CHEMICAL NIX: Flame retardants don't prevent fires and could have negative health impacts.
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Legislation on California state Sen. Mark Leno's desk has the potential to affect every household in the U.S.
If Leno has his way, the state's textile and furniture manufacturers, and thus probably all such makers in the U.S., will drastically alter the amount of flame retardant carried in almost every sofa, love seat and easy chair in the country.
At issue is something called Technical Bulletin 117 (or TB 117), an obscure California law enacted in the late 1970s. It requires all furniture stuffing foam in the state to withstand 12 full seconds of open flame, analogous to a cigarette lighter held against a couch with the upholstery ripped off. Furniture flammability is largely regulated by states, and California is by far the toughest.
"The biggest fuel load in your house is your polyurethane foam," says Alex Morgan, a flammability expert at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "Polyurethane has a very high heat release rate so when it catches, you just have a very short period of time before you're dead."
The current law sets no requirements for how to keep products from burning during those critical 12 seconds, so furniture manufacturers turned to an array of chemical flame retardants mixed directly into the foam. Because these chemicals are cheap, and in order to avoid a separate production line to accommodate every state's flame retardants threshold, major manufacturers now create all U.S. furniture foam to California standards.
Critics of these additives, however, worry they might be dangerous and want an alternative from the 12-second standard. It fails to prevent fires, they say—and worse, it allows dangerous chemicals to leach into humans and the environment.
Flame retardants in foam "are not effective enough to make them stop burning rapidly once they're ignited. But they are effective in polluting the environment and creating health concerns," says fire expert Vytenis Babrauskas, president of Fire Science & Technology, Inc., and a 16-year veteran of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "You get the worst coming and going."
Babrauskas specializes in the study of the temperature at which various household objects ignite and how fast they burn. He created several of the tools that the federal government uses to set standardsmeasure for furniture safety. He says that it takes very little flame retardant to stop a lit cigarette from igniting a couch and a phenomenal amount to slow a sizable flame—amounts often used in airplanes and prisons, according to his July 1988 special report for the National Bureau of Standards (NIST's former name). He says, however, expecting home furnishing to withstand a smaller cigarette lighter flame for 12 seconds is arbitrary and demands too much of a chemical that may have adverse health effects.
The term "flame retardant" casts a wide net. Mostly it refers to organohalogens—compounds like DDT that incorporate halogens such as chlorine or bromine into organic molecules—that are naturally nearly nonexistent in mammals. Lately, attention has focused on one class of these, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which tend to accumulate in living organisms and have been implicated in reduced fertility (for instance, in research published last year in Environmental Health Perspectives); decreased IQ (in research also published last year in the same journal); and for at least one PBDE that has since been phased out, cancer in rats. Another PBDE, pentabromodiphenyl ether (pentaPBDE), once the primary flame retardant in furniture, was voluntarily withdrawn by the chemical industry after a 2007 paper in Science showed a tendency to accumulate in the body.
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10 Comments
Add CommentThis article discusses only flame retardants in furniture, I share Susan Lundy's concerned about the flammability of clothing, carpets curtains and other fabrics. Are the included in the same regulations as furniture material? If not, then what does Susan Lundy's story have to do with this article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I recall, back in the 'bad old days' it was quite common for clothing to burn and melt onto burning victims...
Pregnant women in the U.S. are exposed to industrial flame retardants and so are their unborn children. This may result in harm to the fetus during important development stages. http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/widespread-chemical-exposure-in-pregnant-us-women
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnimal studies of the flame retardants, PBDEs, show exposure may result in neurodevelopment effects. Conclusions find that penta-BDE levels in umbilical cord blood were associated with reduced IQ and physical development in children.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866690/
This study found that women who have higher blood levels of penta-BDE, which was used in furniture prior to it's ban in 2004 had a harder time becoming pregnant then those with lower levels. Old couch foam w. penta can be chopped up and recycled into carpet-back padding and therefore finding its way back into our homes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866688/?tool=pubmed
There's scientific consensus on the environmental and public health threats that industrial flame retardants represent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.1003089
To be fair, "flame retardant" is a broad term. Even PBDE isn't terribly specific. Some of the chemicals included have never been shown to be either toxic or bioaccumulative. Environmentalists worry about a sort of guilt by association - essentially that similar chemicals will have similar effects. It all comes down to "innocent until proven guilty" or "better safe than sorry."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBromine flame retardants (PBDEs) are in virtually every commercial product containing plastic or fabric - drapes, pajamas, bedding, cell phones, sofas, chairs, pillows, computers, etc. Bromine is also used as a dough conditioner in bread, and are an ingredient (brominated vegetable oil) in some soft drinks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the biggest impacts of bromine on the human body is the interference with iodine uptake, which in turn can cause endocrine disruption. Iodine is an essential mineral needed by the thyroid and other glands. In women, the breasts and ovaries are also large users. Tests of several thousand women show virtually all are iodine deficient, leading to thyroid disorders, fibrocystic breasts, PCOS, and other hormonal disruptions. Bromides are neurotoxic, leading to a wide variety of nervous system disorders.
A small group of MDs have conducted research showing inorganic iodine/iodide supplementation can displace bromine from cells of the body, and force its excretion, ultimately detoxifying the body and reversing ill effects. They have also developed urine tests for iodine sufficiency and bromine excretion.
For details on this research, see the book "Iodine, Why You Need it, Why You Can't Live Without It," by David Brownstein, MD. The subject is also covered in some depth in "The Wellness Project."
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com
A research organization
The National Furniture Flammability Standard fact sheet from the National Association of State Fire Marshals provides the following facts about fire safety standards in California and the life-saving role flame retardants can play when they are included in household products.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCalifornia Fire Standards
• California is currently the only state with fire safety regulations for upholstered furniture.
• According to the California Bureau of Home Furnishings, fire fatality rates fell by more than 25 percent following the state’s adoption of furniture fire standards in the 1970s.
• According to the National Association of State Fire Marshals, close to 4,000 fires and 500 deaths would have been prevented over the 10-year period of 1985 to 1994 if the rest of the U.S. had adopted a fire standard for upholstered furniture similar to the one in California.
Life in the U.S. without Flame Retardants
• Fires originating in upholstered furniture account for more than 20 percent of all fire-related deaths in residential structures.
• About 10 people die each week in the U.S. as a result of residential upholstered furniture fires.
• An average of 360 people die and 740 are injured annually as a result of upholstered furniture fires ignited by cigarettes and small open flame sources. Flammability standards for upholstered furniture would help prevent these fires.
To learn more about furniture fires, visit the website of Are You Sitting Comfortably (www.rusc.eu). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov) also offers more information about the effects of fire on life and property. It's important that we get all the facts about this issue!
Bryan Goodman
Manager, Product/Panel Communications
The American Chemistry Council
www.americanchemistry.com
The main reason manufactuerers use flame retardants is they don't want to be sued for fires--which they have been. As one clothing mfr's lawyer told me, though, they've "never been sued for cancer." And probably never will be. Meanwhile, we're using nuclear missiles to kill a few mice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not our responsibility when a person knows the risks and chooses to be reckless with their lives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf someone REALLY cares, they find a way to quit.
A candle is equal to one smoker in the house. AND...
There are flame-less candles.
Might help if "Common Sense" was a required program to graduate from high school? Our cat is smarter than some of the people we know that graduated from college. How sad is that!