotic resistance genes
that they're finding in the environment.
- [Male Audience Member] Right, yeah.
- And so that's sort of more the angle
that's driving that and then the research right now,
I do have a project that's going to start up this summer
with Virginia Tech that's looking at antibiotic resistance
related to dairy and more activities.
So believe it or not
that tends to be more the traditional kind of work
that I'm doing than this.
- [Male Audience Member] Sounds very interesting.
- Yeah, sort of understanding what happens
after those animal wastes are released into the field.
- [Male Audience Member] The last comment is,
since this is a business school I've got to also mention
so I teach classes on stable businesses
and so I sort of track the news.
In the last year, in fact,
one of these was just last week,
Target has come out and Walmart has come out
with very sort of public commitments in their supply chain,
made procurement decisions
to eliminate chemicals of concern.
And I don't know everything that's on that list
so it would seem to me that at some point
there could be interest from companies and a tool like this.
- Yeah, and I think so the College of Ag
has this rain grant program
which is sort of more looking at
entreprenuralship opportunities but I've been encouraged
to submit this sort of smart phone idea in that direction.
So that grant's due March 17th so we're working on that
in the next couple of weeks.
So we are thinking.
- [Male Audience Member] You've got lots of time.
- Yeah, that's okay, it's a fine paper puzzle
so not that it's easy to write that but yeah.
So we are looking at other non-research related avenues
for this to ultimately go, yeah.
- [Male Audience Member] That's cool.
- Yup, all right, thank you.
- [Female Audience Member] Thank you.
- Yeah, no problem, thank you too.
Thanks for video taping it too.
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