Earth/Environment

Sweet pollution, toxic fumes from dry-cleaned clothes and more in this week’s news

Water pollution: How sweet
A team of chemists in western U.S. states has identified a new marker of water that’s been tainted by human wastes: the artificial sweetener sucralose. In a paper posted online August 31 in Environmental Science & Technology,the researchers report finding sucralose in the water entering 15 of 19 drinking water treatment plants that they studied — and coming out in the finished water from 13 of 17 such plants.