HOUSTON (1080 KRLD)- A study by the City of Houston and One Breath Partnership, including the Environmental Integrity Project, Air Alliance Houston and other groups shows it's in three areas along the Ship Channel.
Lauren Hopkins with the City's health department says they looked at levels with the potential risk to cause one cancer case per million people and found concentrations about 13 times higher than that. But here's the catch.
"The vast majority, greater than 90 percent of the formaldehyde that we see is not emitted from a source but is actually formed by other pollutants that the industries are emitting. When those pollutants come together, they make formaldehyde. In order to control it or to lower the formaldehyde we need to lower those pollutants that are the ingredients to make that pollutant."
Hopkins says they have provided this information to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality so they can refine the way they look at permits for these facilities or institute new regulations. "There are limits for those pollutants right now, but this study indicates they are not low enough." The pollutants that make formaldehyde, are by themselves not necessarily toxic. "The other big really big problem is formaldehyde is it is an ingredient of ozone, which is a well-known pollutant in Houston. So in order to solve our ozone problem, we have to solve this other problem too."
The neighborhoods in Houston with the highest risk are fenceline communities in industrial neighborhoods and are lower income and have more people of color.
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