Increases in trade secret designations in hydraulic fracturing fluids and their potential implications for environmental health and water quality.

Hydraulic fracturing is an increasingly common method of oil and gas extraction across the United States. Many of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing processes have been proven detrimental to human and environmental health. While disclosure frameworks have advanced significantly in the last 20 years, the practice of withholding chemical identities as "trade secrets" or "proprietary claims" continues to represent a major absence in the data available on hydraulic fracturing. Here, we analyze rates of trade secret claims using FracFocus, a nationwide database of hydraulic fracturing data, from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2022. We use the open-source tool Open-FF, which collates FracFocus data, makes it accessible for systematic analysis, and performs several quality-control measures. We found that the use by mass of chemicals designated as trade secrets has increased over the study time period, from 728 million pounds in 2014 to 2.96 billion pounds in 2022 (or a 43.7% average yearly increase). A total of 10.4 billion pounds of chemicals were withheld as trade secrets in this time period. The water volume used (and therefore total mass of fracturing fluid) per fracturing job has shown a large increase from 2014 to 2022, which partly explains the increase in mass of chemicals withheld as trade secrets over this time period, even as total fracturing jobs and individual counts of proprietary records have decreased. Our analysis also shows increasing rates of claiming proppants (which can include small grains of sand, ceramic, or other mineral substances used to prop open fractures) as proprietary. However, the mean and median masses of non-proppant constituents designated as trade secrets have also increased over the study period. We also find that the total proportion of all disclosures including proprietary designations has increased by 1.1% per year, from 79.3% in 2014 to 87.5% in 2022. In addition, most disclosures designate more than one chemical record as proprietary: trade secret withholding is most likely to apply to 10-25% of all records in an individual disclosure. We also show the top ten reported purposes that most commonly include proprietary designations, after removing vague or multiple entries, the first three of which are corrosion inhibitors, friction reducers, and surfactants. Finally, we report the top ten operators and suppliers using and supplying proprietary chemicals, ranked by mass used or supplied, over our study period. These results suggest the importance of revisiting the role of proprietary designations within state and federal disclosure mechanisms.

Lead and other toxic metals in plastic play foods: Results from testing citizen science, lead detection tools in childcare settings.

A method development pilot study examining citizen science tools for assessing lead in childcare settings identified plastic food toys as an unexpected potential source of lead and arsenic. Collaborating researchers at three universities sought to develop a low cost, replicable approach for use in childcare centers to identify lead. Through graduate Environmental Health courses at Northeastern and Boston Universities, 197 Plastic Food Toys (PFTs) used in a childcare center were tested for lead using a portable X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) instrument and a colorimetric wipe method for detecting surface lead. The XRF identified concerning levels of lead and co-occurring arsenic in PFTs. The XRF analysis found 8.63% (17/197) of PFTs from the childcare center contained more than 100.00 ppm of lead, the U.S. Consumer Protection Safety Commission's (CPSC) upper regulatory threshold for lead in childrens' products. However, wipes did not detect removable surface lead. Lead concentrations ranged from 6.14 ppm to 11,999.00 ppm with a median of 40.00 ppm. Additionally, 7.10% of all PFTs tested had detectable levels of arsenic which ranged from 9.30 ppm to 1134.42 ppm and had a median value of 113.20 ppm. Arsenic concentrations in 6.60% of PFTs' exceeded the US voluntary standard for arsenic in children's products of 25.00 ppm (adopted from the EU standard). These findings prompted further sampling of similar newly-purchased PFTs. None of the newly-purchased PFTs tested positive for lead or arsenic (0/87). Several other elements were also identified, particularly in the used PFTs. Because these food-like toys are frequently put in children's mouths, we recommend further investigation of PFTs in circulation via citizen science combining the wipe and XRF method as they provide immediate data to participants. Additionally, CPSC should consider a systematic recall of some used PFTs to prevent exposure disparities by socio-economic status and increased surveillance for other toxic metals in new PFTs.

