Scented Products Cause Indoor Air Pollution On Par With Car Exhaust (newatlas.com) 80
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: New research by Purdue University, the latest in a series of Purdue-led studies, examined how scented products -- in this case, flame-free candles -- are a significant source of nanosized particles small enough to get deep into your lungs, posing a potential risk to respiratory health [...] Scented wax melts are marketed as a flameless, smoke-free, non-toxic alternative to traditional candles, a safer way of making your home or office smell nice. To assess the truth of these claims, the researchers comprehensively measured the nanoparticles formed when they warmed wax melts in their mechanically ventilated test house. The tiny house is actually an architectural engineering laboratory called the Purdue Zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) lab. Designed and engineered to test the energy efficiency of a larger building, it's full of sensors that monitor the impact of everyday activities on indoor air quality.
The researchers knew from their previous research that new nanoparticle formation was initiated by terpenes -- aromatic compounds that determine the smell of things like plants and herbs -- released from the melts and reacting with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3). They'd found that activities such as mopping the floor with a terpene-rich cleaning agent, using a citrus-scented air freshener, or applying scented personal care products like deodorant inside the zEDGE house resulted in pulsed terpene emissions to the indoor air within five minutes. Conversely, using essential oil diffusers or peeling citrus fruits caused a more gradual increase in terpenes.
In the present study, heating the scented wax contributed significantly to the number of new particles formed in the indoor air, particularly those smaller than 100 nanometers (nm). The resulting atmospheric concentrations were over one million nanoparticles per cubic centimeter (106 cm-3), which is comparable to concentrations emitted by traditional lighted candles (106 cm-3), gas stoves (105 - 107 cm-3), diesel engines (103 - 106 cm-3), and natural gas engines (106 - 107 cm-3). By comparison, there were no significant terpene emissions when unscented wax melts were heated. The researchers also examined respiratory tract deposited dose rates (RD), a useful way of studying air pollution that measures the number of particles deposited in the respiratory tract over time. They found that the new particle formation triggered by using scented wax melts indoors produced a median RD for 1.18 to 100 nm particles of 29 billion per minute (2.9 x 1010 min-1). That's about 483 million particles per second. The majority of scented-wax-melt-formed particles were deposited in the upper airways. Their small size means they can migrate between cells and enter the bloodstream, potentially reaching organs such as the brain. The study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
The researchers knew from their previous research that new nanoparticle formation was initiated by terpenes -- aromatic compounds that determine the smell of things like plants and herbs -- released from the melts and reacting with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3). They'd found that activities such as mopping the floor with a terpene-rich cleaning agent, using a citrus-scented air freshener, or applying scented personal care products like deodorant inside the zEDGE house resulted in pulsed terpene emissions to the indoor air within five minutes. Conversely, using essential oil diffusers or peeling citrus fruits caused a more gradual increase in terpenes.
In the present study, heating the scented wax contributed significantly to the number of new particles formed in the indoor air, particularly those smaller than 100 nanometers (nm). The resulting atmospheric concentrations were over one million nanoparticles per cubic centimeter (106 cm-3), which is comparable to concentrations emitted by traditional lighted candles (106 cm-3), gas stoves (105 - 107 cm-3), diesel engines (103 - 106 cm-3), and natural gas engines (106 - 107 cm-3). By comparison, there were no significant terpene emissions when unscented wax melts were heated. The researchers also examined respiratory tract deposited dose rates (RD), a useful way of studying air pollution that measures the number of particles deposited in the respiratory tract over time. They found that the new particle formation triggered by using scented wax melts indoors produced a median RD for 1.18 to 100 nm particles of 29 billion per minute (2.9 x 1010 min-1). That's about 483 million particles per second. The majority of scented-wax-melt-formed particles were deposited in the upper airways. Their small size means they can migrate between cells and enter the bloodstream, potentially reaching organs such as the brain. The study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
God I hate science reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
No the scented products are not on par with car exhaust for "pollution". They are on par with car exhaust for the one specific and narrowly investigated pollutant being assessed which should be immediately obvious as no one is killing themselves in their garage using a scented candle.
