Tasting the forbidden fruit
A few months ago we got an email from a listener who tried a bit of a very poisonous apple and lived to tell the tale. Ultimately, he was fine, but the incident left him full of questions.
We figured, why not run with that curiosity? We put a call out for all of your poison related queries and you delivered: How much should you worry about those green potatoes in your pantry? Could our car tires be poisoning the environment? It’s another Outside/Inbox roundup on the show this week. Buckle up.
Is hydroxyapatite an effective substitute for fluoride?
How much toxic airborne pollution is contributed by vehicle tires?
Featuring Hussein Elgridly, Deborah Blum, Andy Robinson, Angela Mech, Kyle Lombard and Heejung Jung.
This is the first part of a “Things That Can Kill You” mini-series. Up next we tackle venom and allergies.
For our next Outside/Inbox roundup, we’re looking for questions about sound! Dream big here: we’re talking animal sounds, traffic noise, the sounds of space… Send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline: 844-GO-OTTER.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Check out the breakthrough paper where scientists identified 6PPD-quinone as the culprit for mass Coho salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest.
For our New Hampshire listeners, you can report sightings of brown tail moths at nhbugs.org.
Top to bottom: Jim Lukach (CC BY 2.0), John Campbell (PDM 1), Yogendra Joshi (CC BY 2.0).
SUPPORT
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Justine Paradis
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Caro Luna and Bomull.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Marina Henke: Hello, hello
Nate Hegyi: Hey Marina what's up!
Marina Henke: Okay, today I wanted to start with an email that we got as a team earlier this year – I do think it’s fair to say it immediately became like… um… show lore. Do you remember this?
Nate Hegyi: Of yeah of course I do, it came in with the subject line: “Tasting the forbidden fruit.”
Marina Henke: In the world of emails I leave unread that email is not going unread.
Nate Hegyi: And in fact I actually called this listener up.
Nate Hegyi: Checky one two, on two…
Hussein Elgridly: There we go.
Nate Hegyi: This is Hussein Elgridly himself, penman of “Tasting the forbidden fruit.” His email started with a story…
Hussein Elgridly: About a year ago now a friend of mine was speaking at a workshop in Costa Rica and she said to me, hey, would you like to come down for vacation for a few days afterwards?
Nate Hegyi: So, Hussein was in Costa Rica. One afternoon he and his friend are coming back from lunch, walking down the beach.
Hussein Elgridly: And while we're walking back, she picks a little apple up off the beach and hands it to me.
Marina Henke: I got to ask Nate, you’re in this moment, you have this apple handed to you, are you eating it?
Nate Hegyi: No! I don’t eat strange fruits! That is not something I do!
Marina Henke: Laughs. Well, Hussein has a very different response.
Hussein Elgridly: I have the teeniest, tiniest taste. I taste the flesh, and then I spit it out and throw the apple back on the beach.
Nate Hegyi: He told me it tasted entirely unremarkable. Like, if he saw these apples at a grocery store… wouldn’t buy ‘em. So he didn’t think much about it.
Hussein Elgridly: 5, maybe 10 minutes later, I look at her and I say, “Hey, we ate the same thing for lunch. Do you have this peppery feeling in the back of your mouth?” And she looks at me and says, “no.”
Nate Hegyi: Uh oh.
Hussein Elgridly: So another 10, 20 minutes later, the peppery feeling has spread. It's now in the back of my mouth. My throat is starting to feel constricted. Swallowing is starting to feel painful.
Hussein Elgridly: In Spanish that is, manzanilla de la muerte. The little apple of death.
[MUX IN, Our Only Lark, Blue Dot]
Hussein Elgridly: The Guinness World Records has this listed as the most dangerous tree.
Nate: That is NOT a fun thing to Google and realize you ate “the little apple of death.” I would be having a panic attack.
Marina Henke: I will say Hussein… not exaggerating at all. This is a super poisonous tree. If you stand under one while it’s raining…. whole body can just break out in blisters.
Nate Hegyi: Oh my god.