Seeing power with a flashlight: DIY thermal sensing technology in the classroom.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on 'making and doing' in Science and Technology Studies (STS) by describing and theorizing the teaching of making and doing. We describe a collaborative do-it-yourself (DIY) technology project taught simultaneously in Canada and the United States, in sociology and public health, to undergraduates with no prior electronics experience. Students built thermal flashlights - low cost digital tools for making thermal images - and employed them to research their surrounding environments. By making and using the thermal flashlights, learners investigated power in two senses: identifying social power relationships embedded within normally unquestioned infrastructures, and exploring these infrastructures' connection to industrial forms of power, such as heat and electricity. Students and instructors came to understand how the control of power, light and temperature is vital to human-made infrastructure and environmental health threats that characterize the 21st century. Through this project, students went from being passive consumers of such power to become active investigators of their socio-technical systems by producing unique knowledge that enabled them to imagine how they might make and inhabit their environments differently. Breaking down the distinction between teaching and research, this article explores the promise of 'making and doing' in university courses to create new collaborative research platforms that could spread laterally and scale to transform social and technical infrastructures.

The Environmental Protection Agency in the Early Trump Administration: Prelude to Regulatory Capture.

We explore and contextualize changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the first 6 months of the Trump administration, arguing that its pro-business direction is enabling a form of regulatory capture. We draw on news articles, public documents, and a rapid response, multisited interview study of current and retired EPA employees to (1) document changes associated with the new administration, (2) contextualize and compare the current pro-business makeover with previous ones, and (3) publicly convey findings in a timely manner. The lengthy, combined experience of interviewees with previous Republican and Democratic administrations made them valuable analysts for assessing recent shifts at the Scott Pruitt-led EPA and the extent to which these shifts steer the EPA away from its stated mission to "protect human and environmental health." Considering the extent of its pro-business leanings in the absence of mitigating power from the legislative branch, we conclude that its regulatory capture has become likely-more so than at similar moments in the agency's 47-year history. The public and environmental health consequences of regulatory capture of the EPA will probably be severe and far-reaching.

History of US Presidential Assaults on Modern Environmental Health Protection.

The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981-1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001-2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermining science-based policy. The current administration combines both these strategies and operates in a political context more favorable to its designs on the EPA. The Republican Party has shifted right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in pushing deregulation. Among the public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted. For these reasons, the effects of today's ongoing regulatory delays, rollbacks, and staff cuts may well surpass those of the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose impacts on environmental health were considerable.

Outcomes of the Halliburton Loophole: Chemicals regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act in US fracking disclosures, 2014-2021.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has enabled the United States to lead the world in gas and oil production over the past decade; 17.6 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well (Czolowski et al., 2017). This major expansion in fossil fuel production is possible in part due to the 2005 Energy Policy Act and its "Halliburton Loophole," which exempts fracking activity from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). To begin quantifying the environmental and economic impacts of this loophole, this study undertakes an aggregate analysis of chemicals that would otherwise be regulated by SDWA within FracFocus, an industry-sponsored fracking disclosure database. This paper quantifies the total disclosures and total mass of these chemicals used between 2014 and 2021, examines trends in their use, and investigates which companies most use and supply them. We find that 28 SDWA-regulated chemicals are reported in FracFocus, and 62-73% of all disclosures (depending on year) report at least one SDWA-regulated chemical. Of these, 19,700 disclosures report using SDWA-regulated chemicals in masses that exceed their reportable quantities as defined under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). Finally, while the most common direct-supplier category is "company name not reported," Halliburton is the second-most named direct supplier of SWDA regulated chemicals. Halliburton is also the supplier most frequently associated with fracks that use SDWA regulated chemicals. These results show the necessity of a more robust and federally mandated disclosure system and suggest the importance of revisiting exemptions such as the Halliburton Loophole.

Chemicals in the Creek: designing a situated data physicalization of open government data with the community.

