My Toxic Couch’s Days Are Numbered: New Furniture Flammability Standard Proposed
This all started with a nearly 40-year-old California regulation known as Technical Bulletin 117 (TB117) that requires furniture to meet a strict flammability standard using an open flame test on the foam. The easiest and cheapest way to apply the standard has been to douse the foam with flame retardants, resulting in pounds of toxic and untested chemicals in most every piece of upholstered furniture sold today. But the problem with the current standard is that fires don’t start in the foam but on the outer covering, often times by cigarettes left smoldering on furniture fabric. Even worse, TB117 has been shown to provide no real benefit in a fire. In fact, furniture treated with flame retardants doesn’t burn any slower and the smoke and gases released from the fire are actually more toxic, putting firefighters’ health at greater risk for cancer.
In addition to being ineffective, many flame retardant chemicals have been shown to be harmful to human health and the environment. The widespread use of flame retardants has resulted in widespread exposure in humans. Most Americans carry much higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies than anyone else in the world and children in California contain some of the highest levels ever measured.
But flame retardants aren’t just polluting our homes—they are polluting the world, literally. During manufacturing, use and disposal, these chemicals are released into the environment where they can be found in air, water, and wildlife. Birds, fish, mammals including whales and dolphins and animals living far from sources of exposure, such as polar bears in the Arctic, have been found to have flame retardants in their bodies.
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A revised furniture flammability standard TB 117-2013 was recently proposed for public comment. This new standard is smolder test of the furniture fabric and will provide better fire safety by addressing the most common cause of fires in furniture – cigarettes – at the place a fire would start – the outside covering. It will also mean that no chemicals will need to be used to meet the new standard – 85 percent of fabric coverings already meet the standard!
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/02/11/my-toxic-couchs-days-are-numbered-new-furniture-flammability-standard-proposed/
People who accept the health risks of smoking should also accept the fire risks. We should not poison the rest of the people with ill advised regulations to protect them from themselves.
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