The Sustainability Imperative - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 244

Figure 6.5 Flux of an
agricultural fungicide after being
sprayed onto soil. These results
are from a laboratory chamber
study of vinclozolin (5 mL of
2000 mg L − 1 suspended in water);
bars show the time-integrated
atmospheric flux of organic
compounds from nonsterile North
Carolina Piedmont soil (aquic
hapludult) with pore water pH of
7.5 following a 2.8-mm rain event
and soil incorporation. Error bars
indicate 95% confidence intervals.
Vinclozolin
[3-(3,5-dichlorophenyl)-5-methyl-
5-vinyl-oxzoli-dine-2,4-dione], M1
(2-[3,5-dichlorophenyl)-
carbamoyl]oxy-2-methyl-3-
butenoic acid), and M2
(3 ,5 -dichloro-2-hydroxy-2-
methylbutyl-3-enanilide) are all
suspected endocrine-disrupting
compounds (i.e., they have been
shown to affect hormone systems
in mammals). This indicates that
workers are not only potentially
exposed to the parent compound
(i.e., the pesticide that is actually
applied) but to degradation
products as the product is broken
down in the soil.
From: D. A. Vallero and J. J. Peirce,
“Transport and transformation of
vinclozolin from soil to air,” Journal of
Environmental Engineering , 128(3),
261-268, 2002.

350

Vinclozolin
M1-butenoic acid
M2-enanilide
3,5-dichloroaniline

300

250

200

150

100

50

0

155 450 1020

Time since spray event(min)

communities. Occupational exposures may also be disproportionately skewed in
minority populations. For example, Hispanic workers can be exposed to higher
concentrations of toxic chemicals where they live and work, in large part due to
the nature of their work (e.g., agricultural chemical exposures can be very high
when and shortly after fields are sprayed, as shown in Figure 6.5).

Biography: Ben Chavis
Ben Chavis was born in 1949 in Oxford, North Carolina, and served as a youth
coordinator with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, working in
the 1960s with Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr. to desegregate southern
schools. When he became an ordained minister, he continued to agitate for
racial justice, and got into trouble in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he
was convicted of conspiracy and arson. He spent nearly a decade in prison
before the charges were thrown out in 1980.
On regaining his freedom, he became the director of the United Church
of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. In 1982 he came to the conclusion
that the selection of the polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill for Warren
County, North Carolina (very near his birthplace) had to be racially motivated.
In his view, this poor, predominantly African-American county was singled
out because its people were unlikely to protest the selection of the disposal
site. He called this environmental racism , a term he later changed to environmental
justice .
Teaming with Charles Lee of the EPA, he wrote the 1987 landmark report,
“Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which documented the uneven
distribution of environmentally undesirable land use in African-American and