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> no one is killing themselves in their garage using a scented candle
If they were burning so many candles as to create emissions at the same rate an idling car does, they would be.
=Smidge=
Re:God I hate science reporting (Score:5, Informative)
The article claims that these flameless candles DO produce pollution "on par with" car exhaust. This implies equivalence, not that it would take "so many candles" to equal a car's exhaust.
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The one useful thing to take away from this is that you can test your air purifier by using a scented candle to stink up the room and then seeing how long it takes to clear.
For general pollution protection though I think positive pressure systems might be better. Otherwise you need a lot of air purifiers.
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That only works to the extent that the odors released from the scented candle are transmitted in the form of particles. If the odors are in gaseous form, the purifier might not be very effective, or be a good test.
Re:God I hate science reporting (Score:5, Informative)
There's a couple things going here.
First is that the person I replied to was complaining about it only being one chemical/pollutant. That is mostly true but they miss the point; of the emissions common to both vehicle exhaust and scented wax melts, they are indeed on par.
Second is that the lethal hazard posed by running a car engine indoors is not the particulate matter, but the increase in carbon and nitrogen oxides, and subsequent reduction in oxygen, in the room Obviously scented wax melts don't do this because they're not burning anything.
So when OP tried to handwave the air pollution caused by these scented devices by saying "they're not the same because nobody's dying by using them" it's only proper to point out that if they were burning so many candles as to create emissions at the same rate an idling car does, they would be. Don't dismiss the hazard common between them just because there's a separate hazard that isn't.
=Smidge=
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Idling cars don't really produce NOx or CO any more. The immediate hazards of idling a car indoors are now almost completely limited to HCs when first started (since we still aren't using heated catalysts, only heated O2 sensors) and CO2, which is still not what you want to be breathing in (and as you said in your comment, the oxygen reduction.)
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Okay, so say we get rid of all the hippie scented candles.
Then they'll do the same study on cleaners and cleansers with all kinds of VOC.
If you've ever lived in California, you'll have noticed that everything causes cancer (they have all those labels everywhere). I'm not surprised to find that modern indoors, or modern outdoors, are toxic in some way. You have to get pretty far out in the boonies before you're in anything close to our ancestral state of nature. And even then, the toxicity of planet earth
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> Then they'll do the same study on cleaners and cleansers with all kinds of VOC.
Tell everyone you didn't even read the summary without actually saying it...
> Welcome to life - everything is trying to kill you, and eventually, it will win.
Might as well start on that meth addition, then. I mean you're gonna die anyway right? Go for it.
=Smidge=
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There's a couple things going here.
That's all you needed to say to agree with me. The point I made was science reporting distils complex things down to simple headlines. It's incorrect, even if you can apply the correct boundary conditions to draw equivalence, the headline did not do so.
So when OP tried to handwave the air pollution caused by these scented devices by saying "they're not the same because nobody's dying by using them" it's only proper to point out that if they were burning so many candles as to create emissions at the same rate an idling car does, they would be.
Maybe you don't know how sarcasm works. I thought that this comment of mine about burning candles was pretty obviously not to be taken literally given the comparison to someone suiciding but hey I can't assume people apply common sense to what they read on Sl
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I think by "on par" they meant the emissions were on par with their health effects on humans as of course a single candle doesnt output as much as a car.
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You might be right, but if you are, that distinction is not clearly communicated.
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I think the fact that a candle couldn't possibly have an output equivalent to a car by volume made it pretty clear they weren't saying that.
In other words, what you interpreted was so absurd maybe exploring whether you misinterpreted it or not might have been a good idea.
