Reactions

Letters to the editor

Mental health

I want to say that I appreciate C&EN’s new consistent emphasis on mental health over the last few years. Though I’m no longer in chemistry, it seemed to me that many of the grad students I overlapped with during my undergraduate studies were enduring some sort of mental duress, whether from their research, advisers, or peers, to name just a few sources. While challenges are natural to any course of research, especially a PhD program, it doesn’t help to brush those issues under the rug, and the underlying sentiment I always felt was that for some reason it was unprofessional to admit or discuss them. Regarding mental stress caused by advisers or other people (that is, challenges beyond just the science), it seemed all too common, and that mistreatment feeds on secrecy and is only enabled by it.

The bottle-it-up attitude is unhealthy and causes damage to people, if it doesn’t go all the way to tragedy. It can also bleed over into other issues, such as harassment. If we’re to see positive change, chemistry (and likely all of the sciences) could use more openness and honesty from its community. I applaud C&EN’s efforts to foster that.

Andrew D. Royappa
Cantonment, Florida

Greener insulation?

While we applaud the effort of the insulation industry to reduce the use of potent greenhouse gas emissions in their products (C&EN, May 31, 2021, page 24), the article does not mention another class of chemicals that make these products much less green. Virtually all foam plastic building insulation sold in the US—polystyrene (extruded polystyrene, or XPS, and expanded polystyrene, or EPS), polyurethane, and polyisocyanurate—contains flame-retardant chemicals that are necessary to meet building codes. Nearly all the flame retardants used are organohalogens. The long-term health and environmental effects of these chemicals and their eventual breakdown products are not well understood.

One example is PolyFR, the polymeric flame retardant used in most EPS and XPS insulation. A recent Viewpoint article in Environmental Science and Technology titled “High Production, Low Information: We Need to Know More about Polymeric Flame Retardants” identifies several points during the life cycle of PolyFR that may expose workers, communities, and ecosystems to this flame retardant and its potentially toxic breakdown products (2021, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c08126).

Furthermore, foam insulation is one of the leading uses of flame retardants, and for most applications, these potentially harmful chemicals do not provide a proven fire safety benefit. Building codes already require that insulation be protected by a thermal barrier, such as gypsum wallboard, capable of withstanding 15 min of flashover fire. Codes in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Spain allow flame-retardant-free insulation behind such barriers, and in 2019, the California Building Standards Commission voted unanimously to update the state’s building codes to allow below-grade use of foam plastic building insulation without flame retardants. These codes demonstrate that the flame retardants used in foam insulation are not necessary. Yet their addition continues to make foam insulation less sustainable—even after replacing hydrofluorocarbon blowing agents.

The health and environmental impacts of the chemicals used in building and consumer products must be considered when deciding how to evaluate how green the materials are. We do indeed need more information about PolyFR and other potentially toxic flame retardants before their continued widespread use in building materials and consumer products.

Donald Lucas (Moraga, California), Vytenis “Vyto” Babrauskas (New York City), Arlene Blum (Berkeley, California), and Lydia Jahl (Berkeley, California)