Reply #20: Corexit is used to clean up oil spills [View All]

It contains a chemical called 2-butoxyethanol, which is also called ethylene glycol monobutyl ether.

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp118.html will tell you all about this chemical. It is very dangerous. Hemolytic anemia is just one of the diseases it causes.

Chemicals like the Corexit family and the Inipol family were used to help oil-eating bacteria break down the crude oil being carried by the Exxon Valdez. Unfortunately, they also break down the workers. (And it turns out that the best way to remediate an oil spill is to boom it off but do nothing else; nature is capable of denaturing all of that oil anyway.)

Why a Home Depot employee would have this kind of exposure: 2-butoxyethanol is found in hundreds of home-care products. Formula 409 is a big one--it is very popular because it works, but it's not the only household chemical that contains it. Krud Kutter probably has it, Goo Gone I know has it, the special "citrus" cleaners we sell have it (because it's cheaper than d-limonene, apparently), even paints have it. And it's not like you can go to Lowe's, Target or a supermarket and find safer products; the entire mass-marketer spectrum sells the same things. When cleaning supplies come in, they're shipped in one of two ways: on a slipsheet direct from the manufacturer, or on a pallet from the distribution center. When you get a slipsheet of...oh, let's say Formula 409...you'll get 32 cases of 409. They are sitting on a thin sheet of cardboard (the slipsheet) and are wrapped with plastic stretch wrap. You pick it out of the truck with your slipsheet machine, deposit it on an empty pallet, and haul the pallet out to the floor. If you get a pallet from the DC, you'll find a mix of products--we might need five cases of bleach, ten of Brasso, two of laundry soap and enough liquid hand soap to fill out the skid. Okay, back to the point: the three ways you could come into contact with 2-butoxyethanol in a Home Depot are:

1) breaking some or all of the bottles in a shipping unit. Dropping a case off a ladder is the most common way this happens. Fortunately, this doesn't happen very often.
2) bottles leaking--some of those products arrive in wet boxes, and you can just smell the chemicals contained therein. This happens a lot.
3) using the products to clean the store.

Of the three choices, the last is most probable.

I'm on my store's safety team, and one of the things we can do is to select products for use by the associates. We used Orange Glo to clean price labels off beams for many years. I stopped that, not because of the 2-butoxyethanol in it, but because it has other "petroleum distillates" in it and, as poorly as this product actually works to dissolve the glue on these labels, you're standing around huffing these petroleum distillates for far too long. Now we use WD-40. Yes, it is pure petroleum distillate. However, it cleans the beams very quickly so you're inhaling hydrocarbons for much less time. (Plus, it gives the beams just a very light oiling. If you rub the beams down well, new price tags will stick...but they're easier to get off in the future and keeps crud from sticking to the beams, which keeps them cleaner.)