What are "benzene", "toluene", "ethylbenzene" and "xylene" (BTEX compounds)?

What are "benzene", "toluene", "ethylbenzene" and "xylene" (BTEX compounds)?

Terry Tamminen (Author & Environmental Policy Advisor) gives expert video advice on: Why do gas stations have three different grades of gas?; Does higher-octane gasoline make my car run more efficiently?; What are "benzene", "toluene", "ethylbenzene" and "xylene" (BTEX compounds)? and more...

BTEX compounds are benzene, toluene, xylene, and so forth and these are the volitile organic compounds, as they're called, or VOCs and these are the fumes that you can smell from gasoline, the very distinctive fumes when you're pumping gas that you can smell and they're very very toxic. They're all known to cause cancer in humans and to be extremely vigorous toxins in the human body even in small quanities. And each year we seem to do more research that finds that quantities we thought would be benign in the human body are actually toxic. And so year after year we find that the BTEX compounds are causing much more harm to our human health than we thought.