Members of the Northwest Toxic Communities Coalition (NWTCC) started their 2019 summit meeting and reconnecting over coffee and pastries and ended it with a penne feast, having covered a myriad of topics from the effects of contaminants on cognitive development, to methods for detoxifying the body, improved solid waste disposal, mushrooms that clean soils, and houseplants that clean air.
The NWTCC is an umbrella group for non-profit groups from across the Northwest that address local hazardous substances and environmental health issues. It exists to provide relevant information and resources to its members, all of whom come from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 10.
Each year the University of Washington Superfund Research Program helps the NWTCC host a Summit to bring together experts on areas of member interest. The theme for the 2019 Summit was remediation or cleanup of contamination.
The event kicked off with welcomes and introductions by Patty Martin, President of the NWTCC Board and Tom Burbacher, Director of Community Engagement and Research Translation for the University of Washington Superfund Research Program, a co-host of the event.
Dr. Bruce Lamphear from Simon Frazier University gave the first talk of the day using a series of masterful videos to emphasize that “low doses of contaminants can have big impacts on public health.” He pointed out that major reductions in hypertension and a 70% reduction in death from coronary heart disease occurred after the ban on leaded gas in the 1980s. He also explained, “The Prevention Paradox” which is that the most gains in public health can be made by focusing prevention efforts not on the most vulnerable but on those of moderate to low risk.
Dr. Margi Ikeda of Natural Medicine of Seattle gave the next talk about methods to detoxify the body using chelation and micronutrient therapy to minimize the side effects of traditional medicine. She described how genetic differences in the production of enzymes involved in glutathione production can underlie high individual variation in sensitivity to mercury. Glutathione is a powerful antioxidant involved in the body’s detox pathways.
Next, President and lead engineer of Remediators Incorporated, Howard Sprouse, spoke about how fungi can act as a single remediation method to clean up multiple pollutants at sites with mixed sources of contamination. It turns out that even individual fungi of the same species collected in close proximity to each other can have very different abilities to break down contaminants. By characterizing the different abilities on Petri dishes, Sprouse and his colleagues are able to customize a team of fungi to work on multiple contaminants at a single site.
Philipp Schmidt-Pathman raised the question of why we put so much solid waste into landfills. According to him, the approximately 2 million residents of King County create more than 800,000 tons of untreated landfill waste annually. In contrast, all 80 million residents of Germany create less than a quarter of that—200,000 ton of landfill waste that’s treated. Do they pay more for their waste disposal? No, Schmidt-Pathman explains that actually, the average German citizen pays less than the average citizen of King County and that much of what’s left after mass incineration is a material that can be used for building roads.
Dr. Stuart Strand started the last talk of the day by debunking the famous NASA science showing that houseplants can clean indoor air. It doesn’t seem to be the houseplants themselves that do this, but rather microorganisms in the soil that they’re grown in. This is a problem because many median levels of indoor air pollutants exceed industrial standards including Benzene, a known carcinogen, and formaldehyde. Dr. Strand and his colleagues have inserted a gene from a rabbit into the common (and very easy to grow) pothos houseplants to create the first true indoor air-cleansing houseplant. They are now in the stages of managing regulations to see that it can be distributed for household use.
The meeting ended with conversation over dinner and a meeting of the Board the following morning to discuss plans for an upcoming retreat, webinar series and for next year’s summit.