Cleaning your car may not protect you from cancer-causing chemicals: Study

This study is published in the ‘Environmental Research Journal’.

This follows on the heels of a related study, the more you travel, the more you are exposed to this chemical.

TDCIPP, or Chlorinated Tris, is a chemical flame retardant widely used in automobile seat foam. In addition to TDCIPP being on California’s Proposition 65 list because it is carcinogenic, UCR environmental toxicologist David Volz has found that TDCIPP prevents zebrafish embryos from developing normally. Other studies have linked it to infertility in some women.

Some research suggested that dust removal may reduce exposure to chemicals. Volz and his colleagues hoped the same was true for the car’s interiors.

Researchers divided about 50 study participants, all of them heavy commuters, into four groups, whom they tracked for two weeks. One group wiped no dust off their cars at all, the other wiped off dust in both weeks, and two other groups wiped out only one of the two weeks.

All participants were given silicone wristbands for continuous wear during the two-week trial period. The molecular structure of silicon makes it ideal for capturing airborne contaminants such as TDCIPP.

“Going into this, our hypothesis was that the no-wipe group would have the highest concentration, the two-week wipe group would be the lower, and the partial wipe group would be somewhere in between,” Volz said.

“But what we found was that there was basically no difference between any of the groups,” he said.

Previously, researchers assumed that travelers’ primary contact with TDCIPP was through contaminated dust. One possible explanation for the result of this study, Volz said, was the possibility that TDCIPP is not coming from dust that can be cleaned up. Instead, it could transfer directly from the car seats to the wristbands in the form of gas or aerosol.

“This result suggests that dust may not be the primary route of exposure,” Volz said.

“The dust certainly has some compound like TdCIPP attached to it, however, we can’t rule out that people are simply breathing airborne compounds.”

Another possibility is that the flame retardant is coming from outside through air vents, but the researchers don’t think this scenario is likely.

Until there’s more data, Volz had a suggestion for concerned readers.

“Apart from a major policy change that replaces TDCIPP with something else, wearing a mask in your car might not hurt,” Volz said.

“Just as wearing a mask will reduce COVID-19 transmission, so will aerosol-phase flame retardants. N95s are probably best for this purpose,” he said.