Shaving Cream War: a Joke, Right? : Why the banning of 16 items is a smog-buster
As the late Sen. Everett Dirksen once said of the federal budget, a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there and pretty soon you are talking real money.
The same is true of smog. So the state Air Resources Board took aim last week at 16 liquids or lotions you can find in almost any house. With these 16 products, California’s 30 million people pump as much pollution-breeding chemical waste into the air every day as 20 big oil refineries or 60 small ones.
SMOG PROMOTERS: Consider a common sight in California as the morning rush hour unfolds. A car backs out of a driveway, jets of water spraying its windshield, its wipers flicking away the night’s accumulation of dust and grime. By the time that car reaches the street, it has a clean windshield, the better to see and avoid other cars, pedestrians, cats, garbage trucks and the like--and that’s good.
What’s bad, as the Air Board said last week, is that the air is now a little bit dirtier. Windshield-washer fluids that drivers mix with water to help the wiper blades brush away bugs and other debris is known in the multisyllabic language of air-pollution control as a “volatile organic compound.” This is another way of saying hydrocarbon, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon that on the average sunny day in Southern California mixes with oxides of nitrogen to create smog.
Washing a single windshield is one thing. But there are 15 million cars in California. A squirt here and a squirt there and pretty soon you are talking real smog.
The air board is not reaching in to snatch hair spray and aerosol shaving creams out of bathroom cabinets. Californians will still be able to buy furniture and floor polish, bug spray, kitchen cleaners and other items among the 16 formulas.
The important changes will be made at the factories that produce these items, compelling them to do so with formulas that reduce the amount of hydrocarbons set loose every time the cap comes off a bottle or a spray-button is pushed.
Manufacturers will spend anywhere from $16,000 to $500,000 a year more to produce the reformulated goods. They probably will cost consumers between a penny and a quarter more.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL PAYOFF: What will that buy in terms of clean air? About 45 fewer tons each day of hydrocarbons, according to the Air Board. Getting reductions of that magnitude out of major oil refineries in California would mean shutting down 10 of the big ones.
The action of the Air Board in Sacramento, which will require changes in six of the products by 1993 and the rest by 1994, is part of a new phase of pollution control.
The big, and relatively easy, targets like power plants, refineries and fleets of automobiles are now covered. Future gains on smog will involve tightening up on thousands or millions of small sources.
The Air Board is absolutely on the right track. Our guess is that Californians may not notice these incremental changes for years--when they take deep breaths or realize that they can actually see the mountains near home.