Marina Henke: People have died from them, but more often you see just theses cases of almost horrible just like chemical burns from top to bottom, there’s temporary blindness. There’s pretty gnarly stories of people using the tree’s leaves as toilet paper.
Nate Hegyi: Oooh!!!!
Marina Henke: Just like all around… bad news.
Nate Hegyi: So Hussein clicks onto Poison Control’s website and types in some information: his age, the amount of the “apple of death” that he ate. And it spits out an answer:
Hussein Elgridly: Based on the information you provided, it is unlikely that significant toxicity will develop. You do not need to go to the emergency room… You basically didn't ingest enough of it um to do any horrible kind of damage.
Nate Hegyi: For the rest of the afternoon his stomach hurts, his throat’s a little itchy.
Hussein Elgridly: It was an uncomfortable couple of hours. But, you know, for my punishment, I sat on a sun lounger in Costa Rica and read a book.
[MUX FADES OUT]
Hussein Elgridly: The problem here is I am, I am emboldened, right? I ate the little apple of death and lived. And so the question I have is, if I am outside walking around in nature and I find something, is there an amount of that thing that I can put in my mouth, have a little taste and I know I will always be fine?
Deborah Blum: That's absolutely true.
Marina Henke: So, I reached out to a woman named Deborah Blum – she’s a toxicology journalist, also just a woman who’s delightfully obsessed with poison. [Nate laughs]. And I posed Hussein’s question to her.
Deborah Blum: It's absolutely true that for most poison, there is some tiny amount that you could be exposed to and get away with the exposure.
Marina Henke: What Deborah’s saying here gets us to this very common refrain in the world of toxicology. I’ve heard it, I’m sure you have Nate. “The dose makes the poison.”
Nate: Ah yes.
Deborah Blum: The idea that the dose makes the poison right dates back, man, hundreds and hundreds of years to Paracelsus
Marina Henke: Now classically, as it goes, what he actually said… little wordier. It is “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."
Nate Hegyi: I’m really happy that we summed it up as just being like “the dose makes the poison.”
Marina Henke: So to figure out what that dose is that “makes the poison” toxicologists assign toxic substances with something called an LD50.
Deborah Blum: And what LD50 means is that, this is the dose that will kill 50% of a test population.
Marina Henke: So imagine you have a cage of mice, you give them all the same dose of a chemical and… bam. 50% of them are dead. That dose – divided by how much they weigh – would be the LD50.
Nate Hegyi: This feels like a scene in a movie where there like really solid foreshadowing where they’re like all right you need to watch out for LD50, you know as they hold up the little pill as they explain the LD50. And then later in the movie you’re like oh my god this amount will kill 50 % of the popular of this evil lair of villians I have to destroy.
Marina Henke: Or like… yeah that cage of mice… not looking good for them.
Nate Hegyi: (Laughs) Or it’s just really sad for the mice.
[MUX IN, DOLLY POP, Blue Dot]
Deborah Blum: So like for arsenic the LD50 in mice and rats is between 2 and 20mg per kg of body weight.
Deborah Blum: . It can be as low as three milligrams.
Marina Henke: But this isn’t necessarily a cheat sheet uh, for like how to consume the tiniest possible amount of a very poisonous thing for all those Husseins who are listening out there.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: If you noticed Deborah described all these LD50s as a range.
Deborah Blum: So the reason they put those ranges is there's a ranges of body weights, there's ranges of age, there's ranges of um, vulnerability. And all of that will play into what the acutely dangerous dose is. It's never one size fits all.
Marina Henke: Like let’s say a kid is walking down that same beach and eats that exact same amount of apple that Hussein ate, they could get a lot sicker.
Nate Hegyi: Right, right, exactly.
Deborah Blum: Even though most of these things, if you're a healthy adult and you take a small amount, are going to be survivable, it's still a gamble, right? You still want to be really careful.
[MUX FADES]
Marina Henke: So big picture here…. is there a small amount of things you could consume and could be fine?… yes. But, do not go around eating random things off of trees.
Nate Hegyi: No. Just don’t do that! I’m sorry Hussein but that’s just a bad idea, we don’t want to send you out there grabbing strange berries and popping them in your mouth and just like hoping that the LD50 is big enough that you’ll be fine.
