Trouble in the Water: Alkylphenol Ethoxylate Surfactants

If you lived on Cape Cod in the summer of 1948, you would have heard the buzzing overhead of crop dusters spraying DDT on all 265,000 acres of the Cape. They came back year after year in an attempt to kill gypsy months. It didn't work. Gypsy moth caterpillars continue to defoliate millions of acres of trees annually in the United States.

There were no gypsy moths in the United States until Leopold Trouvelot brought them here. The gypsy moth was originally introduced into Medford, Massachusetts in 1869 by Trouvelot, a French astronomer with an interest in insects. In the late 1860's he returned from a trip to France with some gypsy moth eggs. He was culturing them on trees in back of his house when some of the larvae escaped. Trouvelot notified local entomologists, but no action was taken.

The action taken years later was to declare chemical war on the gypsy moth, and unintentionally, war on the health of millions of people. When planes crisscrossed the Cape spraying DDT, the pilots did not know they were dropping time bombs on people's health, just as thousands of others spraying the insecticide on other pests had no idea of the danger it posed to life.

The accidental and increasingly not so accidental bumbling into environmental disaster happens all the time in the modern age. But the cumulative effect of too many accidents is a destroyed environment and sick and dying people. We cannot afford anymore accidents. Ignorance is an unacceptable excuse. Some press for the Precautionary Principle, a set of rules which if followed would have kept Trouvelot's moths in France and stopped the production of DDT. It is a "guilty until proven innocent" policy for chemicals. It means we do not have to know all the science to say enough is enough.

The use of a family of chemicals called Alkylphenol Ethoxylates is a case in point. Alkylphenol Ethoxylates (APEs) are surfactants, shorthand for surface active agents. They are chemical compounds that help dissolve and remove oils and greases. They are found in household products like detergents and cosmetics. They are used by industry in detergents, paints, pesticides, textile and petroleum products, and fluids used in metal working.

We know very little about the health and environmental effects of the 80,000 chemicals in commercial use in the United States. Of the 3,000 chemicals with the highest production in the U.S., we know the basics of about 870 of them. The rest are a mystery. Alkylphenol Ethoxylates are not a mystery.

APEs are biodegradable, but what they degrade into is undesirable. When they breakdown, their metabolites (breakdown products) are more toxic to aquatic organisms than they were intact. APEs tend to turn into lower ethoxylates like nonylphenols (NPs). Nonylphenols are endocrine disruptors. They effect the endocrine systems of birds, fish, and mammals. For instance, egg sacks on male fish have been observed near sewage outfall pipes in rivers studied in the United Kingdom. Another troubling effect is that endocrine disruptors can make cancer cells proliferate, particularly those sensitive to estrogen, like human breast tumor cells.

APEs are mostly washed into sewers and enter ground and surface water in wastewater from sewage treatment plants. Swiss researchers have shown that 60-65% of nonylphenolic compounds introduced into wastewater treatment plants in Switzerland are discharged into the environment. Extremely high levels of dangerous APE metabolites have been measured in sewage sludge, particularly anaerobically digested sludge. Once in sludge, they can reach soils by land-spreading and then into waterways through soil erosion.

In the late 1980s, European countries began to ban the use of APEs, replacing them with affordable and effective substitutes like linear alcohol ethoxylates. But in the United States, the use of APE surfactants remains widespread.

It is hard to peg the exact danger of estrogen mimicking chemicals like APEs. It is known that a number of chemicals in use today are xenoestrogens, that is, they are synthetic chemicals that mimic natural estrogen. Knowing which chemicals are xenoestrogens, how they behave once released into the natural environment, how they act in synergy, and how humans respond to them is a formidable challenge to the small cadre of researchers working on the issue. We do know that there is a very serious problem with xenoestrogens in the environment. We know ecosystems and aquatic life are perversely effected by them. We know that human health and development is profoundly effected by minute changes in estrogen levels. We know that the worst health and developmental trouble will be manifested in our children. This alone should be enough to stop the use of estrogen mimicking chemicals like alkylphenol ethoxylates. Instead, we pretend that unless we know everything we can do nothing.

Laura Orlando

ReSource Musings Archive