Published in the Gananoque reporter

by Cameron Smith 

 I guess the beginning of a new year is as good a time as any to confront a sacred cow — in this case, the belief that rural people have an inherent right to use burn barrels. It’s part of an admirable attitude of being self-sufficient.

But times have changed. In the days of our grandparents, people burned paper, brush, and food scraps. Now, plastics are finding their way into burn barrels, and when that happens, look out. Chemical compounds are created that can deform and kill, even when only tiny traces are created.

The main culprits are dioxins and furans. In the dioxin family, there are 75 different compounds, and in the furan family, there are 135. They’re called organochlorines, because when plastics are burned, the chlorine in the plastic combines in the fire with organic matter.

Once created, they can last more than a lifetime. And in incredibly minute quantities, they can create deformities, especially in human embryos and in very young developing children. This is because organochlorines act as hormone disruptors. Some people call them hormone mimickers, or endocrine disruptors. In short, they act like hormones in the human body.

Hormones are messengers that tell new cells what to do. So as a child is developing, hormones direct cells that will determine intelligence, the strength of immune systems and, before birth, sexual characteristics, such as genetalia.

They also control the development of new cells in adults, and when you consider that over the course of seven years, all the cells in a human body are replaced, it’s easy to see why it’s important not to interfere with the work of hormones.

What organochlorines can do is mimic the female hormone estrogen; sometimes they can block testosterone, the main male hormone; sometimes they compete more vigourously than natural hormones to deliver messages; sometimes they simply scramble messages. And often they escape inbuilt controls in the body by going unrecognized by proteins in the blood whose job it is to destroy excess hormones.

In adults it can mean cancer — often breast cancer in women or testicular cancer in men. In babies it can mean males with female genitalia, and females with male characteristics. In young children who are undergoing rapid development, one of the greatest concerns is that their intelligence will be distorted.

Unlike poisons, which may cause no harm below certain levels, no level of hormone disruptors is safe. They disrupt the delivery of messages in the body even at incredibly low levels. The only question is which messages, and when. Did they disrupt when a certain aspect of learning was being developed in a child? Or when cells were being replaced in a woman’s breast?

In short, burn barrels are dangerous. Highly dangerous. We don’t live downwind from neighbours who use a burn barrel. But if we did, I’d be having a talk with them.