Marina Henke: But, even though Hussein should not repeat this apple of death experience, Deborah does think that learning about poisonous things in nature is a really good thing to do.
[MUX IN, Capering, Blue Dot]
Deborah Blum: I think we're so afraid of poisons, right? Because it seems like they kind of sneak up behind us sometimes, that we tend to be very wary about sharing the information… Much better to say, let's look at the wonderful complexity of the natural world, including its poisonous parts.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi. Today on the show it is all about poison. We put a call out to all you listeners for any and all poison questions. We've got green potatoes, poisonous moths, toxic tire pollutants.
Marina Henke: Now, a slight caveat: some are really capital P poison questions, some are sort of more poison-ish.
Nate Hegyi: Eh!
Marina Henke: Let’s get into it.
[MUX FADES]
Marina Henke: Okay Nate, we’re going to start in the kitchen. We had a listener named Karen from North Carolina call in. Karen recently attended a dinner party where the host served a white bean and potato soup.
Karen: Over dinner the cook told us she had made and discarded an entire batch of the soup due to an uneasy feeling about the green-tinged potatoes she used. Lucky for us she bought fresh potatoes and made the soup that we enjoyed. Full of soup we were left wondering, are green potatoes toxic?
Nate Hegyi: Our producer Felix Poon got us some answers for us. Here’s Felix.
Felix Poon: So… you’ve got a craving to eat some potatoes. You get some out to cook. And then you see that they’ve all turned green. What’s the deal? To answer that, I spoke to Andy Robinson.
Andy Robinson: I grew up in Idaho, so I've been around potatoes all my life and grew up farming, so.
Felix Poon: Andy also happens to be the potato extension agronomist for North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota.
Andy Robinson: why do they turn green is because actually when those potatoes are exposed to sunlight that is chlorophyl which is forming in the potato tuber.
Felix Poon: When they’re exposed to sunlight, that’s their cue to sprout – to make new potato plants. And to do that, they start producing chlorophyl, the green stuff plants use for photosynthesis. But they’re also producing something else when they’re exposed to sunlight: a compound called solanine. And solanine is toxic.
Andy Robinson: It's actually meant for plant defense from different bugs or animals to keep them from eating it.
Felix Poon: The more solanine you eat, the sicker you can get.
Andy Robinson: But most people don't eat a lot because they're bitter. They don't taste good.
Felix Poon: So, green skin isn’t the only warning sign. if your potatoes TASTE unusually bitter – that can indicate high solanine levels. Now, there have been horror stories in recorded history of mass solanine potato poisonings. In 1918 in Scotland, 61 people got sick from a bad batch of potatoes. One 5-year-old boy even died. In 1979 dozens of school children in London got violently ill, some even fell into comas, some hallucinated for days. (They all recovered in the end by the way). And while this does sound pretty scary, poisonings like this are pretty rare. That’s because farmers and wholesalers do know how to keep potatoes safe to eat.
Andy Robinson: So we'll harvest the potatoes, and when they go into storage, they're actually holed under dark conditions.
Felix Poon: Historically, people might have stored potatoes in a root cellar. Basically, you’re trying to replicate their natural environment underground.
Andy Robinson: Ideally paper bag, maybe a basement or a cool spot. That’s where we store our potatoes in my house, we put them in our basement.
Felix Poon: Basements are ideal because they tend to be higher humidity. But you can also put them in your fridge.
Andy Robinson: The good thing about a fridge storage is it'll actually slow down the metabolism of the tuber which would slow down… if they want to start sprouting
Felix Poon: Potato sprouts actually have the highest solanine content, so definitely don’t eat those. As for the rest of the potato…
Andy Robinson: what I would tell a consumer, the easy thing to do is if your potatoes have some green on them, just cut it off.
[MUX in, Dognell, Blue Dot]
Felix Poon: Same with sprouts, just cut it off. And then… enjoy your spuds, whether you boil ‘em , mash ‘em, or stick ‘em in a white bean and potato stew…
[MUX fade]
Nate Hegyi: Nice Lord of the Rings, Felix, good job.
