The irony of the whole thing is that the flame retardants don't even make furniture any less flammable:
"The problem, [the fire expert] argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam - a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren't compliant - and they burn just as hot."
So the entire country is now exposed to the dangers of these chemicals because in 1975 some bureaucrats at an obscure government agency in California came up with an arbitrary standard that was not based in reality.
Thanks for digging that up, I was wondering about that.
The article cites a retardant advocate as saying "Deaths caused by furniture fires dropped from 1,400 in 1980 to 600 in 2004; a 57 percent reduction."
We know that almost all of these couch fires are caused by people falling asleep while smoking cigarettes.
According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004. (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762370.html)
So a certain portion of the decline is due to the reduction in cigarette use.
Also, 43 out of 50 states now mandate "fire safe" cigarettes which contain substances such as ethylene vinyl acetate which increase the chance an unsmoked but lit cigarette will stop burning. The presence of these cigarettes has also certainly led to fewer couch fires.
"According to the CDC, in the same period, cigarette consumption in the US adult population has fallen from 33.2% in 1980 to 20.9% in 2004."
Those who smoke cigarettes also smoke a lot less than they used to, so total cigarette consumption is maybe only half as much or less compared to what it once was.
Also, it seems that smokers (at least in the US) are much more likely to go outside to smoke now, even when at their own home. Sorry, no data just personal recollections from childhood in the '80s.
This seems correct anecdotally. At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside, so maybe this had some effect.
At some point they figured out that smoking is somewhat less bad for you if you smoke outside
Smoking is in no way less bad for you if done out of doors. It's because no one, not even a smoker, wants their domicile to smell like an ash tray...and when selling a house, you don't want to cut out that large swath of the population that doesn't smoke from your buyer pool.
"Smoking is in no way less bad for you if done out of doors."
That's not true. If you live in the house of someone who was formerly a heavy smoker then you have a higher cancer risk yourself, because the radiation from the cigarrettes gets into the walls and carpet. Which means that smokers themselves also have a lower cancer risk if they smoke outside for the same reason. I'd imagine it also somewhat reduces their risk for heart attack, since second hand smoke increases your risk of heart attack, although I haven't seen any stats on that.
Everyone commenting on this thread seems to make the assumption that all smokers in fact smoke cigarettes inside their residence. As a 26 year-old semi-heavy smoker, I've never once even considered smoking inside my apartment, nor do I know any smokers who do so. This may be dismissed as anecdotal by the type of vehement anti-smoking zealot you seem to be,But I believe it's an accurate depiction of smokers at large.
Very good point. Given that the person who authored the most frequently cited study advocating retardants has gone on record saying his study has been mis-cited and they actually provide absolutely no benefit at all, it seems fairly likely that the entire 57% decrease is due to these other factors and not related at all to treating the foam with carcinogens.
This reminds me of the ban on regular light bulbs in the EU. People are basically forced now to install so called energy saving lamps, which contain and emit highly toxic mercury and phenol. Most people even don't know about the risks and would let their children sleep in a room with a broken lamp.
They certainly emit mercury when they're broken, and the instructions for cleaning up broken CFLs call for several hours of ventilation, which implies that the mercury vapor escapes into the atmosphere. (See, for example, the cleanup instructions at the bottom of this page: http://www.epa.state.il.us/mercury/compact-fluorescent.html)
I'd guess that a large percentage of people who buy CFLs are totally unaware of how to deal with these hazards (or are even unaware that the bulbs contain poisonous material).
Also, the rise in the use of CFLs means that more people will be exposed to mercury while mining it and while assembling the lamps (probably in places like China, where occupational health laws are fairly lax).
On the other hand though, CFLs, with a current energy production mix of sources, cause, even if broken, less mercury to be emitted into the atmosphere than the extra power required to light an equivalent incandescent would cause to be emitted during generation (coal is mostly to blame for this). They also cause far fewer greenhouse gasses to be emitted.
Also consider that in today's litigious world, no one wants to say "don't worry if you break a bulb, there's not really enough mercury to be dangerous in one" lest someone starts breaking bulbs with wild abandon and then suing the authority that told them they 'weren't dangerous'.
I've seen local ordinances that in effect mandate the incorrect usage of CFLs. As such, a fixture at my mom's house results in a burned out (due to overheating) CFL about once every 6 months.
"They describe in great detail the procedure for cleaning up a broken bulb."
Are you talking about packaging in the US? The packaging in the EU, I saw so far, don't even mention the mercury, not to mention cleaning instructions.
Sure, a broken bulb will release an amount of the 5 mg of mercury that a CFL contains. But it's not harmful unless you breath it, which is why you ventilate the room.
Lignuist's comment made me think they were talking about intact lamps.
Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress. Yet another perfectly reasonable regulation from our friends in the California Legislature! :)
My least-favorite CA regulation has to do with eye-glasses. I lost my only pair and went in to get a replacement on a Saturday, but I couldn't because my (perfectly fine) prescription had expired. I had to make an appointment to get an exam in order to get new glasses, but they were closed for the weekend and booked for a few days.
So I spent about a week with headaches because some CA legislator decided it was in my best interest to pay some practitioner to get the same prescription for glasses every year.
"So I spent about a week with headaches because some ophthalmology trade group lobbied (bribed) the legislature to get profit-enhancing regulations in place."
Are there any states that don't have a requirement of a current prescription to purchase glasses? I've had the same issue in Texas [1], which usually considers itself small-government.
If you know what your prescription is, you could order online from a place like Zenni Optical (where my wife gets her glasses). I'm not sure about PA, but here in PA, it's illegal for an optometrist to withold information about your prescription. She got her eyes checked, had to push a little to get her prescription, and then bought her glasses online.
Exact same experience in Texas; had to ask optometrist to specifically mark down all required information (pupillary distance was missing) and then went to Zenni to get my glasses.
> Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress.
Alternatively, you can order one of the cotton/latex/wool mattresses that don't have any flame retardents. The most popular is Naturepedic. However, such a mattress will set you back $2200 for the most basic queen.
Of the 84,000 industrial chemicals registered for use in the United States, only about 200 have been evaluated for human safety by the Environmental Protection Agency
--Wait, what? What is the EPA doing, then for 42 years?
That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
In other words, the EPA isn't _allowed_ to investigate products unless evidence that they are unsafe is brought before it. Makers get the benefit of the doubt.
Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.
And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.
All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.[1]
The environmental movement in America is worthless. They spent all of their time on lifestyle issues like battery cars, recycling, and global warming (issues that also line the pockets of their large donors) when there are real, profound issues like this. Even if the EPA can't act, how come only one crazy lady is working on building the case?
I wouldn't blame the movement itself. There's always a buzz around lifestyle issues because there's continual evolution. Every day millions of individuals make millions of choices, so every day the culture is changing in little ways. There's a certain portion of the population that is an easy target for the kind of education and advocacy that scientists are good at. Politics is a lot harder. It's harder to make people care, and the target audience is much more diverse. When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community, you need an entirely different message. You have to go toe-to-toe with industries that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists and trot out doctors who say you're trying to kill kids. And even if you try hard and do a good job, it's still boring stuff that's a lot harder to turn into a story than lifestyle issues. Would this article exist without a glamorous protagonist and the harm-to-children angle?
When it comes to people who aren't as well educated or who aren't members of the reality-based community,
Please. This is america. We don't need to talk down to people like this.
200/84000 = 0.24%. EPA doesn't have a clue about 99.76% of the registered chemicals for sale? Experts?
It doesn't take a rocket scientis or a member of the tea party to figure out something is odd-ball with that?
It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.
Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?
I didn't mean to rag on conservatives, though I guess my wording made it sound that way. I just mean people who aren't susceptible to argument with numbers and facts, the kind of argument you would be comfortable making, the kind of argument scientists are good at making.
It would seem more politically feasible to say, here is some tax money. Lets test this stuff.
You're suggesting the most politically appealing pitch would be science and government spending (on something that doesn't create working-class jobs.) I'm not an expert on politics, but luckily we do have an expert opinion to compare that to. The million dollar industry lobbyists thought the most effective appeal would be a scare campaign in newspapers and a venal doctor talking about imaginary suffering babies. They won. I think I'll trust them.
Because it looks like the original CA regs. requiring these chemicals was also written to "protect" the public? who's protecting the people from the protectors?
Whenever we let science affect policy, policy is open to revision, just like science is. We got seat belts right, we got a lot of emissions and pollution laws right, but we're never going to get everything right. It will always be a process of revise, revise, revise as we learn more about the science.
This is one of those cases where the old saying comes to mind:
Sunlight is the best disenfectant
Good news is that sunlight is cheap and easy.
Science needs to do science. Information needs to flow. right now, the system looks more a bunch of "experts" on the take or incompetent. More worried about securing funding, managing their careers, promoting their pet projects, etc. The [trust me] argument is a political failure, because of these demonstrated problems.
The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.
Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture).
--From the NYT article. There is alot of failure avoidance, it seems.
Edit: And also from the Wiki. you site:
The report further acknowledges that trade secrets are preventing effective testing. Sometimes the EPA does not even know what chemical the TSCA application refers to, and cannot report any problems because "health and safety data are of limited value if the chemical the data pertain to is unknown."[6]
This is going on with Fracking chemicals, at the moment.
