A Laundry Load of Chlorinated Flame Retardants: A pathway from households to wastewater treatment plants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of household laundry as a pathway for the transport of flame retardants from homes to waterways was investigated. Flame retardants are commonly used in consumer products found in the home, and also widely found in surface water, sediments, fish, and wildlife. The mechanisms by which flame retardants are transported from indoor to outdoor environments, however, are largely unknown. Besides their known use in household products, flame retardants have been detected in indoor air, house dust, surface wipes, and in clothes dryer lint, indicating their mobility in the indoor environment. In recent years, chlorinated organophosphate flame retardants (ClOPFRs) have come into widespread use, in part as replacements for polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). To investigate transport from the indoor to outdoor environment, household dust was collected from 20 homes in Longview and Vancouver, WA and analyzed for ClOPFRs. In addition, wastewater from household laundry was collected from each home to investigate the hypothesis that flame retardants on clothing and transferring to laundry water is a source to wastewater and waterways. Three ClOPFRs— tris (2-chloroethyl) phosphate (TCEP), tris (1-chloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TCPP) and tris (1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate (TDCPP)—were detected in 100% of the dust samples at levels ranging up to 82,700 ng/g. The three ClOPFRs were detected in 100% of the laundry wastewater samples, at levels up to 561,000 ng/L. In contrast to PBDEs, the ClOPFRs are resilient to wastewater treatment, and previous research has detected these compounds in treatment plant effluent. The ClOPFR contribution of laundry wastewater to wastewater treatment plants was estimated. Based on these estimates, laundry water is likely the primary source of ClOPFRs to treatment plants. With their resilience to wastewater treatment, this pathway is a significant source of ClOPFR pollution in the aquatic environment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".