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I believe that the interpretation is absurd because the claim *is* absurd. It's a trend in research right now, whether it's microplastics, or candle pollution, to make dramatic claims that don't hold up to real-life scrutiny. If the authors want to make a claim that the pollution of a flameless candle is "as bad as" car exhaust, it's on them to be very clear how they came to this conclusion. We don't need to be rescuing them from the clumsiness of their reporting.
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No indeed they weren't. They were quite clear what they were studying. And yes, if you use those scented products indoor for a long period of time (as most people do), your air quality indoors will be just as bad as out on a busy, congested street, health wise. We're talking aerosols and other pollutants. Not good for the lungs and body at all. Not quite sure where you're going the CO tangent.
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Not quite sure where you're going the CO tangent.
Probably from "no one is killing themselves in their garage using a scented candle" in the original post. Death in a garage with the engine running used to be caused by carbon monoxide. As another poster has pointed out, idling cars don't produce CO any more.
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Its almost like they weren't studying carbon monoxide at all....
Indeed they weren't. If only the headline would point that out when drawing a comparison to a car which produces a shitton of the stuff along with other things which we typically refer to as "pollution".
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Indeed. It's worth remembering that human lungs have evolved around much worse pollutants than that, which is why our lung surface is specifically very good at addressing nanoscale foreign bodies coming into our lungs. While microscale is handled by bronchi cilia and cough. Cilia is a hair-like cell that keeps transporting things upward to keep microscale things like debris and microbes out of lungs. And within lungs themselves there are specific branches of immune system specialized for addressing nanoscal
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"Evolved to cope with" just means "lives long enough to reproduce". Some of us would like to live past 30. Continuously stressing these foreign body clearance mechanisms leads to chronic inflammation which can lead to cancer, not to mention autoimmune diseases like asthma and is why particulate pollution is such a big environmental concern.
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Funny you mention asthma. An autoimmune disorder triggered primarily by lack of pollutants, so immune system doesn't encounter enough actually "not me" things to attack, so it begins to attack parts of "me" that are tangentially cleaning up parts of "not me" instead of actual "not me" particles it is calibrated by evolution to expect to find and attack.
Because we're actually living far too cleanly nowadays compared to what our bodies are calibrated for. It's where most autoimmune disorders such as allergies
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This is why I laugh at people who wear resperators when powerder coating, painting, sandblasting, and cutting quartz. They are just buying what big resperator is selling.
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This is the "oh, you cut off that small part of skin hanging off your nail? Well, you should just chop off your whole arm" level of understanding of the subject.
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"Rapidly destroying"? Of course not, that claim isnt even being made here. Is it bad to be lighting these things indoors all the damn time? Apparently, yes it is. Just like how urban area car pollution has been found to impact people's health over the long term these candles will apparently do the same.
Just because our bodies have evolved ways to deal with pollutants entering our lungs doesnt mean our bodies are invincible relative to this stuff. We've known for eons that excessive air pollution is bad for
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>excessive
Key word. But there's another key word you forget. Insufficient. Because our immune systems expect some load. When they don't encounter it, especially during calibration period in the childhood, the "me or not me" detection systems begin identifying some "me" parts as "not me" and begin attacking.
Asthma for example, the disease you mention is one such disease that follows from miscalibration of immune system, where it begins attacking parts of your bronchi instead of foreign objects it's suppos
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What you describe for asthma might be true for certain types but is definitely not the mechanism for how air pollution is known to cause it https://aafa.org/asthma/asthma... [aafa.org] .
Youre also mixing up pollution and germs and bacteria. Exposure to some level of germs and bacteria is, as you say, good for the immune system. This is not true of pollution. Even if that were true though, those of us living in urban or suburban areas get plenty of pollution without creating even more in our homes. As I said though, th
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>What you describe for asthma might be true for certain types but is definitely not the mechanism for how air pollution is known to cause it https://aafa.org/asthma/asthma [aafa.org]... [aafa.org] .
You misunderstood contents of your link. What it describes is the specific event that triggers the incorrect "me/not me" detection, leading to it concluding that "part of me is classified as not me, begin attack".
