[Pharmwaste] Foam Alone: Do Furniture Flame Retardants Save Enough Lives to Justify Their Environmental Damage?

[DeBiasi, Deborah (DEQ)]

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Foam Alone: Do Furniture Flame Retardants Save Enough Lives to Justify
Their Environmental Damage? 
An obscure California law effectively sets flammability standards for
foam in the nation's furniture, but proposed new legislation claims
flame retardants don't prevent fires and could have negative health
impacts
By Erik Vance <http://www.scientificamerican.com/author.cfm?id=1645>   |
Monday, April 18, 2011 | 8
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-furniture-flame-ret
ardants-save-enough-lives-justify-environmental-damage&print=true>  
 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpsutcliffe/2419931670/>  <<Picture
(Device Independent Bitmap)>> CHEMICAL NIX: Flame retardants don't
prevent fires and could have negative health impacts. Image:
Flickr/CPSutcliffe 
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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
<http://www.bhfti.ca.gov/industry/bulletin.shtml>  (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.
<http://www.doctorfire.com/> , and a 16-year veteran of the National
Institute of Standards and Technology <http://www.nist.gov/index.html>
(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 (PBDE
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=6B47EB84-E7F2-
99DF-372C4C480BAB6068> s), 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.
"They tend to be bio-accumulative
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=chemical-body-burden
-researchers-an-2011-02-20> , persistent and they also tend to be
toxic," says Arlene Blum, executive director of the Green Science Policy
Institute, which advocates against industrial flame-retardants. "We can
have pounds of these in organohalogens in our consumer products in our
homes"
It is not clear how such chemicals escape from couches, but as they age,
they may leach retardants as dust that then gets inhaled or else works
its way into the environment. Flame retardants have been found in rivers
and streams around San Francisco as well as in fish and marine mammals.
Industry representatives say they are constantly changing the makeup of
their products to reflect the newest science and safest ingredients.
Environmentalists complain that the changing recipes amount to a shell
game, where companies make tiny changes and then continue to sell a
product while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) restarts
safety protocols.
Specifically, Blum worries about the health impacts of
<http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flame-retardants-may-a
lter-hormones-of-pregnant-women>  new organohalogens (like Firemaster
550, a popular alternative to pentaPBDE) because its compositional
specifics are hidden behind patent laws. According to the EPA,
Firemaster is not a health risk and has not been shown to accumulate in
the body, although studies are still ongoing.
One possible solution would be to abandon flame retardants in foam and
focus more on the fabrics covering the couch or else create an envelope
of fire-proof material between the fabric and foam. However, both are
expensive fixes and the textile industry has a history of controversial
use of flame retardants, especially in children's clothing. Blum was a
part of the movement to ban flame retardants in that merchandise.
Questions of health effects, however, could be moot if the extra
retardant in foam is not actually preventing extra fires. Babrauskas
says that TB 117 is ineffective, only serving to create more toxic smoke
without observably limiting fires. Smoke from fires generally kills
victims before the fire and has been linked to chronic disease in
firefighters.
Environmental activists in California have tried to topple the 12-second
rule before-which would immediately change how retardants are used in
the rest of the country-with little success due to supporters' concerns
that change would result in more fire deaths. The new legislation
requires the state Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair, Home
Furnishings and Thermal Insulation to amend TB 117 to include an option
to chemical flame retardants (although it does not specify what that
option should be), thus giving furniture manufacturers a choice between
the old standard and a new one.
Mainstream furniture-makers have until now largely stayed out of the
fight, allowing environmentalists and chemical companies including
Albermarle, Chemtura, and ICL-IP America (the three dominant flame
retardant companies) to slug it out. Furniture giant Ikea, however,
recently drafted a letter supporting the changes to California policy,
as did the American Home Furnishings Alliance (AHFA).
Defending their products, representatives from the chemical industry
point to broader statistics supporting the use of flame retardants in
furniture. They say that every extra bit of retardant saves lives,
pointing to the U.K., where they say decreases in fire deaths correspond
to increases in the use of flame retardants.
Robert Luedeka, executive director of the U.S. Polyurethane Foam
Association <http://www.pfa.org/> , a group representing companies that
supply foam for furniture-makers, says customers are now very worried
and confused about flame retardants in furniture. He stresses that his
organization has not taken sides, adding that retardants do not really
increase the cost of the foam. But it is only worth the effort if it
saves lives. The chemical industry says 20 percent of fire-related
deaths in residences occur as a result of fires that started on
furniture. But data from the National Fire Protection Association
suggests very few of these are from open flames like those controlled by
TB117. "For this, millions of pounds of fire retardant is being put into
upholstered furniture," he says. "The question is: Was there ever a
threat?"
Susan Lundy, a spokesperson for Albemarle, who herself was nearly burned
as a child when her pajamas caught fire, says there's no question. "You
ask people who lose their children in fires, 'Do they think it's
valuable to have flame retardants in there?' I promise you, they would
say, 'Yes.'"
The bill is expected to hit the state senate floor in May.


Deborah L. DeBiasi
Email:   Deborah.DeBiasi at deq.virginia.gov
WEB site address:  www.deq.virginia.gov
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality
Office of Water Permit and Compliance Assistance Programs
Industrial Pretreatment/Whole Effluent Toxicity (WET) Program
PPCPs, EDCs, and Microconstituents 
www.deq.virginia.gov/vpdes/microconstituents.html
National Drug Take Back Day!  April 30, 2011   10-2
Mail:          P.O. Box 1105, Richmond, VA  23218
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PH:         804-698-4028      FAX:      804-698-4032


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