Focus on Small Polluters : A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine and . . . Smog?

Mention smog and images of polluting cars, diesel buses and oil refineries come to mind.

Mention wineries or bakeries and most people think about the bouquet of fine wine and the aroma of fresh baked bread.

But, air pollution regulators say that bread and wine may have more in common with tailpipe exhaust than meets the eye.

Simply put, ethanol vapors from bakeries and wineries are wafting into the atmosphere and forming ozone, the health-impairing oxidant commonly known as photochemical smog.

Until recently, emissions from wineries and bakeries were all but ignored. It was felt that their comparatively insignificant contribution to air pollution wasn’t worth the trouble to control.

Now, however, a new wave of air pollution controls on small-time polluters is under study in California that could touch the life styles of nearly everyone. Wine makers and bakers are not alone.

In Southern California, everything from lawn mowers and aerosol spray cans to swimming pool heaters and lines of idling cars at fast-food restaurants with drive-through service are under scrutiny.

“The fact is that the biggest smog problem in the nation is the accumulated contribution from thousands of small sources and every amount of pollution you control is important,” said Bill Sessa of the state Air Resources Board staff in Sacramento.

The sharpening focus on seemingly small-time polluters comes at a time when two decades of increasingly stringent and costly controls on major emission sources such as oil refineries and automobiles have not been sufficient to meet federal Clean Air Act standards.

One out of three Americans still lives in urban areas that will fail to meet the federal ozone standard by December’s deadline. Some regions, such as the South Coast Air Basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, may never meet the standard.

And, while many argue that far more can be done to squeeze significant emission reductions out of major sources, it seems clear that first-time controls on an array of small-time polluters are only a matter of time.

Individual Contributors

“There’s just no big single bad guy out there that we’re ignoring,” said James Lents, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. “There are just thousands of individual industries and individual people whose day-to-day living and production habits all add up to create the worst air pollution problem in the nation,” he said.

While a large oil refinery might spew out four tons of various emissions daily, small polluters like dry cleaners and gas stations emit only several pounds each daily. But the output of the small polluters adds up.

Polluters of fewer than 25 pounds a day account for half of all hydrocarbon emissions and 6% of all nitrogen oxide in the South Coast Air Basin, the state Air Resources Board reports.

Ozone is created when hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides combine in the atmosphere in the presence of sunlight.

The average South Coast Basin resident contributes more than 125 pounds of ozone a year from such everyday activities as driving to work, using gasoline-powered lawn mowers and aerosol deodorants, according to testimony before a congressional subcommittee meeting in Los Angeles recently. The aerosol spray cans emit nearly four tons of hydrocarbons a day in the basin.

Cost to the Environment

“Everything we do in this highly technological society has a cost to . . . the environment. Underarm deodorants have a byproduct, some pollution. If there is a way not of stopping this but of doing something better and polluting less, that’s the way we ought to go,” said Lucille Van Ommering, an air quality specialist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional headquarters in San Francisco.

A forerunner of the new controls appeared several years ago when newly installed natural gas-fired home furnaces and water heaters were required to meet stricter emission standards.

But imposing additional controls on small-time polluters may be as politically difficult as it has been to slap controls on cars, refineries, power plants and factories.

In 1982, for example, the South Coast Air Quality Management District talked about banning gasoline-powered leaf blowers only to be besieged by scores of angry gardeners. The controls were never imposed, even though they would have reduced hydrocarbon emissions by 6.7 tons a day.

In San Francisco, large bakeries are protesting proposed controls that require afterburners on their ovens to burn off the smog-producing ethanol emissions--and with them the familiar baked-bread aroma.

Bakery Emissions

Bakeries account for two to three tons of ethanol emissions each day in the Bay Area. The proposed controls on five large bakeries making more than 100,000 pounds of bread daily would reduce those emissions by at least a third, to 1.2 tons a day at a cost of a penny a loaf, according to Bay Area Air Quality Management District officials.

“That’s going to be the major down side. You will no longer have the aroma of fresh baked bread--or Ding Dongs,” said Peter Hess of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

In Fresno, wine makers are gearing up to oppose even “suggested” controls on wine fermentation tanks that could reduce ethanol emissions from tanks of 50,000 gallons or more by 431 tons a year--a 90% reduction.

“All of a sudden such fundamental staples as bread and wine that are 6,000 years old are being repositioned by the technical community as contributory to air pollution problems,” complained John DeLuca, president of the Wine Institute, which represents 521 California wineries, including such majors as Gallo.

