I’ve been doing some water testing for a creek that runs through a local park. You can read about it here. One reason for doing the testing is to determine if the water is safe for people to wade and fish in.

This month, I decided it was time for an arsenic test since arsenic is common in Iowa soil and water. Arsenic occurs naturally and has been known about as far back as the ancient Egyptian and Ming dynasties. It usually occurs in nature as salts and not as a free metal. The first recorded reaction yielding metallic arsenic was done by alchemist Albertus Magnes. Not even a chemist, an alchemist. Let that sink in.

Historical uses include using salts of arsenic as a green pigment and as an insecticide,

Today arsenic is primarily used as a wood preservative, although it’s found in semiconductors and the metal itself is a semiconductor. (Arsenic treated wood will take on a blue or green tint because the preservative is mixed with copper.)

Most arsenic used today is produced by China, Chile, and Kazakhstan.

Why is it toxic? Arsenic, abbreviated As, is the same column as nitrogen on the periodic table and can get involved with biological reactions involving nitrogen in a bad way. We all know it can act as a poison. It can kill slowly as well, causing bladder, skin cancer and other cancers. It can increase cholesterol and mess up your thyroid. High levels in the soil can cause birth defects.

Arsenic in Iowa hasn’t been thoroughly studied but it is concentrated in northern Iowa.

Arsenic as found in food and water has no taste or smell. Testing for arsenic poisoning was tricky until 1836.

Today, testing instruments are used. I’ve put a video of me explaining a similar technique at the bottom of this post. However, this time I didn’t do the testing myself. I sent a water sample off to a lab. It was much cheaper than paying me to run the test.

The results came back this week.  The news is good! No arsenic detected!

This is most certainly As you like it!

Saudi Arabia is going to cut oil production and although they say they are not doing it for political reasons, we can see our politicians here vocalizing what could be their wishes such as finishing the Keystone pipeline which would bring crude to their refinery in Texas. It’s hard to imagine that some US pols even speak against electric cars made in the USA. Or maybe not. If we all switched immediately to electric vehicles powered by wind and solar energy, would we still need oil? The answer is, yes.

Fuel oil and gas are not the only petroleum based products. The paving and roofing material asphalt is a complicated mixture of large hydrocarbons and plenty of sulfur, vanadium, and nickel impurities and is petroleum based. Tar can be made from coal or found naturally, as in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles where fossils of mammoths and dire wolves have been found. But tar and asphalt are not the only additional uses for petroleum.

Petroleum is the starting material for most of our plastics and synthetic materials, everything from fibers to pharmaceuticals, starts out as a form of oil.

Hydrocarbons can be chains or rings, and are distinguished by their composition-molecules made from just two elements, carbon and hydrogen. These materials can be light and flammable like naptha and gasoline or heavier as with asphalt and tar. Although they are useful in their own right, organic chemistry can step in and add elements to the hydrocarbons to make them into entirely new compounds. But they are the necessary beginning–the feed stock so to speak.

Here is an example of making something simple, acetic acid, as found in vinegar. Acetic acid contains oxygen in addition to hydrogen and carbon. It can be produced by fermentation as in this reaction where the acetic acid is bolded.

2 CO₂ + 4 H₂ → CH₃COOH + 2 H₂O.

It can also be made from alcohol, something you don’t want happening to your wine, for example, in this reaction starting with ethanol (as in wine) and adding oxygen naturally. It’s why you need to carefully control the amount of oxygen when wine making.

C₂H₅OH + O₂ → CH₃COOH + H₂O

With the proper catalysts, acetic acid can easily be made from oil, for example as in this reaction:

2 C₄H₁₀ + 5 O₂ → 4 CH₃CO₂H + 2 H₂O

Why would anyone do this when acetic acid can be made from fermentation? We need a lot of it. Non-food acetic acid has been produced industrially since the 1960s and accounts for 90% of the usage world-wide. Over 5 million tons are produced each year. It’s a high demand chemical used to make coatings, paints, inks, and plastics such as PET. It’s one example of how we use chemical feed stock petroleum to make products we use every day.

Twenty percent of each barrel of oil is used as a chemical feed stock and when oil goes up in price, so does anything made from oil.

There are biological ways to make synthetic materials as discussed here and in my novel Lost in Waste. But as long as there is plenty of oil available, it has a long history of being used as a fuel and a feed stock and this isn’t likely to change anytime soon. Kicking the world’s oil addiction won’t be easy, unless we want to go back to life as it was 100 years ago. And we all know how some politicians love plastic bags. Fortunately, crude oil prices are still much lower than their highest point in 2008 so don’t despair. We will have plenty of low cost cigarette butts other plastics in the near future.

The last time I cleaned out the dryer vent, I felt like my clothes were disappearing before my eyes. So much lint, all produced when my clothes break off fibers as they tumble in the hot air. My use of cotton, which gets more linty than synthetic fibers helped fill the lint trap.

However, a switch to non-natural fibers produces other problems. Many synthetic fabrics shed dryer lint microplastics which can be can be bad for birds, and if the particles come out in the wash, bad for aquatic life. And plastic clothes disappear, too. The shirt I have on in my profile picture has gotten almost see-through! Fragrance from dryer vents is a source of pollution. Not only that, lint is flammable. It’s estimated that many home fires start in the clothes dryer or uncleaned ducts . Yes, your dryer is a fire hazard.

Clothes dryers were developed in the late 1930s and became popular in the 1960s. I used to consider line drying something older people did. I have memories of staring at bras on the neighbor’s clothes line and wondering if I’d ever need one that large. (Turns out, I didn’t.)

