Friends of the Earth, the green campaign group, has been accused of scaremongering to raise money by suggesting that sand used in fracking could cause cancer.
The group distributed thousands of leaflets asking for donations to help stop fracking. The leaflets said fracking would expose communities to chemicals that could cause cancer because it involved “pumping millions of litres of water containing a toxic cocktail of chemicals deep underground . . . [which] could end up in your drinking water”.
The leaflet said that the group had already helped people in Lancashire prevent fracking by Cuadrilla, the company which had two applications rejected by the county council this summer. When Cuadrilla complained to Friends of the Earth that it did not use toxic chemicals, the group replied listing the evidence on which it based its claims. It wrote: “We understand that Cuadrilla used a significant amount of sand to frack the well at Preese Hall [in Lancashire in 2011]. Frack sand tends to contain significant amounts of silica which is a known carcinogen.”
Sand is used in fracking to prop open tiny fractures in shale to allow gas or oil to flow into a well.
In its response, Friends of the Earth provided a link to a report about fracking sand by Clive Mitchell, an industrial minerals specialist at the British Geological Survey.
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Mr Mitchell said that Friends of the Earth was wrong to suggest that sand used in fracking posed any cancer risk.
“It’s tantamount to scaremongering. It’s inaccurate and misleading,” he said.
Mr Mitchell said industrial workers who breathed in fine silica dust could suffer silicosis, a lung disease, but the dust particles were 50 times smaller than grains of fracking sand.
Paul Younger, a professor of energy engineering at the University of Glasgow, said that Friends of the Earth’s claims were nonsense. “Sand is silica. It’s exactly the same stuff that’s on every sandy beach in the country. What are they proposing? That we treat all beaches as contaminated land and pave them over? The debate about fracking should be on the basis of reason, not wild, unsubstantiated allegations that reveal that they don’t have the first clue about mainstream chemistry, let alone environmental toxicology”, he said.
Cuadrilla said that it was planning to make complaints about the “wilfully misleading” leaflet to the Charity Commission, Advertising Standards Authority and the Fundraising Standards Board.
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Friends of the Earth said: “[Cuadrilla] has used polyacrylamide, which contains acrylamide, a probable carcinogen, and it uses hydraulic fracturing sand, which tends to contain significant amounts of silica. Silica is a known carcinogen.”
Francis Egan, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, said polyacrylamide was widely used in industry, including by water companies and in contact lens solution. He said that it would not break down into acrylamide unless exposed to much higher temperatures than would be experienced in fracking and that it was “irresponsible and shameful” for a charity to make false claims in an attempt to raise money.