Nate Hegyi: Okay this is me being vulnerable, what’s the Lord of the Rings reference?
Nate Hegyi: Boil em’ mash ‘em stick ‘em in a stew. One of the hobbits said that.
Marina Henke:I’ve been nodding along and laughing to that reference that everybody’s been making for the past few weeks.
Nate Hegyi: (Laughs)
Marina Henke: Um Nate what’s your, what’s your relationship to dodging little, little pieces of food like that – you know little green potato little piece of moldy bread?
Nate Hegyi: I’ve straight up eaten green potatoes before. When I was younger nothing happened. Moldy though, I’ve definitely, I’ve accidentally eaten moldy bread and moldy cheese and moldy hummus.
Marina Henke: Oh… Nate…
Nate Hegyi: (Laughs) What about you?
Marina Henke: Potato sprouts are the one thing that give me the heebie jeebies. Like I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want to think about them, even like talking about it now like echhhh.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah okay okay.
Marina Henke: Good thing we’re moving on. We’re moving out of the kitchen and into the great outdoors.
Marina Henke: Sheila wrote to us on our listener Facebook group (join it if you haven’t! ). She asked, “Is there evidence of Browntail Moth caterpillar activity in New Hampshire? They were really a problem when I lived on the coast of Maine.”
Nate Hegyi: Our producer Justine Paradis looked into it. She’s going to take it from here.
Justine Paradis: If you’ve never heard of a browntail moth, consider yourself lucky. A writer for the Cape Cod Times once described them as “poison ivy with wings.”
Angela Mech: They're horrible… it is one of the the absolute worst insects to have to work with.
Justine Paradis: This is Angela Mech and she would know. As a forest entomologist with the University of Maine, she helps manage the state’s browntail moth population. Browntail moths are white, with a brown abdomen. That’s where they get their name. But the issue is their caterpillars. They have tiny, barbed hairs, which they shed when they molt.
Angela Mech: And they have a toxin within the hair that causes a poison-ivy-like rash.
Justine Paradis: The biggest danger is when the caterpillars are active, from April to June. But their hairs can persist in leaf piles for years. And the kicker? You can’t see them.
Angela Mech: They are extremely microscopic. The length of one of the hairs is almost the width of a human hair, so very, very small. It's small enough to inhale, so they can cause respiratory issues in sensitive people. And, as I learned the hard way, they're small enough to get stuck behind your contact and tear your cornea.
Justine Paradis: Browntail moths have long been a scourge in Europe, but were inadvertently introduced to New England in the late 1800s. And people were not happy. They burned the nests, sprayed them with pesticides, even paid kids five cents for every 100 nests they collected (seriously). It pretty much worked. As of the 21st century, the range of browntail moths had been reduced to small pockets at the tip of Cape Cod and on the coast of Maine. But it would be unwise to let our guard down. Every 10 or 15 years or so, their population surges again.
Kyle Lombard: We've been doing a winter survey for browntail moth for 30 years, and we've always been amazed that it has not come back to New Hampshire from that site on the coast of Maine.
Justine Paradis: Kyle Lombard is a forest entomologist with the New Hampshire Division of Forests and Lands. In the summer of 2024, for the first time in 75 years, browntail moths crossed over the state line. Technically, they blew over from Appledore Island in Maine to Star Island in New Hampshire.
Kyle Lombard: The count is zero on the mainland. But Star Island still has a few. . . . We did do a control project out there this past spring where we went out and we clipped as many of the nests as we could and destroyed them. But we didn't get them all.
Justine Paradis: Kyle and his team are monitoring other high risk areas along the coast. Which they do every winter: It’s a good time to find nests and remove them.
Kyle Lombard: Now, the good news is that the population in Maine this summer completely crashed . . . just a massive die off. And so, it receded all the way back to that little spot along the coast where they just can't get rid of it.
Justine Paradis: We owe thanks for today’s decline at least in part to those who suffered from browntail moth rashes 100 years ago. That’s when entomologists identified a fungus which infects the moths.
