Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes ofwebsite accessibilityHaz-mat in the gym: Aging school floors may conceal a toxic threat to students & staff

Haz-mat in the gym: Aging school floors may conceal a toxic threat to students & staff


Once a certain level of mercury is detected, the site becomes a haz-mat area, requiring an extensive and complex removal process (Photo: North Plainfield Middle School)
Once a certain level of mercury is detected, the site becomes a haz-mat area, requiring an extensive and complex removal process (Photo: North Plainfield Middle School)
Facebook Share IconTwitter Share IconEmail Share Icon

NEW JERSEY (TND) — Parents trust that when they send their kids to school, they're learning in a safe and healthy environment, but an invisible threat to their health may lurk right under their feet.

Spotlight on America has discovered a potential hazard may be embedded in the floors of school gyms and cafeterias all over the U.S., slowly leaking toxic gas that can damage kids' brains and kidneys. Making matters worse, it's virtually impossible to tell where the floors are, which has experts sounding the alarm to school leaders to be proactive and launch testing.

Your kids play on it, lay on it, eat, and even sleep on it. But the floors of their school, which never gets a second thought, could be hiding a serious hazard.

Trisha Dello Iacono believes those floors contributed to the health problems her son has been battling for the better portion of his young life.

They're like landmines in schools," said Dello Iacono. "And our children's health is on the line. I have a son who has lifelong health issues because of his exposure.

Dello Iacono told Spotlight on America it all began when her son, Liam, was attending a Southern New Jersey school. She said Liam would come home with rashes and redness on his hands. She'd later connect those symptoms to a material in the school floor called Phenylmercuric Acetate (PMA): a form of mercury.

Mercury is a neurotoxic heavy metal:

Despite the known hazards, Dello Iacono believes her son was touching and breathing it every day, as he was in the room with the floor containing mercury, sat on it during rehearsals for his school play, and even ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches sitting on that very floor.

Liam, now 11 years old, suffers from rashes, neurological and behavior problems, which his doctors believe could be connected to the mercury that rose from the flooring of his elementary school. In 2019, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Dello Iacono told us it's unknown if that's definitely connected, but she wonders if it too can be traced back to mercury exposure.

She's not the only one raising concerns.

Allen Barkkume is an environmental hygienist who is part of a unique team of experts in New Jersey that is taking aggressive steps to identify and remove the floors. He says this can be compared to one of the biggest environmental crises in American history.

This should remind us of the lead-in-water crisis in the country," Barkkume told Spotlight on America. "Did we know that lead was causing that much problems when we installed lead pipes in everybody’s house? If we did, would we have done it? Now that we know that there’s mercury in these floors, can we stop installing them immediately?

Barkkume points out that it's not just kids who are being put at risk.

"A student is in a gym class for 30 minutes, 40 minutes a day. A gym teacher is in that gym for eight hours a day," he told us, pointing out that their total exposure may be much greater than a child's.

At least one New Jersey gym teacher believes she has cancer because of exposure to mercury from the floor, and others have tied their health problems to the floors. However, because there is limited research on the connections, it's difficult to make a direct correlation until further study is done.

WHY WAS MERCURY USED IN FLOORS?

Starting in the 1960s, and up until today, mercury is used to help harden inexpensive, rubberized floors. As the floors wear down with age, experts say they're more likely to release neurotoxic mercury gas that can be inhaled.

Several factors will impact whether the floors emit mercury vapors, including:

  • Ventilation
  • Temperature
  • Age of floor
  • Maintenance

WHERE ARE MERCURY FLOORS LOCATED?

Simply put, floors with mercury can be anywhere. They were installed in gyms, cafeterias, hospitals, day care centers and senior homes. Older and inner cities and areas of lower-income neighborhoods may be at greater risk as well, according to experts like Allen Barkkume.

Baltimore, Washington D.C., anywhere that you have an inner city where they have older buildings and also where they have problems funding their public education system, it's more likely that you will find these floors in those areas," Barkkume told us.

But pinpointing where these floors are is almost impossible for parents, school districts and even the EPA. Barkkume says because of because of rules about trade secrets, manufacturers are not required to disclose whether they used PMA (phenylmercuric acetate) in their formula.

