Wednesday, June 17, 2020

People were buying 55-gallon drums of DCM off eBay?

Via NPR, this odd news:
On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Amazon and eBay to stop selling certain pesticide-containing products, many of which claimed to fight off and disinfect from the coronavirus. 
The orders also bar the e-commerce giants from selling products that contain toxic chemicals like chlorine dioxide and methylene chloride, which is federally regulated as a toxic substance. 
Exposure to methylene chloride can cause death, but in one instance, eBay marketed and sold 55-gallon drums of methylene chloride as a coronavirus disinfectant and paint stripper, according to the EPA press release.
Here's the EPA link. I think it is quite possible that someone was selling DCM as a COVID-19 disinfectant (people do dumb things), but actually arranging for delivery? A drum weighs 600 pounds! Can't get that in a UPS truck. 

2 comments:

  1. Delivery services are available out in the sticks. A company will contract for freight and will add that on to your bill. We ordered a U-Line table that weighed about 400 lbs and it was delivered, and they did a pretty good job at it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had a tub refinished and the guy was lamenting not being able to buy dichloromethane paint stripper anymore. He implied that there were a lot of tradesmen who would jump if they found a source of dichloromethane.

    ReplyDelete

looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20