Angela Mech: They artificially infested healthy caterpillars with the fungus and then they would go plant those sick caterpillars in healthy populations. They did that to 100,000 sick caterpillars, spread them out across the state of Maine.
Justine Paradis: Today, Angela and other researchers are exploring new ways to address browntail moth outbreaks — like using their pheromones to confuse the moths during mating season, and prevent them from reproducing. But funnily enough, as the population crashes, they’re racing against the clock.
[MUX in, Nyar, Epidemic]
Angela Mech: It’s a very short window. Once the outbreak ends, there isn't going to be enough browntail to really research for another 10 to 15 years. So, we're trying to cram in as many research projects as we can while we have them.
Nate Hegyi: I recently moved out East from the West. And you know MT has grizzly bears and mountain lions and big apex predators. But Maine has brown tail moths and ticks and really tiny critters that can bug you.
Marina Henke: Yeah I mean I have run into this really, really personally. When I was 13 I was at summer camp – this was not a browntail moth, but I had a caterpillar get into my sleeping bag, crawl all over me while I was sleeping and I woke up in such a head to toe body rash I cannot even explain.
Nate Hegyi: That is the stuff of nightmares. I’m so sorry that happened.
Marina Henke: It’s okay I’ve gotten past it. One thing to add on to the brown tail moth front, if you DO think you see a browntail moth or maybe you’re not sure – I don’t know about you but I’m not great at IDing bugs, you can go to nhbugs.org and report what you see. So we’ll drop a link to that in our show notes.
Marina Henke: Alright Nate, we’re gonna take a quick break, you can check your pantry potatoes for sprouts & your sleeping bags for caterpillars.
Nate Hegyi: I’m going to check for both of those.
[MUX OUT]
MIDROLL
Nate Hegyi: Hey welcome back to Outside/In. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Marina Henke: I’m Marina Henke, and we are back to the world of poison. Before we jump into the next poison question I actually wanted to spend a minute to talk about a recent episode that you did Nate, about fluoride. So we got a bunch of great listener feedback and anecdotes and questions – I wanted to play some of them here.
RING TONE, “NEW MESSAGE”
Jeannie: Hi Nate. This is Jeannie calling from Montpelier, Vermont, and I just listened to your Fluoridation Nation episode, Nate, and I loved it so much! I thought I would also answer your question for listeners about if we used fluoride, and I remember for sure taking fluoride tablets as a kid cause we grew up on well water, and I'm glad I did thanks so much! Bye.
BEEP
Samantha: Hi this is Samantha from San Diego. My family lived in Eastern Europe for about 4 years and something that we noticed was that all the kids just had terrible cavities all the time. And then one of my colleagues finally pointed out that there’s not fluoridated water in the country that we were living in. And coming back to the US, but, yeah, the cavity situation's gotten a ton better. So, it was really enlightening to hear about the history of fluoridated water in the US. Thanks for that.
BEEP
Rebecca: Hi this is Rebecca I’m calling from Matbury, NH. My question: hydroxyapatite – I’m not sure if I’m saying that right – or other alternatives to fluoride. Is there a middle road that's both evidence-based and avoids some of the risks & concerns that people have around fluoride? Thanks so much, bye.
Marina Henke: So I actually decided to dig into this last question – hydroxyapatite as an alternative to fluoride. I’m curious Nate, what do you remember about hydroxyapatite from your own reporting?
Nate Hegyi: That was a term that one of the dentists that we interviewed used about the part of the stuff that makes up our enamel.
Marina Henke: Yeah yeah! People can’t see but Nate’s tapping his front teeth –
Nate Hegyi: I’m tapping, yeah!
Marina Henke: You’re totally right hydroxyapatite, it’s naturally in all of our teeth. It’s the mineral that makes up the enamel – which is that hard outer part of our teeth.
Marina Henke: And dentists have used hydroxyapatite as a tool in their dental toolbelt for years, but there’s been a rise in toothpastes that advertise using hydroxyapatite as an alternative to fluoride.
