Researchers have found toxic hotspots of carcinogenic heavy metals in the air above two local glass companies, and the neighbors are demanding answers

Instead of eating the kale she grew in her backyard garden in Portland, Oregon, this spring, Jessica Applegate will submit the leafy green plants for toxic metal testing.

Recent revelations that heavy metals – specifically arsenic, cadmium and chromium – are hovering above the city in toxic hotspots have stunned the eco-conscious city. Along with the news came an unlikely culprit: artisan glass manufacturers.

Applegate, who has lived about a half mile from Bullseye Glass Company in south-east Portland for 18 years, said she was blindsided.

“I’m educated. I’m politically active. I serve on the board of Oregon Wild [an environmental advocacy group]. I’m a good citizen,” Applegate said, while sitting on her front porch last week. “And yet, I felt baffled by my own ignorance of the true state of our airshed.”

Since February, hundreds of nearby residents have had their urine tested for cancer-causing cadmium. The state’s top environmental official has resigned. Erin Brockovich, the environmental advocate, visited the city of about 600,000 people to talk to citizens after word spread that hexavalent chromium, also a carcinogen, could be one of the pollutants.

Applegate said her neighbors were focusing on being “rational, organized and solution-oriented” but that they also felt betrayed and were questioning the city and its officials, who have long basked in the reputation as being the greenest in the nation.

It turns out the state has known for at least a decade there were elevated levels of cadmium in the air but could not pinpoint the source. It was a US Forest Service research project that revealed where the toxic hotspots were located and discovered much higher levels of heavy metals than expected.

“I thought, we’ll probably see some industries emit different things, we’ll see some hotspots around permitted [industries],” said Sarah Jovan, one of the US Forest Service researchers. “But instead we found this unregulated industry. It was crazy, We first got the data back and looking at it was like … these hotspots don’t match up remotely with any of the known emitters of cadmium.”

The glass companies use the metals to make certain colors. Cadmium is integral to making reds and yellows, and chromium is key to making a blue-green tint.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bullseye Glass Company’s proximity to residential properties is born of Portland’s desire to avoid urban sprawl, and has neighbors worried about its effect on their health. Photograph: Steve Dipaola/AP

Bullseye Glass voluntarily suspended using cadmium and arsenic once the news broke. Uroboros Glass, another manufacturer, also stopped using cadmium and agreed to put a filter on their furnaces. They said they stopped using arsenic decades ago. Neither company was violating Oregon’s air quality requirements.

A manager with Bullseye Glass, which has been in the area since 1974 and has 150 employees and ships its products worldwide, said they learned of the elevated levels around the same time as the public. The company is working to install an air filtration system and has plans to resume full production by this summer.

“We have always been an environmentally friendly company,” Jones said, adding that Bullseye started out using glass from recycled bottles. “We have said we are willing to do what we have to be the cleanest, most environmentally conscious glass factory in the US, but people haven’t been willing to listen. They’re angry.”

Jones puts the blame on politicians, saying they should have enacted air quality standards years ago.

Nina DeConcini, with the Oregon department of environmental quality, said having residential neighborhoods near industry is a result of the city’s determination to avoid urban sprawl and embrace its bike-friendly ethos.

She added: “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh my gosh, Portland’s air is so dirty.’ But a lot of people around the country might not have done this testing.”

The state’s health authority has tested 513 Oregonians and detected cadmium in 5%. Continued air testing shows lower levels of metals since both the glass manufacturers voluntarily stopped using some of the metals. But the state recently announced news of a cancer cluster, calling it a “small, statistically significant” increase in the rate of bladder cancer in one area of North Portland, near Uroboros.

Both of Jennifer Jones’s teenage children went to school in what she calls the “Bullseye plume”, but she’s reticent to start pointing fingers at the glass companies right away with “so much uncertainty right now”.

Jones has taken workshops at Bullseye, and felt proud that it was a thriving, creative business. Obviously, those feelings have evolved.

“I have a friend, she could see bits of colored glass in her backyard [from Bullseye],” Jones said. “She used to think it’s charming and now she looks at the glass and wants to vomit. Who does that to a neighbor?”