What it doesn't describe is the underlying causal relationship between amount of exposure to "not me" things
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Cite a source for any amount of air pollution being good for the immune system. If your claim is correct you should be able to support it.
Specifically air pollution mind you.
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None are published yet to my knowledge. Not enough time. Several are in progress AFAIK. This is the field that got a jump start after aforementioned long study on kids in Karelia vs Eastern Finland on allergies and other auto-immune illnesses ended and its findings blew up the consensus immunology. That was a gate that held until that one though it was very damaged by the colorectal findings from about a decade and a half ago. That study basically blew the gate off its hinges, as people behind that study co
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NLT is still used as a measurement of radiation damage in official capacity across the world.
It's been fully debunked what, thirty years ago at this point? Or has it been forty already?
Problem is that NLT regardless of application is sticky because it's simple. And humans are simplification machine. It intuitively makes sense to us that "less bad thing is good".
And then you have allergies explosion in populace. Because it's not.
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Gotcha. So what you're saying isnt supported by any scientific research. Thanks for confirming that for me in far too many words.
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>So what you're saying isnt supported by any scientific research
I literally listed several examples of research that supports it, and then noted that this also applies to other scientific fields where this specific intuitive belief was wrong.
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It is clear they are exposing themselves needlessly to some serious pollutants that could lead to health problems, including cancers. Not sure where the candle in the garage bit comes in. We're talking people polluting the air in their homes for years at a time with these scented products. The health risks are similar to spending years walking polluted, congested city streets as is common in many parts of the world. People think of their homes as having cleaner air typically compared to a busy city stree
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Absolutely it is. And you expressed it well. You should write headlines and science reporting instead of the garbage that we are getting here.
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No the scented products are not on par with car exhaust for "pollution". They are on par with car exhaust for the one specific and narrowly investigated pollutant being assessed which should be immediately obvious as no one is killing themselves in their garage using a scented candle.
You bring a valid point, but perhaps we should hold our assumptions until we better understand the long term effects of the stay-at-home introvert who sits in a bedroom breathing scent-enhanced terpene-infused “air” 24 hours a day. 75 years ago the sponsored family doctor was recommending cigarettes to freshen things up in the home. Marketing morals have not improved
Thanks to WFH and modern influencers being paid well commuting from a bed to a bedroom corner, we have plenty of reasons to find
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How long will the stay at home introvert survive with a running car in the same enclosed space? Asking for someone who had to endure reading the horribly worded headline.
I didn't even remotely imply the underlying science isn't sound, just the headline with the comparison to cars is rubbish since the pollution from a running engine is several orders of magnitude worse.
Forget cancer. Forget long term effects. You'll be dead from CO poisoning within the hour. Drawing equivalence to a car is fucking dumb.
Humans and Fire = Soot (Score:1)
Re:Humans and Fire = Soot (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans have lived in the close presence of fire for over a hundred thousand years? I wonder if we may not have evolved some immunity to soot and carbon bits.
We have not evolved immunity to soot or carbon bits AT ALL. They are persistent irritants which can cause cancer. What we have evolved is cilia in our lungs which sweep out particles including soot. However, PM2.5 particles are smaller than cilia so they cannot really be removed from the lungs by this mechanism. This is what most of what makes them particularly dangerous to us and leads to some unintended consequences in pollution reduction.* Cancer resulting from breathing of soot from cooking fires remains a major cause of death in the third world, particularly for the women who do the bulk of the cooking. This was the impetus behind the invention of the rocket stove, which drastically reduces fuel use and improves burn cleanliness (efficiency is power.)
* Rant follows: For example, DPFs used on diesel vehicles trap and burn soot. Some of that soot is converted into CO2, but the rest of it changes from PM10+ to PM2.5 and becomes more carcinogenic. We have a 1999 Blue Bird bus with a Cummins ISC 250 which has literally no smog equipment at all. It has nothing even like emissions equipment, as it has a road draft tube**. It's got just over 90,000 miles and it passed California's newly required "Clean Check" requirement by so much that it met the standard for vehicles with a DPF; they must have 5% opacity or less, our bus was tested at 3%, and is allowed 20%. A DPF would make it more carcinogenic, not less. It would make it emit more CO2, not less.
