![]() The Trust warned it is “particularly concerned about the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals” commonly known as endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).Īnd then last October new research found that fracking chemicals are linked with a decreased sperm count in adulthood. The report identified specific examples of hazardous materials used in fracking, including chemicals “associated with leukaemia in humans” and “toxic to sperm production in males”. Just over a year ago, the UK-based CHEM Trust issued a report and briefing paper on how toxic chemicals from fracking could affect wildlife and people. Over the last eighteen months there has been growing concern about fracking chemicals contained within fracking waste-water. There is real reason to be worried by this dumping. In so doing, the industry was also allowed to dump a staggering 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into the sea in 2014 alone. The newly released documents reveal that fracking occurred off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with no public involvement and with no site-specific tests undertaken beforehand. The Gulf has already been suffering from decades of conventional oil and gas drilling as well as the aftermath of the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010, when millions of gallons of oil were spilt. The Centre for Biological Diversity has released federal documents that reveal that officials approved over 1,200 offshore fracks in 630 different wells in the four years from 2010 to 2014 in the Gulf of Mexico. ![]() "Considering the terrible history of pollution associated with PFAS, EPA and state governments need to move quickly to ensure that the public knows where these chemicals have been used and is protected from their impacts," Horwitt said in a statement.As the US shale industry comes under increasing scrutiny for its environmental and health impact, it has emerged that the US has secretly approved fracking offshore leading to billions of gallons of waste-water to be dumped at sea.identified serious health risks associated with chemicals proposed for use in oil and gas extraction, and yet allowed those chemicals to be used commercially with very lax regulation," Dusty Horwitt, a researcher at Physicians for Social Responsibility, said, per the New York Times. He added that the documents were redacted because of a statute protecting proprietary business information.The EPA's approval of these chemicals was not publicly known before the new report.ĮPA spokesperson Nick Conger told the Times the chemicals were approved a decade ago and that the agency now has to affirm that new chemicals are safe before they're allowed in the marketplace.PFAS has been linked to cancer, birth defects, pre-eclampsia and other health outcomes.and that the EPA has found to be "toxic to people, wild mammals, and birds.” The big picture: EPA regulators had previously expressed concerns about using these chemicals, saying that they can "degrade in the environment" into substances similar to PFOA, a kind of PFAS that has been largely discontinued in the U.S. states, per the report, first detailed in the New York Times. The fluid that creates these substances was used in fracking for oil and gas in nearly 1,200 wells across six U.S. Why it matters: The substances, known as "forever chemicals," accumulate inside the human body and have been linked to cancer and birth defects. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2011 approved the use of chemicals in fracking that can break down into toxic substances known as PFAS, despite the agency's own concerns about their toxicity, according to EPA records obtained by Physicians for Social Responsibility and made public in a new report.
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