question:
hi, and infinite kudos.
the time warner center at columbus circle (nyc) has workers clean the streetlevel stone with organic solvents. i've seen mainly acetone. since i walk past there i get to breath the stuff.
are there any laws concerning pedestrian exposure to toxic cleaners, or is this industry (stone cleaning) unregulated? are there any legal challenges on record? is there a requirement to have an environmental impact assessment on public record?
i'm basically looking for strategies for legal and public relations challenges.
thanks!
In NY State Dept of Environmental Conservation website: http://search.dec.state.ny.us/, you can do searches like: +acetone +concentration (22 hits). The results seem to get mostly allowable concentrations in wastewater (.28mg/l) and non wastewater (160 mg/kg).
The search: +acetone +cleaning gets 23 hits, including the DEC "Rules and Regulations" Part 200 "General Provisions" at: http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/regs/part200a.html. Near the bottom of this part is section "(cg) Volatile organic compound (VOC). Any organic compound which participates in atmospheric photochemical reactions". Acetone is one of the compounds listed. It may take quite a bit of digging through these pages and searches, to get mention of potential harm to people in the vicinity of acetone cleaning projects.
New York City has an advanced search link from: http://search.nyc.gov/query.html. The search "must contain in the full text": acetone concentration gets 15 hits, some of which may be close to what you are after. Use CTRL-F (find in page) to navigate to where these long documents are mentioning acetone or dimethyl ketone.
You can also try searching: acetone and concentration in the OSHA full search page at: http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owasrch.full_site_search (193 hits in OSHA web site, 12 hits in Regulations Standards - 29 CFR).
Also, in the National Library of Medicine site at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/, try searching just the word: acetone (this search gets a total of about 20 hits in that site)
Hope this helps...
EPA, at http://www.epa.gov/ebtpages/alphabet.html links to many other sites under its heading for "Acetone". 2 main links are under Acetone as a soil contaminant.
"IRIS: Acetone: CASRN 67-64-1" at: http://www.epa.gov/iris/subst/0128.htm has 19 html pages of acetone information from EPA's IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System), including 4 pages of references from health sciences-toxicology journals and technical papers and reports.
The other link, "Envirofacts Warehouse Chemical References: Acetone: CAS # 67 - 64 - 1" at: http://www.epa.gov/envirofw/html/emci/chemref/67641.html in turn links to the Environmental Defense Fund's "Chemical Scorecard" on Acetone, at: http://www.scorecard.org/chemical-profiles/summary.tcl?edf_substance_id=67-64-1 One of the many links on this EDF page is the NJ Dept. of Health and Senior Services' 6-page "Hazardous Substances Fact Sheet" on Acetone, at: http://www.state.nj.us/health/eoh/rtkweb/0006.pdf
Getting information on actual cases will probably require access to Lexis Academic or other legal databases. But the search may be quite tricky. The search: acetone and stone and cleaning (in Legal Research/Law Reviews/all avail dates) gets many things like acetone cleanup costs, with a mention of "stone" in a figure of speaach like "casting the first stone", etc. The search: Environmental impact and acetone gets 25 hits, and they may be more on target.
If access to Lexis Academic (on site only, and at large academic libraries) is impractical, it is possible you could get some free information via http://scholar.google.com, with searches like:
acetone "environmental impact" stone cleaning (57 hits, but once again, "Stone" is often an author's name, etc.). The search for the phrase "stone cleaning" is not promising. Google Scholar gets only 5 hits for: "environmental impact" "stone cleaning". In Google's web search, "environmental impact" "stone cleaning" solvents gets 7 hits. Possibly you can get results with other searches on the Web, such as: "environmental impact" acetone masonry site:edu (6 hits), "environmental impact" solvents masonry site:edu (79 hits), etc.