The latter part is a major thing that really should be fixed, I agree. In many of these cases, it seems fairly clear that the invocation of trade secrets is pretextual (the goal is not actually to protect a valuable secret from competitors), and the real motive is preventing third-party investigations into chemical safety.
Well, EPA is really more "systemic" risk of chemicals, I think. It regulates chemicals at point of production and use mainly to prevent systemic environmental issues later on.
I was mostly wondering who regulates this stuff for point of consumption by consumers -- OSHA is pretty clearly focused on production or use in business, not in the home, and CPSC isn't really so "sciencey" as OSHA or EPA -- it's more concerned with grossly apparent problems with products like swallowing magnets and decapitation in cribs.
I don't know who proactively looks for risks of products in long-term exposure/normal use on a long basis. Arguably the non-consumers with the most to care about that would be health insurers, so either an industry association of those or a regulator or a government insurer (medicare/medicaid) would have an interest in doing something like Underwriters Laboratories.
Not that health insurers do such a good job at anything that we really want them to expand to looking at home furnishings and such.
More info here. TL;DR: Gov't still trying to figure it out.
GAO was asked to review the approaches used under TSCA and REACH for (1) requiring chemical companies to develop information on chemicals’ effects, (2) controlling risks from chemicals, and (3) making information on chemicals available to the public. To review these issues, GAO analyzed applicable U.S. and EU laws and regulations and interviewed U.S. and EU officials, industry representatives, and environmental advocacy organizations.
GAO is making no recommendations.
I think this kind of cynicism without citation is a very unhealthy thing for any (online) community.
large edit: I should have said "cynicism without citation and qualification." Even if there's a citation I don't like how people reject people/places/institutions out of hand because they might do bad things or have bad qualities because it's often represented as a dichotomy.
For instance here, even if we grant that the EPA is susceptible to corporate influence, even if we as a society decide to go so far as to find them guilty of all the good they didn't do, it doesn't diminish the good that they did do and can still do, and too often these kinds of rejections/scoffs/cynicisms don't serve to add anything to the conversation of a community (such as HN) other than shut down more concrete or nuanced criticisms or discussions.
Reminds me of the situation around one of theories that tries to explain SIDS - Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. If you had a kid, you know what it is - a newborn dying in his sleep for no apparent reason. You put a healthy baby to sleep in his bed only to find him dead in the morning. Fun stuff.
There are no exact explanation for the syndrome, but there are preventive measures (such as always let newborn fall asleep on his back) that statistically lessen the risk of it occurring.
One of the theories was that a typical crib mattress creates a fertile ground for some fungal growth. Coupled with chemicals found in the mattress, this creates weak poisonous gas emission, which ultimately kills the child. It's an older theory that was verified and formally considered invalid. However in one country, New Zealand, there's a doctor who has been a vigorously arguing in favor of this theory and now has a statistic to show that proper mattress wrapping nullifies the risk of SIDS. From what I've read, he had very hard time getting the authorities to even listen to his findings, leave alone to act on them.
I wish this lady the best of luck, she's got NYT on her side, I hope she takes a full advantage of this exposure.
Unfortunately sometimes smart people believe dumb things, and Dr. Sprott is one of these people.
When you read the reasons why his "research" has been ignored you hear things like "vested interest", "cover up", and "politics".
Dr. T.J Sprott has a book, and several products for sale.
His "statistic" is bogus; the NZ authorities stopped recommending mattress wrapping in the 90s; he has no idea if babies slept or died on wrapped mattresses; yet he claims it as fact.
His paper was awful. That's why people didn't listen to him - he has weird ideas, he can't write them up, other research has tested his ideas and found them wanting.
He claims that decreases in SIDS are because of his mattress wrapping programme. He cannot explain why SIDS is dropping in countries that don't practice mattress wrapping. He cannot explain why SIDS was dropping in NZ before antimoney was addedd to mattresses.
Don't forget that he's not a medical doctor. He is a chemist.
People like Sprott are evil. They come up with some plausible sounding theory, and then they try to publish. No scientific journal wants it, so he self publishes, and publicizes. This creates fear and uncertainty in parents. And so children are at greater risk of death, because parents don't follow current best practice (which is still not perfect but at least is evidence based) and decide to try the advice of a wingnut.
Well, from what I've read the book and the products came substantially after he started voicing his concerns, which sort of implies that he might've taken the matter in his own hands since no one would listen to him.
Even assuming he is a complete loon, the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible. Perhaps not fungus, not phosphorus, but something in the bedding that just knocks those kids out.
With regards him being evil - I don't really see it that way. Why do you say that parents stop following established best practices once they wrap their kid's mattress? Parents aren't idiots, are they? What he's advocating for is orthogonal to existing prevention measures, both easily combined.