"If you have a formula that contains less than 10% of any one ingredient, you don't have to list that ingredient," he said. "Even if it's toxic."

Barkkume says it takes far less than 10% mercury in a product to potentially impact human health, but as long as manufacturers stay below that threshold, the ingredient does not need to be disclosed to the public on material safety data sheets.

Absent a national registry, tracking down these floors requires legwork.

If you identify a rubberized floor, it needs to be tested," Allen Barkkume told Spotlight on America. "There's no other way to know whether or not there's mercury in it.

That testing method involves hiring a professional to remove a portion of the floor and send it to a lab. If mercury is found, Barkkume says, more action must be taken, including air testing.

FROM PLAY SPACE TO TOXIC WASTE

"Once you discover that you've got that much mercury in your floor, you're now standing on a toxic waste site," Barkkume told Spotlight on America.

Removing it isn't as simple as tearing up the floor and throwing it in the garbage.

Instead, that very space where children played will be sealed-off by crews in hazmat suits, who must follow a strict protocol to dispose of the toxic material.

Several schools have undertaken the effort, including North Plainfield Middle School in New Jersey, which shared photos of the process with Spotlight on America.

Not only is the removal complicated, but it's also expensive.

"One of the biggest problems with these floors is that the schools either don't want to test in the first place or once they do, they want to keep it a secret," said Barkkume. "The cost of remediation is extremely expensive on the one hand. On the other hand, there is public health panic that ensues once the community discovers that their children have been exposed to a neurotoxin while they're at school."

NEED FOR NATIONAL SOLUTION

New Jersey is one of the states leading the charge to learn where floors may contain harmful mercury, recently issuing guidance for school districts and their environmental consultants.

New Jersey has introduced a bill that requires new flooring for schools and child care centers to be certified to be mercury-free. That bill recently passed the Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee, and is moving forward, but hasn't been signed into law.

New York state introduced a moratorium on the floors, but it is yet to pass.

A recent report from the New Jersey Education Association, the New Jersey Work Environment Council and the Healthy Schools Now Coalition compiled information about the issue using findings from other states.

According to that report, results reported by state health departments in Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota, "varied greatly in concentrations of mercury vapor." In most cases, concentrations were found to be within the limits set forth at the time. However, according to the report, "there were instances where exposures exceeded these limits. Average mercury vapor levels in Minnesota gyms were about 200 times higher than typical outdoor background levels of 2 to 10 ng/m3 reported by ATSDR in their 1999 toxicological profile for mercury."

Complicating the process of investigation is the difference in what's considered "safe" for inhalation when it comes to mercury. Because heavy metals can accumulate in the body, people with more sources of exposure will tend to face greater risk of symptoms. That's why experts generally agree that any level of exposure can be unsafe.

As of today, many states haven't even looked at the issue, because they may not even be aware that it exists.

One federal lawmaker is trying to change that. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has brought the issue to the national stage several times. In 2019, he wrote a letter to the EPA, ATSDR and USCPSC asking the agencies to evaluate the risk of mercury exposure from the flooring and to take steps to communicate the potential hazards to the public.

We asked the EPA, ATSDR and USCPSC for an update on where things stand now.

Only the EPA returned our inquiry, telling us in part, "we understand the concern regarding this rubberized polyurethane flooring that was installed in some buildings beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s," but writing that as of the year 2018, the agency had confirmed that there was no production or use of PMA still going on in the U.S.

Their assertion that PMA was no longer used contradicts efforts by states to put a moratorium on the material and to ensure that future floors are certified mercury-free.

We asked how the agency determined that PMA was no longer being used. The EPA told us that the use of PMA to create gym flooring would be considered using mercury in a "manufacturing process," and that no such processes were actively practiced in the US in 2018. However, experts told Spotlight on America that though the process may not be happening in the U.S., it's possible that an overseas floor manufacturer exported a finished product to a U.S.-based contractor, which would not appear in the EPA's reporting data, and would not be subject to the EPA's assertion that the material is no longer used.

The EPA pointed out that several state assessments found levels of mercury that would not be a concern to health, but acknowledged that many schools have been proactive to remove those floors or deploy mitigation strategies.

You can read their full response at the bottom of this article.

Still, as the floors from the 1960s age, they may pose a continued risk, that remains invisible in many places.

