In the town of Lamont, southwest of Blackwell and near the Kansas border, a Department of Energy atmospheric monitoring station sniffed out a compound never before detected in the air over North America. And it’s toxic.
Called Medium-Chain Chlorinated Paraffins, or MCCPs, they are handy compounds used in high-temperature lubricants, flame retardants, the manufacture of PVC pipes, the production of rubber, paint, and a host of other substances and processes that modern life takes for granted. But now they are showing up in the air.
Recently, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty organization to reduce so-called forever chemicals in the environment, concluded that MCCPs are a problem. Linked to liver and kidney damage, and possibly carcinogenic, the organization banned them. At the 12th Conference of the Parties last spring, MCCPs were officially listed in Annex A of the convention on such pollutants. That decision mandates a global ban on their production and use, with some exemptions for critical industrial uses.
They’ve been found in the air over parts of Asia. But now MCCPs have been detected floating in the air around Lamont. A team of scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder found the compound while looking for something else entirely.
“I guess what I would say, in general terms, is that we found something very unexpected that we weren’t looking for and we hadn’t designed the study around,” said Daniel Katz, who at the time was finishing his doctorate. “So when we detected these medium chain chlorinated paraffins, we can tell from our measurements, like we’re absolutely certain that is what we’re seeing, but there are a lot of very interesting questions that we can’t answer.”
Among them, why they were in the air and why in Oklahoma.
“We can definitely say that it’s there, but there’s still a lot of questions that are unanswered from the work that we did,” Katz said