Over the last decade growing amounts of government data have been made available in an attempt to increase transparency and civic participation, but it is unclear if this data serves non-expert communities due to gaps in access and the technical knowledge needed to interpret this "open" data. We conducted a two-year design study focused on the creation of a community-based data display using the United States Environmental Protection Agency data on water permit violations by oil storage facilities on the Chelsea Creek in Massachusetts to explore whether situated data physicalization and Participatory Action Research could support meaningful engagement with open data. We selected this data as it is of interest to local groups and available online, yet remains largely invisible and inaccessible to the Chelsea community. The resulting installation, Chemicals in the Creek, responds to the call for community-engaged visualization processes and provides an application of situated methods of data representation. It proposes event-centered and power-aware modes of engagement using contextual and embodied data representations. The design of Chemicals in the Creek is grounded in interactive workshops and we analyze it through event observation, interviews, and community outcomes. We reflect on the role of community engaged research in the Information Visualization community relative to recent conversations on new approaches to design studies and evaluation.

Visualizing changes to US federal environmental agency websites, 2016-2020.

Websites have become the primary means by which the US federal government communicates about its operations and presents information for public consumption. However, the alteration or removal of critical information from these sites is often entirely legal and done without the public's awareness. Relative to paper records, websites enable governments to shape public understanding in quick, scalable, and permissible ways. During the Trump administration, website changes indicative of climate denial prompted civil society organizations to develop tools for tracking online government information sources. We in the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) illustrate how five data visualization techniques can be used to document and analyze changes to government websites. We examine a large sample of websites of US federal environmental agencies and show that between 2016 and 2020: 1) the use of the term "climate change" decreased by an estimated 38%; 2) access to as much as 20% of the Environmental Protection Agency's website was removed; 3) changes were made more to Cabinet agencies' websites and to highly visible pages. In formulating ways to visualize and assess the alteration of websites, our study lays important groundwork for both systematically tracking changes and holding officials more accountable for their web practices. Our techniques enable researchers and watchdog groups alike to operate at the scale necessary to understand the breadth of impact an administration can have on the online face of government.

Photopaper as a Tool for Community-Level Monitoring of Industrially Produced Hydrogen Sulfide and Corrosion.

Scientific instrumentation driven by academic, military, and industrial applications tends to be high cost, designed for expert use, and "black boxed". Community-led citizen science (CLCS) is creating different research instruments with different measurement goals and processes. This paper identifies four design attributes for CLCS tools: affordability, accessibility, builds community efficacy and provides actionable data through validating a community method for monitoring the neurotoxic and corrosive gas Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S). For $1 per sample, the semi-quantitative method provides an affordable and easily interpretable data for communities to compare H2S concentrations and silver corrosion in their home environments to those in a major municipal sewage treatment plant. H2S is a leading cause of workplace injury in the U.S. and commonly found in oil and gas production, sewage treatment plants, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Communities neighboring such sources tend to be socio-economically marginalized with little access to scientific or political resources. Consequently, health risks and material degradation from corrosion are well studied in workplaces while community exposures are under-studied. Existing commercial H2S detection methods are prohibitively expensive for low-income communities and often require the support of professional scientists. This paper describes a simple and inexpensive semi-quantitative H2S measurement method that uses photopaper. Photopaper passively measures H2S as its silver halide layer linearly reacts with H2S between concentrations of 60 ppb to 1 ppm, discoloring the paper from white to brown. We develop a colorimetric scale for this discoloration for visual estimation of H2S concentration and overall corrosion. The scale is based on comparing silver sulfide (Ag2S) measured by Purafil Corrosion Classification Coupons (CCCs) and H2S concentrations measured with the industry standard tool a Jerome Meter to silver and sulfur bound to the photopaper as measured with X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). We conduct our validation studies in a major municipal sewage treatment plant to provide real-world occupational benchmarks for comparison to community results. This community science method is affordable, accessible, designed to build collective efficacy and to create actionable data to flag the need for follow-up research.

Learning in Crisis: Training students to monitor and address irresponsible knowledge construction by U.S. federal agencies under Trump.

