Meeting this hour at a home in Northeast Seattle is a group of people with a message for the rest of the world: When you clean your laundry, you're probably polluting local waterways.
The gathering is a press conference by People for Puget Sound and the Washington Toxics Coalition to announce findings from a study of homes in western Washington in which a class of chemicals known as phthalates were found in house dust and laundry wastewater.
It's pronounced THAL-ates. Get used to hearing about them. They are endocrine disrupters that come from all that plastic we've got around our houses.
These chemicals have now been measured at six homes around Puget Sound, and sometimes at levels that raise concern. While this is an admittedly small study on one chemical, it shows that stuff in people's house dust is getting into the wastewater, which ultimately flows into local waterways.
More details here. It's time for the InvestigateWest staff meeting. I'll update this later if I get time.
Update 8:45 p.m.: OK, folks, I'm running out of gas after a 13-hour workday and so will have to be satisfied with referring you to a story by John Stang at seattlepi.com. I had intended to send you to a story by my wife, Sally Deneen, for seattlepostglobe.org, but it's not posted yet. Nor do I see anything over at the Seattle Times.
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