Marina Henke: It’s partly because there’s a growing body of research that shows hydroxyapatite toothpaste it does just about as well as fluoride toothpaste to slow down dental decay.
Marina Henke: But, hydroxyapatite isn’t a perfect alternative to fluoride.
Nate: Mhmm.
Marina Henke: I don’t want to get too much in the dental weeds here, but hydroxyapatite and fluoride work best in tandem. Like, it’s the chemical interaction between them that helps make hydroxyapatite effective.
Marina Henke: And so when I talked to a dental professor about this he said look if it were up to me my patients would be using both fluoride and hydroxyapatite –
Nate Hegyi: Gotcha
Marina Henke: Maybe that’s fluoride in your water, hydroxyapatite in your toothpaste, some fluoride mouthwash.
Nate Hegyi: And it’s like again topical right? It’s not like something you're drinking and when you drink it it protects your teeth. And that’s kind of I’m guessing one of the downsides of hydroxyapatite compared to fluoride especially for people who don’t have access to great dental care.
Marina Henke: Exactly. Fluoride can be used on a big public health scale… Hydroxyapatite is much more case by case intervention… like buying a hydroxyapatite toothpaste.
[MUX IN, CACH PKL, Blue Dot]
Nate Hegyi: Oh and one quick note here – keep your questions and your comments like this one coming! We really do read or listen to every one that comes in, we talk about them as a group. It is honestly one of our favorite parts of the job.
Marina Henke: It’s so true! I love listening to them.
Marina Henke: Alright, so we’ve got one more question that came from our callout on poisons. Nate are you ready for this?
[MUX FADES OUT]
Nate Hegyi: I am yes. Our final question comes from Beth Anne in Montana. Here’s her question…
Beth Anne: How much toxic airborne pollution is contributed by the rubber and other compounds in vehicle tires? Even if we electrified all transportation overnight, how much would tires contribute to toxins in the air?”
Nate Hegyi: So you ended up looking into this question Marina, right? Take it away.
Marina Henke: Quick story. Cars used to belch black smoke. In the 1940s, smog in cities like Los Angeles was so bad, that fields of produce could wither over the course of a day. But then, came the regulations. Today, things aren’t perfect, but tailpipe emissions are a fraction of what they used to be. So, scientists started wondering about other parts of our cars that could be causing pollution. Like… our tires and brakes.
Heejung Jung: It has been there, but it became much more important because other sources have reduced its emissions substantially.
Marina Henke: That’s Heejung Jung, a professor of mechanical engineering at University of California Riverside. He studies how cars contribute to air pollution. Heejung told me that these days, the pollution from our tires and brakes can rival tailpipe emissions. The physics of this is pretty simple. When we drive, the friction between the car and the road wears down our tires. During its typical lifespan, a tire will actually lose between 10 to 20% of its mass this way. Basically, it turns to tire dust, which is a weird mix of a lot of chemicals: rubbers, hydrocarbons, heavy metals. The exact recipe of tire brands vary and are actually proprietary information, so it’s hard to know what’s in them.
Marina Henke: But no matter what, anytime this kind of cocktail of particles is entering the air, scientists take note. Exposure to particulate pollution has been linked to asthma, cancer and Alzheimers. A few years ago, Heejung and his team took to the streets to study just how much of that tire dust was making it into the air that we breathe.
Heejung Jung: The further you live away from major roadways, such as highways, the less you are exposed to. So that's good news and bad news, because depending on where you live, you can be much more exposed to or much less exposed to brake and tire wear particles.
Marina Henke: Brake and tire wear particles don’t go far once they’re in the air, Heejung explained. For the most part they stay right around the road. And the risk to human health?
Heejung Jung: Not much human subject or animal study has been done to figure out how much toxicity the tire particles are affecting us.
Marina Henke: We don’t really know yet. But we do know that tire particles are a significant source of microplastics in the ocean. And, they pollute freshwater streams too.
News anchor clip: New this morning, the science is clear, a chemical from tire dust is killing massive amounts of Coho salmon in the Pacific Northwest…
Marina Henke: A few years ago, a group of scientists researching salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest found the culprit: A common tire additive known as 66PD. It reacts with ozone and creates a new chemical that’s lethal to the fish.