In 2020, Booker introduced legislation called the Mercury Vapor Study Act of 2020, which would:

  • Require federal agencies to study the impact of mercury vapor
  • Require federal agencies to create a registry of schools with PMA floorings
  • Establish best practices to mitigate the risk of mercury vapor exposure

The bill never made it out of committee.

CONTINUING THE FIGHT FOR AWARENESS

Back in New Jersey, Trisha Dello Iacono is pledging to continue her fight to raise awareness and encourage parents to speak up and ask questions.

"My story is not isolated. There’s parents all over the country who are unknowingly sending their child to schools that have this flooring," she told us.

If you want to find out more about whether your child's school may have mercury in the floors, please visit the following resources:

New Jersey Department of Health Guidance for Schools

New Jersey School Boards Association Health and Safety Guide

--

Spotlight on America reached out to several top manufacturers of rubberized floors to figure out when they used PMA, where it was installed, and if they still use it as an ingredient. Mondo Contract Flooring told us doesn't, and has never, used PMA. None of the other companies responded to our questions.

--

The EPA sent us this statement in response to our inquiry about mercury in floors, including how they responded to Senator Cory Booker's inquiries:

"We understand the concern regarding this rubberized polyurethane flooring that was installed in some buildings beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s. As noted in the response to Senator Booker in January of 2020 (attached for your information), a number of studies do indicate that such floors can emit mercury vapors over the course of their lifetime, as well as when the flooring material is removed. The finished flooring typically contains 0.l percent to 0.2 percent of mercury, usually phenyl mercuric acetate (PMA).

When Congress wrote the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 1976, it exempted every chemical in commerce at that time from having to go through the new chemicals assessment process. The 2016 amendments to TSCA, however, now direct EPA to undertake risk evaluations on the existing chemicals that were grandfathered in under the original law and requires EPA, among other provisions, to have at least 20 risk evaluations in process at any given time.

Although mercury has not been identified as one of the first 10 chemicals for risk evaluation or one of the subsequent 20 chemicals designated as High-Priority for risk evaluation under TSCA, we would like to note that our first Mercury Inventory Report, which was mandated to be completed by EPA every three years by Congress in those same 2016 amendments to TSCA, was published in March of 2020. For the first time, this inventory presents actual data from any U.S. company that manufactures or imports mercury or mercury-added products, or otherwise intentionally uses mercury in a manufacturing process. Based on reporting for the calendar year 2018, it was confirmed that there was no production or use of PMA. More important, the reported data indicated no production, use, import, or export of polyurethane elastomers. This is notable because PMA was used as a catalyst in the types of polyurethane flexible flooring manufactured in the 1950s and 1970s, commonly found, as Senator Booker indicated, in school gymnasiums and other public spaces.

We would also like to highlight that the United States is a Party to the United Nations Minamata Convention on Mercury (Minamata Convention), which is a global agreement that has as its objective the protection of human health and the environment from anthropogenic emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds. Paragraph 3 of Article 5 of that Convention addresses a number of processes that utilize a mercury catalyst, such as the process that is used to make the flooring you are interested in, by requiring Parties to take measure to restrict the use of mercury or mercury compounds in the processes listed in Part II of Annex B; polyurethane elastomers are listed in Part II of Annex B. In its 2021 National Report under Article 21, the United States was pleased to be able to report that, as mentioned above, it had no production, use, import, or export of polyurethane elastomers, which will be published on the Minamata Convention’s website shortly.

In our response to Senator Booker, we also indicated that we were aware that ATSDR has assisted numerous state health agencies in assessing mercury emissions from polyurethane floors in specific schools in Ohio (2003), Michigan (2004), Minnesota (2006, 2008), Oregon (2006), and Wisconsin (2010). While a number of these assessments of mercury air emissions from school gym floors have concluded that mercury vapor from such flooring is not likely to pose a health concern, many state health departments have nevertheless recommended that schools take precautionary actions to minimize potential mercury releases and exposures based on other assessments which have suggested that such flooring may pose global public and occupational health issues. Mitigation strategies used in schools, for example, have ranged from increasing ventilation (i.e., in-place management to reduce indoor concentrations of mercury vapors) to removing and disposing of the floor as hazardous waste."


Loading ...