This is what makes the disaster in Ohio so shocking. Five train cars filled with vinyl chloride were burned – some deliberately to depressurize buildings – which could have produced toxic compounds called dioxins. As hot air from the fire rose, the train’s flames sent black plumes high into the air, potentially spreading the toxic material far beyond the site of the derailment. “The thing about dioxins is that they’re effective at very low levels, and they’re persistent and bioaccumulative,” Schettler said. This means they persist in the body rather than breaking down. “You don’t want dioxins to be deposited in the soil around East Palestine, which don’t disappear and bioaccumulate in people who are exposed to it.”
The Environmental Protection Agency considers the air in East Palestine to be safe. Officials also said the water was safe to drink. But according to Gerald Markowitz, an occupational and environmental health historian at the City University of New York, there are still many unknowns about these individual chemicals and how they mix and burn. “The real concern is that there is no safe level of exposure to carcinogens,” Markowitz said.
Since it’s so toxic, what does vinyl chloride do on a train? PVC is one of the most common plastics, used primarily in plumbing, but also in consumer products such as packaging and shower curtains. According to Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and former EPA regional administrator, about 5,000 businesses in the United States alone produce a variety of plastics. They all need ingredients. “It’s not just the trains, it’s the trucks moving stuff,” Enck said.
Not just vinyl chloride. Manufacturers must add a host of other chemicals to give plastics their plastic properties—substances that make polymers more heat-resistant or more flexible, for example. Many of these are known endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, that throw our hormones out of whack. That’s why bisphenol A (aka BPA) was singled out after scientists linked it to cancer, behavioral conditions, and diabetes.
But this is whack-a-mole. When a chemical is found to be dangerous, manufacturers substitute others that may be equally or even more toxic. “There haven’t been studies showing whether they’re safe, or whether they’re less dangerous but still cause for concern,” Markowitz said. He added that it may be years before we know the potential side effects of alternative chemicals.
BPA is just one Among the 2,400 other chemicals in plastics, scientists say they deserve attention. A 2021 study found that exposure to plastic chemicals called phthalates could lead to 100,000 premature deaths in the U.S. each year—a conservative estimate.
The core problem is that what you put in plastic doesn’t stay in plastic. When the bag or bottle breaks, it releases its constituent chemicals as leachate. Heat and freezing also break down any plastic into microplastics that have corroded every corner of the environment, as well as our own bodies. They are found in human lung tissue, internal organs, blood, and even the first stool of a newborn. However, we know very little about the health effects of microplastics, despite early research finding that microplastics are highly toxic to human cells in laboratory experiments. The fires in East Palestine are a particularly egregious example of the worsening crisis.