Rep. Katie Porter clip: The salmon suffocate as their blood thickens, they flail near the surface in futile effects to get oxygen before sinking to the bottom where they die en masse…
Marina Henke: This is a Congressional hearing in 2021, where scientists pushed Congress to support alternatives to 66PD. Now, our listener also asked whether tire pollution is a problem with electric vehicles, too. Unfortunately, there’s actually a good chance EV cars are worse for this problem.
Heejung Jung: Those vehicles are heavier compared to conventional internal combustion engine vehicles and heavier vehicles make more friction, so it generates more brake and tire wear emissions.
Marina Henke: Now, Heejung doesn’t think that’s a strike against all EVs, but that it is an important design question.
Heejung Jung: So my take is let's promote smaller, lighter electric vehicles as opposed to heavier and larger electric vehicles.
[MUX IN, Shelftop Speech, Blue Dot]
Marina Henke: Heejung and his colleagues are hoping that research like theirs can help shape future regulations. He thinks, if tailpipe emissions are so well regulated, maybe it’s time that tire emissions are too.
[MUX fades]
Marina Henke: Yeah Nate I’m curious, had you ever thought about tires in this way before?
Nate Hegyi: No but I will say every time I drive up a hill and I get out of my car I can smell the burning tires and I’m like oooh that doesn’t smell very healthy.
Marina Henke: Yeah it’s so funny like what you notice and what you don’t, I had a moment in talking to a couple of these researchers when I was like oh the black streaks on the road we see that’s part of our tire – right like that’s part of our tire that’s come off.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: I will say though that you know this may sound surprising, but initially in my reporting it actually left me feeling just a bit optimistic if that makes any sense – the scientists I talked to were really that the fact that we were focusing in on tire particulates speaks to how much work has been done in vehicle regulations.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah it is really cool just the sheer amount of science that is out there like there is somebody out there studying tire particles.
Marina Henke: Which though okay does get me to the last thing I wanted to say which… since I talked to Heejung, some of those standards that regulate tailpipe emissions are up in the air. So the new head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin announced in mid-March that the EPA is going to look at a whole bunch of air quality standards including some of the ones that Heejung was talking about. So there’s actually a good chance that car manufacturers will get some more leeway as to what’s coming out of their vehicle’s tailpipes, which like we just said… it can be a lot worse than what’s coming off of our tires.
[MUX IN, Para Charkiv, Epidemic]
Nate Hegyi: Alrighty that is a wrap for questions today. But, if all this talk about poison is up your alley you are in LUCK. For the next two weeks on the show we are going to be running with an investigation of our bodies and how they react to all kinds of things – a “Things That Can Kill You” mini-series if you will – next week we are going to look at venom, and the week after that achooo allergies.
Marina Henke: Laughs
Nate Hegyi: Was that cheesy? Was that cheesy Marina? It felt cheesy when I did it.
Marina Henke: No I love it
Nate Hegyi: (Laughs) And, for our next call-out, we’re looking for questions about sound. So dream big here: we’re talking animal sounds, traffic noise, sounds in space or I guess not sounds in space. You can send us your questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline, we’re at 1-844-GO-OTTER.
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: Outside/In was reported and produced this week by Marina Henke, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon.
It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby.
I am your host, Nate Hegyi.
Our staff also includes Kate Dario.
Our director of on-demand audio is Rebecca Lavoie.
Special thanks to Bennet Amaechi and Zhenyu Qian.
Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions, Caro Luna and Bomull (ba-mule).
Outside/In is a production of NHPR.
John: Hi my name’s John from Manchester. I just heard that the phone number is 1-844-GO-OTTER or something like that, that’s just hilarious, I’ve never actually listened to the end of the podcast without skipping ahead to jump to the next one. I love it.
Nate Hegyi: I still think that an otter should be the mascot to our show though like it’s disingenuous to otters to not have it as a mascot for us.
Marina Henke: Good for the otters, good for us
Nate Hegyi: Exactly
POST-ROLL