Chemical on derailed Ohio train isn’t banned in all products

CLAIM: A train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, was carrying a chemical that was banned in 1974.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Vinyl chloride, one of the chemicals on the freight train that derailed in East Palestine last month, was banned for use in aerosol products in 1974 by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. However, the compound is still allowed to be used in other products, such as plastic.

THE FACTS: Weeks after the Feb. 3 derailment, conspiratorial claims are continuing to spread on social media. One such post suggests the train was filled with a chemical that was banned in 1974.

“Trying to understand why a train was carrying over 300,000 gallons of a chemical that was banned in 1974,” reads the text over a close-up image of a person’s narrowed eyes surrounded by math symbols. One Twitter post that shared the image had received more than 7,000 likes as of Thursday.

The image doesn’t name vinyl chloride as the chemical to which it is referring. However, the compound, which was being carried by the train that derailed in East Palestine, was banned for use in aerosol products in 1974 by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

“The Commission has determined that the degree and nature of the hazard presented by aerosol products containing vinyl chloride is such that the public health and safety can be adequately served only by keeping these products out of the marketplace,” the commission’s 1974 statement on the ban reads. “Therefore, all such products would be banned.”

But the ban did not affect vinyl chloride’s use in plastic products and the chemical is still found in such items today. For example, it is commonly used to make polyvinyl hard plastic resin, a material in PVC plastic piping, Neil Donahue, a professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, told The Associated Press.

“To the best of my knowledge the only ban is indeed the use of vinyl chloride in spray cans,” Donahue said. He also noted that it’s not uncommon for hazardous materials to be transported by rail.

According to Donahue, the reason vinyl chloride was banned in aerosol products was because spray cans allow people to directly breathe in the toxic chemical. Vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of liver and other cancers, according to the federal government’s National Cancer Institute.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Feb. 22 preliminary report on the derailment, there were five tank cars carrying 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride, not 300,000 as the social media post states. The AP reported that about 1.8 million gallons of liquid waste has been collected from the derailment site, according to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Following the derailment, the compound was slowly released into the air and intentionally burned to prevent an uncontrolled blast.

A group of senators including Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and JD Vance, a Republican, introduced bipartisan legislation on Wednesday that aims to improve rail safety. The bill seeks to address regulatory questions that arose from the incident in East Palestine, including why the state of Ohio was not told about the hazardous load and why the train’s crew didn’t learn sooner of an impending equipment malfunction, according to AP reporting.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.