Immediately after President Trump's inauguration, U.S. federal science agencies began deleting information about climate change from their websites, triggering alarm among scientists, environmental activists, and journalists about the administration's attempt to suppress information about climate change and promulgate climate denialism. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) was founded in late 2016 to build a multidisciplinary collaboration of scholars and volunteers who could monitor the Trump administration's dismantling of environmental regulations and science deemed harmful to its industrial and ideological interests. One of EDGI's main initiatives has been training activists and volunteers to monitor federal agency websites to identify how the climate-denialist ideology is affecting public debate and science policy. In this paper, we explain how EDGI's web-monitoring protocols are being incorporated into college curricula. Students are trained how to use the open-source online platforms that EDGI has created, but are also trained in how to analyze changes, determine whether they are significant, and contextualize them for a public audience. In this way, EDGI's work grows out of STS work on "critical making" and "making and doing." We propose that web-monitoring exemplifies an STS approach to responsive and responsible knowledge production that demands a more transparent and trustworthy relationship between the state and the public. EDGI's work shows how STS scholars can establish new modes of engagement with the state, and create spaces where the public can not only define and demand responsible knowledge practices, but also participate in the process of creating STS inspired forms of careful, collective and public knowledge construction.

DATA RESISTANCE: A SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL DATA AND GOVERNANCE INITIATIVE.

The dismantlement of evidence-based environmental governance by the Trump Administration requires new forms of activism that uphold science and environmental regulatory agencies while critiquing the politics of knowledge production. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) emerged after the November 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, becoming an organization of over 175 volunteer researchers, technologists, archivists, and activists innovating more just forms of government accountability and environmental regulation. Our successes include: 1) leading a public movement to archive vulnerable federal data evidencing climate change and environmental injustice; 2) conducting multi-sited interviews of current and former federal agency personnel regarding the transition into the Trump administration; 3) tracking changes to federal websites. In this article, we conduct a "social movement organizational autoethnography" on the field of movements intersecting within EDGI and on our theory, tactics, and practices. We offer ideas for expanding and iterating on methods of public, collaborative scholarship and advocacy.

Materializing Exposure: Developing an Indexical Method to Visualize Health Hazards Related to Fossil Fuel Extraction.

How can STS researchers collaborate with communities to design environmental monitoring devices that more effectively express their experiences and address gaps in regulation? This paper describes and shows the results of a novel method of visualizing environmental emissions of corrosive gases such as hydrogen sulfide (H2S) exposure using photographic paper. H2S is a neurotoxic and flammable gas that smells like rotten eggs and is frequently associated with oil and natural gas extraction. Communities living with oil and gas development in Wyoming report odors of rotten eggs and describe symptoms of H2S exposure. H2S is recognized as an acute and chronic threat to human and environmental health and oil and gas companies are required to have plans in place to prevent and respond to accidental, high concentration releases of H2S. They are not, however, required to monitor, report or prevent routine daily emissions. Yet 15-25% of the oil and gas wells in the US are predicted to contain H2S, and some communities surrounded by multiple wells report chronic, routine exposure. Chronic exposure is difficult to represent with current tools for monitoring H2S because they are designed to measure acute workplace exposure. Informed by STS theories of black boxes and regimes of imperceptibility that focus on the need to revise not only regulations but also material tools of science, this paper describes the development of an indexical approach to visualizing this hazard. In indexical design, the reactive sensing element of a scientific instrument is brought to the foreground. The silver in the photopaper is an index as it tarnishes with H2S exposure. Discolored tests strips can be arranged together to form data-rich maps of the exposure landscape where this discoloration both represents how the gas spreads through a space and is a physical trace of the gas. Preliminary results in the form of data-rich maps show that regulating H2S emissions as primarily accidental is inappropriate and fails to adequately protect human health.

Inspiring Collaboration: The Legacy of Theo Colborn's Transdisciplinary Research on Fracking.

This article describes Dr Theo Colborn's legacy of inspiring complementary and synergistic environmental health research and advocacy. Colborn, a founder of endocrine disruption research, also stimulated study of hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In 2014, the United States led the world in oil and gas production, with fifteen million Americans living within one mile of an oil or gas well. Colborn pioneered efforts to understand and control the impacts of this sea change in energy production. In 2005, her research organization The Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX) developed a database of chemicals used in natural gas extraction and their health effects. This database stimulated novel scientific and social scientific research and informed advocacy by (1) connecting communities' diverse health impacts to chemicals used in natural gas development, (2) inspiring social science research on open-source software and hardware for citizen science, and (3) posing new scientific questions about the endocrine-disrupting properties of fracking chemicals.