Wine makers are digging in for a protracted battle and show every sign of fighting new controls in much the same way that automobile manufacturers, oil companies and electrical utilities have fought controls for years. Indeed, to build a case against controls, they are hiring some of the same attorneys and independent laboratories used by oil companies in their campaigns.

Vintners’ Complaints

The developing battle over whether to require controls on fermentation tanks at wineries is a study in political deja vu.

Wine makers, like the oil companies before them, are complaining about the cost of control technologies, the possible adverse effect on their product, and warning that they will be placed at a competitive disadvantage because foreign wine makers are not saddled with the same expensive controls. (The ARB said the controls would add anywhere from 1.2 cents to 34 cents to the cost of a bottle of wine, depending on the type of wine and the control technology used.)

The industry is also calling for additional air chemistry studies before any action is taken.

Recently, during a hearing before the state Air Resources Board in Sacramento, witnesses from the Wine Institute produced charts that indicated that ethanol emissions are not as reactive as other smog-producing hydrocarbons and, in fact, may not produce smog at all.

The Wine Institute’s suggestion drew a smile from ARB Chairwoman Jan Sharpless, who has long heard similar arguments from the oil industry that refinery emissions of nitrogen oxides actually suppressed ozone development over a wider area than ARB studies have found and therefore should not be controlled.

Ironic Response

“It seems to me,” she said with a hint of irony, “that so far we’ve hit more (ozone) suppressants than we’ve hit (ozone) contributors. If that’s the case I don’t understand why we’re having an ozone problem.”

Ozone reduces lung capacity and aggravates human respiratory diseases such as asthma. In animals, ozone has been shown to damage lungs and cause their premature aging and also weaken the animal’s ability to resist respiratory infections. Ozone also reduces crop yields and damages trees.

There are smog episodes in the South Coast Air Basin when ozone concentrations are two to three times the permissible level of .12 of a part of ozone per million parts of air for one hour.

The new attention that is slowly being brought to bear on smaller polluters is leaving some environmentalists uneasy. They are concerned that major industries will seize the opportunity to divert attention and regulatory pressure from themselves.

Earlier this month, a major oil company official called for an examination of smaller pollution sources. “It is time to be open and candid with the public,” Carleton B. Scott, Unocal Corp.’s director of environmental sciences, urged a congressional subcommittee chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles)

“There is a direct linkage between air quality, life style, and the cost of living here in the basin,” he said. “All sources of emissions must come under scrutiny for control--stationary, mobile, transportation, domestic and commercial. Fireplaces, water heaters and lawn mowers must be considered right along with utilities, cars and heavy industry. The piecemeal approach used so far simply will not work.”

But, remarks like Scott’s raise a red flag for some environmentalists. Gladys Meade, director of environmental health for the American Lung Assn. of California, insisted in an interview, “There’s still some biggies out there.”

Waxman himself roundly assailed the South Coast Air Quality Management District for not doing more to control major polluters. “I am frankly skeptical of government claims that everything has been done that can be reasonably done to reduce ozone and carbon monoxide in Los Angeles and across the state,” Waxman said.

For example, he noted that a recent joint federal-state audit of the district discovered that 60% of all yearly air pollution permit applications in the basin were filed by businesses after they had begun construction.

The district was also found to be granting exceptions to air pollution restrictions, most of the time without even knowning what the effects on air quality would be.

Such lapses, Waxman said, “paint a shocking picture of an air pollution agency that has lost control. . . .”

Still, air pollution regulators at the regional, state and federal levels say that if by magic every motor vehicle were removed from the South Coast Air Basin--or in the alternative, every major factory was dismantled--the ozone standard would still not be met.

“To meet attainment, new measures may be required which would impose more directly on California citizens, such as product bans, parking restrictions, auto use restrictions, and other transportation control measures,” said Judith Ayres, regional EPA administrator.

Prepared to Pay More

A public opinion poll conducted by the Institute of Politics and Government at USC found that respondents were not satisfied with the air quality and were prepared to pay more for cleaner air.

For Van Ommering of the EPA, the new wave of controls doesn’t seem as farfetched as might appear. “Ten years ago a lot of the things now in place, the vapor recovery systems at gasoline pumps and the complete phase-down of lead, seemed completely unworkable,” she observed. Technological advances may make palatable tomorrow what is hard to swallow today, she said.

Lents of the South Coast Air Quality Management District added: “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between a cattle feed lot and a bakery and an oil refinery when you look at their emissions if it’s causing the same ozone pollution we see out there.

“Historically, it’s been hard for the average person to see it that way. But, these places ultimately add to our ozone problem and we need to apply reasonable controls to those processes. Historically, there has been a hands-off (approach) on these sources, but we just don’t intend to leave any rock unturned in trying to improve the problem here.”