What is benzene?
It’s a very widely used chemical, a solvent. It’s also used widely as a building block in organic chemistry to create molecules. It’s been used for 100 years in an enormous range of plastics. There’s some in gasoline — less than there used to be — and it’s in jet fuel. It used to be used in dry cleaning. What does it smell like? Some would call it sweet, some pungent. It’s natural [not an added scent]. It vaporizes easily so if you put it in a dish in a room, you’d smell it instantaneously. Is benzene dangerous? Solvent vapors can cause headache and nausea. From a toxic point of view, benzene is a known human carcinogen [according to] the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the World Health Organization and virtually any regulatory body you could name. There’s some disagreement about how much is needed to cause cancer or what kinds of cancer it causes, but there’s no debate about whether it’s a carcinogen and it’s most closely associated
