Vehicle chrome bumper photo by Chad Kirchoff on unsplash.com

There’s a toxic history to the shiny decorative finishes so ubiquitous on the wheels and bumpers of classic cars.

Chrome plating is important to a variety of consumer products from vintage automobiles to aerospace components to plumbing fixtures. 

But hexavalent chromium—a highly hazardous substance emitted by chrome-plating businesses—is 500 times more carcinogenic than diesel exhaust, putting it in the cross hair of regulators for decades.

The California Air Resources Board last week approved a landmark ban on use of the substance by the chrome plating industry. The ban requires companies, who opposed the action, to use alternative materials.

The air board in 1988 adopted its first emissions standards for chromium 6 use in the plating industry, requiring facilities to equip their tanks with fume suppressants, filters or other pollution control devices. Over the intervening decades, those rules have been revised to further restrict and regulate hexavalent chromium.

The toxin has some presence in popular culture. The court battle over the presence of the chemical in drinking water in the San Bernardino County town of Hinkley was dramatized in the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

But environmental advocates and residents of Los Angeles’ low-income, industrial neighborhoods and cities have long raised concerns. Residents of the southeast industrial city of Bell Gardens sued a chrome plating company, Chrome Crankshaft, in 1999, accusing it of producing emissions that had resulted in diseases including cancer, according to The Los Angeles Times.

More recently, air monitoring in the southeast industrial city of Paramount was expanded after chromium 6 was discovered in much higher levels than other parts of Los Angeles County in 2016. The Paramount Unified School District detected chromium 6 in air samples inside two classrooms there. The South Coast Air Quality Management District said that air quality has improved significantly since then.

Christopher Callard, a spokesman for Paramount, said the city had not detected significant samples of chromium 6, including at the schools, since it took over monitoring of the substance in 2021.

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Alejandro Lazo is a climate reporter who previously reported on issues of inequality for the California Divide team. He joined CalMatters from The Wall Street Journal, where he covered the West Coast for eight years. He previously wrote about housing and real estate for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. He’s a native of Modesto who attended the University of San Francisco and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.