** Catch can is planned if any substantial miles are done.
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That makes a lot of sense. You'd think just capturing the soot into a replaceable filter would be more useful, but it would have to be replaced a LOT more often.
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Yes, DPFs also clog up so they get "regenerated" which means there's a fuel injector which injects fresh diesel into the hot filter to cause the soot to burn off. For diesels which are operated only on short trips, they have to do this often because the DPF never gets hot enough to burn off on its own. (Arguably, nobody should be using large diesels for only in-town use.) This also increases fuel consumption and emissions, and you cannot shut off a vehicle doing a regen burn. They also eventually clog no ma
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The trick is to not run diesel at all.
Re: Humans and Fire = Soot (Score:2)
I'm on my phone so I'm not going to find you the cite right now but it was found a little while back and we discussed here that gasoline burning vehicles produce just as much soot as diesels, but it's finer so it is harder to detect - and it's more carcinogenic.
You might say that we should use EVs instead then, and that would not be entirely wrong, but it wouldn't address the most popular use cases for diesel.
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I've always wondered about that sig. So I asked AI to write me a little story about it...
The annual "Fluffiest Pillow" competition was in chaos. Not the usual, genteel chaos of competitive pillow fluffing, mind you. This was⦠viscous.
Barnaby Thistlethwaite, a man whose mustache resembled a startled caterpillar, was weeping. His prize-winning goose-down pillow, "Cloud Nine," was now a gelatinous, trembling mass. Across the hall, Agnes Periwinkle, a woman who communicated exclusively through interp
Re: Humans and Fire = Soot (Score:2)
That's pretty good!
The quote is from Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, which I recommend heartily.
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Caves or more primitive forms of shelter probably don't give the same kind of exposure as nearly-airtight modern houses. I can spray deodorant in the bathroom in the morning, and when I get home and open the intervening doors in the evening, the air purifier in the living room kicks off, because that stuff is still floating in the air. If I didn't have an air purifier, I guess it would keep floating around until it ended up in my lungs. Plus, there's limited evolutionary advantage to living longer than is n
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really, once your kids are teenagers you're expendable
Yeah, they keep telling me that :)
Zero Benefit to Raising Kids (Score:2)
I wonder if we may not have evolved some immunity to soot and carbon bits.
Why? Air pollution is unlikely to kill young, otherwise healthy adults before they have raised children meaning there is little evolutionary advantage. Plus, for most of those 100kyrs people died young from disease, accidents, lack of food etc. not air pollution. The result is that there would be basically zero selection pressure for someone able to breathe smoke without getting cancer to be better able to pass on this trait to their kids which is undoubtedly why it has not happened.
Re: Humans and Fire = Soot (Score:2)
And our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. Forest fires were a thing long before CalFire tried to put them out.
That's why I don't have indoor car exhaust (Score:5, Funny)
Re: That's why I don't have indoor car exhaust (Score:2)
But the smell is nicer
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It's almost as bad as scented candles.
I find it easier just to have scented car exhaust.
CARB follows The Science! (tm) (Score:1, Insightful)
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Next headline: "California to Ban Scented Candles, Traditional Candles, Gas Stoves, Diesel Engines, and Gasoline Engines From Homes"
Sounds good to me!
Not all pollution is created equal (Score:3)
These flameless candles might produce the same volume or the same number of particles as a car exhaust. But by that measure alone, using a humidifier also can produce as much "pollution" as car exhaust. The precise makeup and mix of particles matters, a lot.
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While the composition of the particles is important, they are also categorized by size for a reason [wikipedia.org].
