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Toluene: the sweet smell of brain damage

VALERIE BROWN
OVERVIEW
This mainstay of the chemical industry - a close relative of benzene - is in your hair
dye, your concrete sealer, your gas tank; and its a glue sniffers siren song. Just how
bad is it for your body?
PUBLISHED JULY 24, 2014 AT 10:52 PM
HTTPS://WWW.BEACONREADER.COM/VALERIE-BROWN/TOLUENE-THE-SWEET-SMELL-OF-BRAIN-DAMAGE?REF=PROFILE

Meet todays molecule: toluene. Notice that it looks just like the benzene molecule, but
theres a seventh carbon atom perched at the center top, and that additional carbon has
three hydrogen atoms attached to it. A lovely variation on the benzene theme. This
particular four-atom group is called a methyl molecule, which is why toluene is also
called methylbenzene.

Toluene was first isolated in about 1841 from tolu balsam, a resin of a tropical South
American tree, by Etienne Henri Sainte-Claire Deville. Devilles father was the French
consul in St. Thomas, West Indies, which may be why Deville was aware of the tolu tree.
He eventually became a professor at the Sorbonne and is best known for working out a
method of isolating aluminum on a large scale.

Toluene is now produced primarily from petroleum. Its popularity in chemical


manufacturing is mostly because it is a precursor to the even more popular benzene and
it works well as a solvent. It is a gasoline additive (like lead, it discourages engine
knocking) and can be found in hundreds of consumer products. It was once used on
humans to kill roundworms and hookworms, but that use is now discouraged. A related
compound, butylated hydroxytoluene, is used as a preservative in food and many other
consumer products. Toluene is a component of BTEX (Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene
& Xylene), a common additive to fracking fluids. And of course toluene is the second T
in the explosive TNT.

At the moment, educated guessers peg China and South Korea as the biggest customers
for toluene compounds, accounting for 46% of global demand. Because it is produced in
high volumes (1 million pounds or more per year) in the U.S., toluene manufacturers
and users must report spills and releases to the EPAs Toxics Release Inventory.

Between 2000 and 2012, almost 650 million pounds of toluene were released into
American air, mostly the unlucky skies of the southeast. However, releases have been
declining yearly, which may reflect the decline of the printing industry, which has been
the highest emitter of toluene.

Toluene is a volatile organic compound and extremely flammable. It evaporates


quickly out of water. In air it takes about a day to degrade via reactions with oxygen
compounds. So unlike many creepy industrial chemicals, toluene is not persistent and
doesnt accumulate in the food web. However, as is often the case with chemicals in
commercial use, there is little or no data available for many potential health effects
because nobody has done the research or elected to make it public. For example,
the TCI America Materials Safety Data Sheet for 2,4-Diaminotoluene states that there is
no data regarding the potential for toluene exposure to harm sperm and egg cells or to
cause birth defects or developmental problems. Nor has there been any attention to
delayed effects of early exposure or to the combination of toluene exposure with other
chemical insults.

The Italian version of the word toluene, toluolo, is redolent of whimsy, but unfortunately
toluene delivers something other than what it promises. The effects of acute exposure
were described eloquently in a 1917 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine:

The power to take up oxygen is gradually lost, resulting in the development of dyspnea
or symptoms of air hunger, nausea, vomiting, headache, giddiness, severe nervous
symptoms, feeling of anxiety and, in severe cases, lividity and death.
Despite these disturbing effects, toluene is one of the chemicals that makes glue sniffing
appealing to some people. Chronic abusers will experience generalized brain atrophy,
slurred speech, loss of their sense of smell, dementia, seizures,oscillopsia and pendular
nystagmus (the former being a visual condition in which objects seem to jump around
rapidly, and the latter being rhythmic side to side or up and down [eye] movements of
constant speed, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary).

You would think, given this amount of information about its insalubrious effects,
toluene could never be considered an inert ingredient, but in fact it is often a component
of that category on pesticide labels. Inerts typically dont require specific disclosure and
may be obscured by the veils of intellectual property law.

As long ago as 1987 the EPA created a list of potentially toxic inerts/high priority for
testing including toluene. It took until 2009 for the EPA to issue a final order requiring
pesticide manufacturers to test toluene for endocrine disrupting effects. No companies
volunteered. In 2012 the EPA issued a new test order for toluene under the Safe

Drinking Water Act. As far as I can tell as of this writing no test results or EPA action
has been made public.

So aside from glue-sniffing, and in a state of ignorance as to its chronic effects, are there
any other reasons to worry about toluene exposure? It is not considered carcinogenic,
and for that reason it is viewed as an acceptable substitute for benzene in many
industrial applications. However, many toluene-based compounds are at least
reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen or possibly carcinogenic to
humans, for example 2,4-diaminotoluene and 2,4-toluene diisocyanate, respectively. If
you use Vidal Sassoon Pro Series Hair Color, to color your hair a vibrant red, or Loctite
PL Polyurethane Concrete Crack and Masonry Sealant on your driveway, youll be
getting a hit of 2,4-toluene diisocyanate.

The people who are likely to have the highest toluene exposures are workers in pesticide
factories, rotogravure printing plants, and other industrial locations. Appallingly, the
most recent information about worker exposures to toluene is from a survey done by the
National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health from 1981 to 1983. At that time
NIOSH estimated that about two million workers in the U.S. were exposed to toluene.
Since 2004 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration reports 11 incidents

involving toluene with 12 fatalities, of which seven were explosions or fires and the rest
were inhalation events.

So we know a lot about the acute effects and something about the chronic effects of
toluene, and the likely circumstances of exposure. We dont know very much about
endocrine disruption or long-term effects on various cellular processes such as those
that are set up in the womb but take a lifetime to manifest as disease.

Thats this Chemical Tale. 79,999 to go!

Worth It 30

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