The prize is the peg, and the prize is large. In April 2023 the Puget Sound Institute announced that Edward Kolodziej, the environmental chemist, was one of 20 finalists for the Frontiers Planet Prize, chosen by an international jury as National Champion for the United States from a field of 233 universities on six continents, with more than 40 US institutions submitting candidates. The winner’s purse is one million Swiss francs, roughly $1.1 million, to be settled at a ceremony in Montreux on April 27. “I am honored to represent the United States and very proud that the excellent team of people working on this project, many of whom have dedicated years of sustained effort to this problem, got this recognition.” Kolodziej said.
The work that put him on the list solved a fisheries murder mystery. Every fall, coho salmon return from the sea to the urban streams of Puget Sound, and in more than half the cases in those creeks the fish die before they can spawn; in the worst creeks, every one of them does, a die-off researchers had watched since the 1980s. The killer, identified by a University of Washington Tacoma-led team and published in Science on December 3, 2020, was a molecule nobody had named: 6PPD-quinone, a transformation product of 6PPD, “It’s like a preservative for tires,” as research scientist Zhenyu Tian put it, the chemical that keeps every tire on the road from rotting. “Here we started with a mix of 2,000 chemicals and were able to get all the way down to this one highly toxic chemical, something that kills large fish quickly and we think is probably found on every single busy road in the world”, Kolodziej said of the hunt; the answer arrived in his lab when Tian, working from a formula of 18 carbons, 22 hydrogens and two each of nitrogens and oxygens, recalled: “Then one day in December, it was just like bing! in my mind. The killer chemical might not be a chemical directly added to the tire, but something related”. Co-senior author Jenifer McIntyre, of Washington State University, had earlier cleared the usual suspects, from high temperatures to low oxygen to zinc.
The reason the prize juries care is scale. The chemical turned up in Los Angeles runoff and in urban creeks near San Francisco, which surprised nobody, since 6PPD appears to be in all tires; by 2023 Kolodziej was calling 6PPD-quinone perhaps the second most lethal compound known to sensitive aquatic life, documented in tire-wear dust washed into waterways, in the air, in the crumb rubber of play fields and, recent studies found, at detection frequencies of 60 to 100% in human urine, effects unknown. “It’s not just out in the environment, but it’s in our bodies, too,” he said. “This isn’t just an ecosystem problem. We’re also exposed or probably breathing it into our lungs as little bits of tire dust,” he said.
The remediation ledger is thinner than the research one, which is where Kolodziej’s advocacy sits. Environmentally friendly stormwater treatment can strip the chemical, the team noted, but you cannot build a treatment plant for every road; the neater fix is reformulation, what the field calls “salmon safe” tires. McIntyre testified at a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on July 15, 2021, convened to shape legislative and industry responses. Tire ingredients protected as “confidential business information” should be public, Kolodziej argued: “Really, we shouldn’t be surprised when something toxic turns up because nobody was allowed to look in the first place.” Delivery giants of the Amazon or FedEx type are, he reckons, probably among the biggest sources of toxic tire rubber anywhere, and nobody is measuring them. The data gaps, he said, need filling to build tires that are safe for people and fish alike, and his lab runs on three to four people. “We need people to care. We need funding and support!”
The detail that matters, as the chemists keep saying, is the irony under the tread: the molecule that makes tires safe to drive is the one killing the fish, and swapping it out means re-engineering a global product one compound at a time. Kolodziej’s own summary is the blunt version: “Basically, all the tires in the world need to be changed, and soon!” The alternative-preservative shortlist is still open, as he concedes, but the faith in the trade is intact, because “we do know that chemists are really smart and have many tools in their toolboxes to figure out a safer chemical alternative.” Whether Montreux adds a million francs to that effort, the salmon, presumably, are available for peer review.
Sources
- Ed Kolodziej among finalists for Frontiers Planet Prize | Puget Sound Institute
- Tire Chemicals and Coho Salmon – Washington Stormwater Center