And while evaporative humidifiers are pretty benign because particulates don't evaporate very well with water, the ultrasonic ones spew droplets into the air which creates a very effective airborne particulate dispenser [nih.gov]. So yeah, watch out for your humidifiers as well [rocis.org].
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I was referring to the actual water as being described as a pollutant. The point being simply that the composition matters so much that that aspect dwarfs the quantity in importance. Toxicity *is* a function of proportions and varies significantly--orders of magnitude--from one substance to another.
So, they produce smells? (Score:3)
I'm sorry, did this research discover that smells are produced by tiny particles that can get into your body?
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"I'm sorry, did this research discover that smells are produced by tiny particles that can get into your body?"
Correct. The tiny particles have to get in your nose to be detected, and from there it's a direct path to the lungs.
We'll have to add scent free air to pure grain alcohol and distilled water on list of things needed to protect your precious bodily fluids.
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I'm sorry, did this research discover that smells are produced by tiny particles that can get into your body?
Looks like the New Atlas headline writer did when he rewrote the Purdue University article. The Purdue newsroom writers that were rewritten were better, with the simpler declaration that indoor home air can be more polluted than outdoor air.
The actual paper [acs.org] is just that they measured the rates using a scanner to compare scented wax melts, unscented wax melts, and traditional scented candles. The actual findings were that "Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor a
Flameless candles (Score:2)
You can buy flameless candles that do not emit any scent, they are just flickery LEDs.
Your house stinks (Score:1)
There is a solution, but it requires commitment (Score:1)
There is a solution, but it requires commitment that I think even the most hardened, most indoctrinated Communist would retch at.
Since there seems to be a streak of "scientists" who find fault with everything and anything us humans do, why don't we all collectively decide to go back to pre-industrial era living?
o No more airplanes.
o No more trains.
o No more cars or motorbikes or even bicycles, because all of those require metal manufacturing, lubricants, rubber, etc
o no more phones, no more internet, no mor
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Since there seems to be a streak of "scientists" who find fault with everything and anything us humans do, why don't we all collectively decide to go back to pre-industrial era living?
Yeah! Just pretend it's not happening! People burned shit because it smelled good in pre-industrial times, too, so your suggestion is not only disingenuous, it wouldn't help.
How about you all stop panicking about the latest "study" and just live life?
How about you stop pretending bad things aren't happening, or failing that, you stop telling other people to pretend bad things aren't happening? Nobody needs your call to ignorance.
Re: There is a solution, but it requires commitmen (Score:2)
Stressing over "bad things" is going to kill you far faster than most of those bad things will.
Re: There is a solution, but it requires commitme (Score:2)
There's a train coming, get out of the way!
Is what I would have said to you in that situation before you said that.
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Sorry. We're still processing "The sky is falling!"
My airfilter (Score:2)
My airfilter could have told you that, it always freaks out when my any scented candles are lit, goes red and into hyperactive mode, even at the ligthest scented candles.
Interesting but no surprise... (Score:2)
I have a Siamese cat that is quite sensitive to any kind of airborne pollutants. For example, any incense, scented aerosols or candles that on being used in the household will cause his eyes to get all puffy and his nose starts running.
Since discovering this years ago, I don't use any of those things in my household and he does just fine.
Seeing this reported as a study doesn't surprise me at all.
Many of us have known this, nice to see it proven (Score:2)
Terpenes (Score:2)
There's already research showing that breathing the air in a pine forest has an antidepressant effect for depressed brains.
So alot of this is presumed.
I guess I will choose to believe that peeling an orange and getting a lung full of citrus oil isn't something that is bad for me.
If the researchers want to put on an N95 for lunch, OK, go for it.
Noted, but filed away without action.
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My Wife is into Doterra oils and diffuses them by either direct ultrasonic or water based ultrasonics. The point is to get them into your body internally, like your pine Forrest example so they have a medicinal effect.
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Just remember to use distilled water in those ultrasonic diffusers or you'll wind up with hard water deposits in your lungs [nih.gov].