SALT LAKE CITY — It's estimated 310,000 people live within a five-mile radius of BD Medical in Sandy, along with 163 schools and daycare centers.
The company is among the nation’s leading medical supply manufacturers.
According to the Union for Concerned Scientists, it’s one of 104 facilities in the country that could pose long-term health risks to those nearby.
“Anyone who’s just living in one of these communities might not think to look for one of these facilities, or to look them up online if you haven’t heard of them before,” says Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.
The report published in February focuses on a colorless, flammable gas called ethylene oxide, used to sterilize medical devices and plastics.
The Environmental Protection Agency, National Toxicology Program and International Association of Research on Cancer all classify ethylene oxide as a carcinogen.
Long-term exposure could lead to cancers involving white blood cells like Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer.
Most notable is the effects it can have on children.
“Ethylene oxide is a mutagen, meaning that it can damage a cell’s DNA and children’s cells where the DNA is housed are dividing more rapidly as they grow than adults which makes them more susceptible,” says Minovi.
According to the EPA’s website, in 2020 the agency updated emissions standards for two types of ethylene emitting facilities in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
The most common types of these facilities are called commercial sterilizers.
BD Medical in Sandy along with 22 other facilities in the country, is classified as a commercial sterilizer with elevated cancer risks.
All 22 currently exceed the EPA’s maximum cancer risk level threshold.
“What the EPA was looking at is people’s risk from just breathing ethylene oxide, but as we know, we don’t live in a vacuum, we’re exposed to a number of pollutants and stressors every day that contributes to our own risk of developing cancer,” says Minovi. “Ask the EPA and the state, are they considering other exposure measures in that community?”
Another commercial sterilizer, Sterigenics, is a short drive away in Salt Lake City.
Like BD Medical, it emits ethylene oxide, called ETO for short, but has not been identified to have elevated cancer risks.
There are 26,000 people who live within five miles of the facility.
“Ethylene oxide is kind of a new pollutant to be monitored, so there aren’t a lot of instruments or chemical monitors available that are easy to deploy or put in someone’s backyard,” says Rachel Edie, a scientist with Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality.
She says the department has been working with the EPA to reduce the emissions of BD Medical and held two public virtual community meetings last fall on it.
“The facilities are regularly inspected for compliance that they’re controlling their emissions the way they’re supposed to and then beyond that we’re talking with them trying to get them to install more emission controls and they both are doing that ahead of federal regulations,” says Edie. “We also just received funding to do more sampling in the coming years, as that would hopefully help assess this risk and more temporal and timely fashion.”
That sampling is happening with the help of University of Utah professor Rod Handy.
Along with graduate students, they use data to track how much ethylene oxide is emitted.
“What we are able to do from the company data that’s been given from EPA is we’re able to look at the stack and the future of emissions that they report,” says Handy. “That is the first thing that we modeled.”
BD Medical allowed Fox 13 inside their facility.
Our cameras weren’t allowed to film most operations due to proprietary concerns, but we were able to ask about how they plan to tackle ethylene oxide emissions.
In BD’s sterilization areas, where ethylene oxide is used, there are monitors that measure ETO levels.
Before it reaches an unsafe intensity, an alert is triggered.
They’re utilizing methods recently tested at their own plant in Georgia.
“Today all the air in that post-sterile warehouse gets collected through the technology and runs through the systems to remove those residual trace amounts of ETO that could be left in the air and treats that,” BD Medical’s spokesperson Troy Kirkpatrick. “If the systems behave the way the ones in Georgia do, we’ll see a 90 to 95% reduction in those emissions.”
Those new controls were put in place just two months ago.
“We have to still validate those to verify the emission reduction, but once those are validated, we will be able to say we are below that risk threshold,” says Kirkpatrick.
The EPA is set to update its ethylene oxide emissions standards later this year.
Until then the Union of Concerned Scientists says don’t wait to do your research if you’re concerned.
“We think that anyone who is in proximity to this chemical, which also tends to stay in the air for longer than some other toxic chemicals, that people should know that,” says Minovi. “The state and the federal government should be taking steps to adequately notify people of the risks.”
Fox 13 reached out to the commercial sterilizer in Salt Lake City, Sterigenics.
We asked them their thoughts on the research and if they were doing anything about their ethylene oxide emissions.
They sent this statement; it reads in part:
“Sterigenics is proud of the critical role we play in safeguarding public health by sterilizing millions of essential medical products across our facilities each year. Our facility in salt lake city operates safely and has consistently outperformed regulatory standards for decades. Consistent with our commitment to continuing to implement industry-leading emissions controls we are actively engaged with local officials regarding enhancements to further protect our employees and the community and improve our already safe operations.”
The Utah Department of Environmental Quality posts updates on the EPA’s ethylene oxide standards.
You can find those standards here.