Coal-tar industry fights ban on sealants

Chicago Tribune

When officials in suburban Des Plaines, Ill., read about the hazards of spreading cancer-causing coal tar on playgrounds, parking lots and driveways, they moved to join other communities across the nation that have banned pavement sealants made with the industrial byproduct.

A city council committee ordered staff to research the issue, drafted an ordinance to outlaw the widely used products and recommended its passage. Aldermen cited federal, state and academic studies that found that coal-tar sealants contain high levels of toxic chemicals, steadily wear off and crumble into dust tracked into houses and washed into waterways.

But the coal-tar industry was ready for a fight. After Austin, Texas, in 2005 became the first U.S. city to ban coal-tar sealants, industry leaders formed a tax-exempt lobbying group and started funding their own research — all to try to convince homeowners and elected officials that coal-tar sealants are safe.

Industry representatives have cited their studies in presentations arguing that bans on coal-tar sealants would do little to eliminate toxic chemicals in the environment. Promotional materials from contractors and manufacturers say the papers show that government studies are flawed, or “lies,” as one brochure describes them.

“My members don’t want to sell a product that causes harm,” Anne LeHuray, executive director of the Pavement Coatings Technology Council, the industry lobbying group.

The industry’s efforts have worked in some cases. Since 2010, cities including Des Plaines and Springfield, Mo., and the states of Illinois, Michigan and Maryland have rejected coal-tar- related legislation after LeHuray and contractors intervened.

“It seemed too confusing,” said Patricia Haugeberg, a Des Plaines alderman who moved to table the suburb’s proposed 2011 ban.

In a February presentation to contractors, a top industry representative boasted that they are beating government scientists “on their own turf.”

Yet a Chicago Tribune review of the two industry-funded studies published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in recent years found they fall short of proving their authors’ contention that coal-tar sealants pose few, if any, threats to human health and wildlife. And, the Tribune found, the industry has at times overstated the findings supporting coal tar.

Manufacturers promote coal-tar pavement sealants as a way to extend the life of asphalt and brighten it every few years with a fresh black sheen. The products are most commonly used in states east of the Continental Divide; in the West, contractors tend to use asphalt-based sealants that contain significantly lower levels of worrisome chemicals.

Coal-tar sealants contain up to 35 percent coal-tar pitch, partially refined waste from steelmaking that the National Toxicology Program and the International Agency for Research on Cancer consider a known carcinogen. Among the chemicals of concern in the products are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which pose a cancer risk and can trigger developmental problems and impair fertility, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Peer-reviewed studies by government scientists have found that coal-tar sealants are a major source, and sometimes the dominant source, of PAH contamination in urban areas. Other sources of the chemicals include vehicle exhaust and factory emissions.

In response to the growing body of federal research and regulatory pressures, the coal-tar industry turned to a pair of consulting firms frequently hired by corporations dealing with environmental, health or safety issues — Exponent Inc. and Environ International. The industry-funded papers, published in a journal called Environmental Forensics, contend that coal-tar sealants are at best a minor source of pollution.

The Exponent study concludes that vehicle exhaust and industrial pollution are far bigger sources of PAHs than coal tar. But the finding is largely based on an older scientific model that does not include coal-tar sealants as a potential source, leading the researchers to conclude that PAHs in the environment “can be explained in the absence of any contribution” from pavement sealants.

Kirk O’Reilly, an Exponent senior scientist and the study’s chief author, said researchers have overstated their conclusions and failed to consider “the large body of literature” about the chemicals. The government research, O’Reilly said in an email response to questions, “does not prove that sealers are a source.”

But at the end of his paper, O’Reilly acknowledges that coal-tar sealants “cannot be eliminated as a PAH source.”