Dioxin and Chlorine in the environment

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Chlorine is one of the 100 or so elements that make up all living and non-living things. It has always existed on earth, but mainly in safe, non-active forms such as ordinary common salt.

Since the early 1960’s, there has been considerable concern about the unsafe, artificial forms of this element such as Chlorine Gas and Organochlorine compounds.

Chlorine gas (Elemental Chlorine) is produced when salt is split up to make caustic soda, an essential industrial chemical. The term Elemental Chlorine Free does not mean free of chlorine, it means that Chlorine Gas is not used. However, more often that not, Chlorine Dioxide is used to bleach wood pulp used to make paper and synthetic fibres such as rayon.

Elemental Chlorine free bleaching (ECF) refers to methods that do not use elemental chlorine gas to purify wood pulp. There are many ways to produce chlorine dioxide for pulp bleaching. Some processes create 1000 parts chlorine dioxide and 600 parts of chlorine gas, while others produce more chlorine gas at 1,080 parts versus chlorine dioxide 1,000 parts.
Some ECF bleaching processes can theoretically generate dioxins at extremely low levels, and dioxins are occasionally detected in trace amounts in mill effluents and pulp. Industries using the above mentioned processes consider the method to be a dioxin free process.

One must ask the question that if dioxin can be measured, how can it be considered to be a dioxin-free process?

Totally Chlorine-free bleaching (TCF) refers to the use of bleaching agents that do not contain any chlorine at all. These methods are dioxin-free. Totally chlorine-free methods include, for example, hydrogen peroxide as the bleaching agent.

In the late 1980’s, the Scandinavian governments encouraged pulping mills to change to more environmentally friendly bleaching methods.

In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently worked with wood pulp producers to promote the use of dioxin-free methods because dioxin has been recognised as an environmental pollutant. Because of decades of pollution, dioxin can be found in the air, water and the foods that we eat.
When questions about dioxin arose a number of years ago, the United States of America government agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked tampon manufacturers to provide information about their pulp purification process and the potential for dioxin contamination.

Manufacturers of rayon tampons are also asked to routinely monitor levels in the raw materials used in the finished tampons. But what does routinely monitor mean? With 1000’s of tons of chlorine bleached pulp produced and shipped daily, how long would it be before the routine monitoring caught the problem?

Manufacturers did provide the FDA with test results of studies conducted at independent laboratories, using the most sensitive methods available. Dioxin monitoring is a highly technical assay performed at only a few, independent, expert laboratories. Here in the UK they are mostly NAMAS accredited.

The detectable limit of this assay is currently approximately 0.1 to 1 parts per trillion of dioxin

There are 32 dioxin and 27 furan compounds. Which dioxins are the pulp producers required to measure and do they measure for other organochlorine compounds, known to cause cancer and other health concerns, that are released and produced when using chlorine compounds for bleaching, such as Furans, Methylenechloride, chloroform, chloromenthane, trichlorothane, hexachlorobenzene, polychlorinated Biphenyls, Endrin, Heptachlor, Mirex, Toxaphene, Aldren, Chlordane, DDT and Dieldrin? Who is the industry to report to and why this data is not made readily available to the public?

Using these tests, dioxin levels in the rayon raw materials for tampons containing rayon are reported by the industry to be at or below the detectable limit of the state of the art dioxin assay, i.e. approximately 0.1 to 1 parts per trillion. FDA’s risk assessment indicates that this exposure is many times less than normally present in the body from other environmental sources, so small that any risk of adverse health effects is considered negligible. A part per trillion is about the same as one teaspoon in a lake fifteen feet deep and a mile square. Why is the FDA using a lake to compare to human ingestion? I do not know any person or animal that relates to such an analogy. This compound is bio-accumulative and the EPA believes that every person has around 8 – 10ppt of dioxin in his or her system. These are levels that do create harm. This is far below the threshold that the EPA believes puts consumers at risk for cancer or other side effects. The EPA has published documents that state that there is no safe level for dioxins. Dioxin is 1,000 times deadlier than cyanide and ranked as the “Deadliest Toxin ever produced by Man”.

Reference: Chlorine Free Products Association - Archie J. Beaton

References:

1.Propensity of Tampons and Barrier Contraceptives to Amplify Staphylococcus Aureus Toxic Shock Syndrome Toxin by Tierno Jnr, Philip M and Hanna, B A, The Journal of Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 2:140-145, 1994.
2.Results released by Osamu Tsutsumi, Professor of Gynaecology, Tokyo University Hospital and the National Institute for Environmental Studies, 1999.

The Endometriosis Association : www.EndometriosisAssn.org