Each load of laundry dried at home costs about $1 . Most families do nine loads of laundry per week. It adds up to$468 per year. Dryers use more energy than refrigerators–about 4% of your total electricity costs. One solution could be to use dryer balls , which allow air circulation between your clothes and this reduces drying time and possibly keeps items of clothing from rubbing on each other.

Likewise, using the shortest wash cycle possible, avoiding hot water, and sorting clothes so that rough clothes like jeans don’t rub on soft clothes like t-shirts will help cut down on the wear and tear and broken fibers on your clothes.

I’ll be honest, I have another solution. I can’t wait until the skies clear, the sun comes out and with the help of a gentle breeze, it dries my clothes. If you find joy in the the smell of line-dried clothes, you’ve got a discriminating sniffer. Line dried laundry contains special scents, created by the sun. One, nonanal (not pronounced as you might think), is found on the skin of older people, is called aldehyde C-9 in the perfume industry, and it was one of the magic ingredients that made Chanel No. 5.”

Line drying won’t wear out your clothes or shrink them as dryers do. The sun can sterilize clothes to some extent. Some items such as Turkish towels, with extra long fibers, are meant to be hung to dry, not put in the dryer.

One concern about line drying is outdoor pollen falling on your laundry. There are a few ways to minimize this problem such as not line drying when pollen counts are high or putting the laundry in the dryer for five minutes after it hangs outside to rid it of the allergens.

Currently, only about 8% of homes in the US use a clothesline. In some places, they are banned as being unsightly, especially if used for underwear. Most people find line drying too time consuming. I must admit that a sunny day plus time to hang clothes is a luxury. Until self cleaning clothes became a reality, I’m going to indulge and breathe in the nonanal as much as I can. Please try not to look at my underwear.

While working on a new novel, I needed a way to determine if something was acidic. I asked myself, how about adding baking powder and seeing it if fizzes–ala the volcano kids like to make with our kitchen supplies? But, since this is a paranormal historical, I wondered: was baking soda or anything like it even used in 1872? The answer is Yes. Baking soda’s near twin, soda ash or sodium carbonate has been used since the days when chemistry was alchemy or “the dark art of Egypt” and was used in mummification. It can be mined or produced chemically.

Baking soda, a less caustic close relative to soda ash, known to chemists as sodium bicarbonate, can be found along with sodium carbonate in natural mineral springs. Saratoga New York and Manitou Springs Colorado are examples of highly bicarbonated waters. It’s believed that an underground reaction produces the bicarbonate. Carbonates are common in nature and are found in limestone and shells in the form of calcium carbonate, and even in geodes.

The baking product, baking soda, was developed in by Church & Dwight to replace potash or potassium carbonate made from wood ashes, which was hard to make, not very pure, and had a weird smell.

Baking soda, soda ash and baking powder act as rising or leavening agents, producing bubbles of carbon dioxide to make baked goods rise and become fluffy. This rising action is called leavening. An alternative to adding a leavening agent is to whip the substance and stir in air.

Yeast is biological leavening agent, releasing carbon dioxide as an an exhale. The problem is, it takes a while to act.

Baking soda works almost instantly, but must be mixed with an acid such as cream of tartar, sour milk, sour cream, or vinegar, creating the carbon dioxide producing reaction. It’s also dependent on the amount of acid added and some things such as sour milk are not consistent in their composition.

The first baking powder contained baking soda and cream of tartar (tartaric acid, a by-product of wine making) which reacted together quickly and was expensive. Modern double acting baking powder contains an acid and baking soda plus corn starch to keep them from reacting when solid.

And believe it or not, controversy surrounded it.

Created in 1859, the first modern version contained monocalcium phosphate, calcium dihydrogenphosphate to chemists, made from animal bones. Corn starch, and baking soda were additional ingredients. It slowly activated when water was added and fully reacted when heated (making it double acting and slower rising) Later, the monocalcium phosphate used was mined. This company was Rumford, which still makes this version of baking powder. Rival companies sprung up and alum, which was very cheap, was used in products such as Clabber Girl, clabber being sour milk. Thanks to politicians bought with baking powder fortunes, the alum based products were temporarily banned as being unhealthy.

Despite politics, the alum based powders won out due to their low price. But was the competition right, are alum based powders are bad for you? What do we know about the health effects of aluminum, the third most common element in the Earth’s crust?

Recently, nanoaluminum particles were found to impair memory and cognition in zebra fish. (Fan, Rong, et al. “Effects of Nano-Alumina on Learning and Memory Levels in Zebrafish: Roles of Particle Size and Aluminum Ion.” Huanjing Yu Zhiye Yixue = Journal of Environmental & Occupational Medicine, vol. 36, no. 6, 2019, pp. 526.)

Miners exposed to aluminum dust have elevated incidences of Parkinson’s. (Zeng, Xiaoke, M.Sc, et al. “Aluminum Dust Exposure and Risk of Neurodegenerative Diseases in a Cohort of Male Miners in Ontario, Canada.” Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, vol. 47, no. 7, 2021, pp. 531-539. )

There are perhaps links to aluminum exposure through dust or food and neurological problems. However, most studies do not find aluminum to be easily absorbed when eaten or put on the skin. (Lead is a much greater risk and is associated with breast cancer so it would be better to worry about bullets than your leavening agent.) Aluminum and other metals are found in the brains of people who had Alzheimer’s, but it’s not known if the aluminum caused the disease since healthy brains also have some aluminum in them. One except is if aluminum is mixed with a fluoride product. This combination is toxic. One thing to keep in mind is that aluminum is commonly used in water treatments to remove cloudiness.

In any case, most baking powder now is alum based for better or worse. But there are exceptions for those who want the good-old fashioned formula. So bakers, rise and shine!