Will San Antonio Remember the River & Ban Coal Tar Sealers?
Or Will They Forfeit the Future? The City of San Antonio, Texas, the nation’s 7th largest city at 1.5 million people, may become the nation’s largest city to ban coal tar pavement sealers. Earlier this year the City laid out a schedule to bring this before the San Antonio Council by summer. District 8 Councilman […]
PCTC Roadshow Formula: Say Anything + Claim Anything
The Belleville-Area Independent newspaper last week ran a summary of a meeting at Van Buren Township, Michigan (VBT). You may recall that VBT is the first community to outright ban coal tar sealers in the State of Michigan and they are the first in the US to ban high-PAH sealers even those that aren’t made from […]
Cradle to Grave: An Inescapable Life with Coal Tar Sealers
I was shocked about what I learned about coal tar pavement sealers earlier this week. No this isn’t a guest writing here, but rather someone who has written over 300 posts on the topic. (At full screen the above presentation should be self-running) I was speaking with Dan Chiles from Springfield, Missouri; former Mayor Pro […]
2016 Coal Tar vs. Asphalt Sealer Price Comparison Reveals the True Value of the Survey
For several years now, we have done an annual survey of the costs of pavement sealers. Primarily we do this to demonstrate the small, if any, price and performance difference between asphalt-based and coal tar based products and to monitor how the market is changing. Commercial PricingDecision-makers often rightly want to know regulating coal tar […]
Industry Denial of Toxic House Dust is Off-Track
A few weeks ago we introduced a series of posts to look at the pavement sealcoat industry’s latest PR piece to get people to continue to use their coal tar product. Now we’ll investigate their claim that there really isn’t any truth to the studies about contaminated dust from these sealers getting into homes and […]
The Bad, The Good, and The Really Good of Coal Tar Sealers in MI
The following is a newsletter article from the Huron River Watershed Council who have admirably taken up this effort to ban coal tar sealers and other high-PAH products from communities. The Huron River is just west of Detroit and includes the City of Ann Arbor. People often ask how to get these products regulated in […]
CONSUMER ALERT: It isn’t Just Coal Tar That Lacks Transparency
Over the years, we’ve caught industry representatives getting cute with the names of their products in order to stay one step ahead of negative public knowledge and perceptions of their coal tar sealers. First they dropped “‘coal” out of their name and added “refined” to give it the perception that all of the impurities are […]
Do Pavement Sealers Cause Cancer?
The last post on this site discussed a recently introduced brochure published by the trade group representing the manufacturers of coal tar sealers for asphalt. The group is the Pavement Coatings Technology Council or PCTC. We reviewed the first of seven claims made in that brochure on why the use of coal tar sealers are safe. […]
Coal Tar Spin: What the Latest Industry PR Piece Isn’t Telling You
New Brochure Unveiled Among Unimpressed Audience Last month the Pavement Coatings Technology Council (PCTC) unveiled their latest attempt to get people to continue to use coal tar sealers (or their new sanitized name “refined tar sealers”). It was presented at a session with at the National Pavement Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina. More than 2/3 […]
On Paws and PAHs
On Paws and PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) Recently we faced the unpleasant decision to put a dog of ours, Chandler (above left) to sleep after being a big part of the family for nearly 13 years. Even though she was annoying at times with family and guests, I am surprised by the sadness I […]