The very many parents who believed Wakefield[1] and didn't immunise their children prove you wrong. Some parents are scared, and want to do the best, and cannot assess risk, and cannot understand scientific research, and thus are vulnerable to woo.
See also "wifi is dangerous"; "cellphones are dangerous" etc etc.
> the theory of an environmental cause is actually quite plausible.
I have no problem with someone saying "Cot death could be caused by environmental factors. Let's do lots of good quality research to see if we can discover that cause."
Sprott did not do that. Sprott said 'I have found the cause. This is the cause. There is no room for doubt. By not following my advice you are killing babies. By arguing against my advice you are covering up mistakes that you've made, or you are corrupt'.
Sprott says that no babies have died on wrapped mattresses. This is false. Babies have died on wrapped mattresses.
Sprott claims that toxic gases are produced by fungus and the fire-retardant chemicals. This is false - it's not possible to generate those toxic gases unless you do weird things in a lab. (ie, it doesn't happen in the home when the mattress is used normally.)
So what he has done is diverted attention from correct information; made it harder for parents to remember and follow correct information; caused fear and uncertainty among scared people. He has ignored the very clear recommendations against his advice. And finally he's making money off this FUD; he's using the conspiracy theory as a marketing gimmick.
Yes (speaking as a parent), parents are idiots. We're expected to raise children without a real guide except our own life experience, flawed as that is. We are continually bombarded with media that expects parenting to look one way, while reality is far different. The scientific method doesn't work for parents; we generally try ad hoc procedures that reinforce our confirmation biases.
Yes, parents are idiots. It's a testament to the resiliency of children that any make it to puberty.
SIDs, while still too common, has dropped 70% in the U.S. since the "back-to-sleep" effort and the general awareness of the situation. Children under 6 months don't have a reflex to carbon dioxide poisoning, and their respiratory systems aren't fully developed, so it is easier for them to suffocate on their own breath pooling in too-soft mattresses or cribs with polyester blankets or bumpers. Risk factors for SIDs death include: winter, cigarette smoke exposure, respiratory illness, not breast-feeding, and not sleeping in the same room as an adult.
Keeping an infant too hot is a risk factor. In winter people may use extra bedding, or thicker sleeping bags, or extra clothing, or reduced ventilation, or increased heating.
SIDS is another word for "looks like asphyxiation but we can't figure out how". There's no single cause. Babies sleeping on their tummies was one, since they just breathe back in their CO2. Other proposed causes include fungus, as you mentioned, and even infanticide.
It's sad that premature regulation moved this into the sphere of politics and mandated-purchases (from companies with an incentive to lobby). That means any attempt to learn what's really going on, or make any incremental changes, is gummed up by the fog of adversarial, zero-sum politics.
Without the inflexible mandate, the rule could simply be: label whether your product has flame-retardants or not, and have evidence for your claims. Then the industry could diversify, some brands emphasizing flame-resistance and others lack of chemical additives. And, this diversity would mean we would gather more real-world experience about whether the flame-retardant units are really correlated with fewer/slower fires and fewer fatalities, or with more health/IQ/behavior problems in children and pets, or both, or neither.
But because of the uniform monoculture imposed by the premature politicization, we face a data white-out and policy is flying half-blind... with only indirect data on costs and benefits.
Maybe a way out would be to compel a bisection of the industry output: you must make half your units with, and half without, these additives, and clearly mark the units in each category. Five to ten years later, we'd likely have much better data about real effects.
Another example of government creating arbitrary policies that just waste time and money, and probably kill us.
Since 1975, an obscure California agency called the Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation has mandated that the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting.
Who decided on 12 seconds? Why the inside of furniture rather than the outside? Who does this benefit? Why is there even a Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation? Why do government agencies like the EPA exist when they can't say anything about the safety of chemicals that are in couches in probably in upwards of 95% of homes in America?
It wouldn't surprise me if a flame retardant manufacturer was behind the law to begin with, which is even more disgusting.
It was totally a lobbying effort to get the legislation passed. First by the tobacco industry because of fires started by smokers falling asleep with lit cigarettes, then by the chemical industry (by courting state fire marshals) to boost sales of their flame retardants. The Chicago Tribune has a multi-part series on it here: http://media.apps.chicagotribune.com/flames/index.html
Memory-foam mattresses have the same problem apparently. I have one, and am looking into a dust mite bed casing (~$100) to prevent the chemicals from getting into the air...
We spend a lot of time in our beds (at least we should), so we should take everything about it very serious!
We recently switched to a bed that strictly consists of natural materials like wood, latex, cotton and natural rubber. Absolutely no metal and no toxic additives. Costs as much as our car, but is worth every cent. Sleeping feels like holiday now. I also can smell the difference.
No, I'm in the EU and bought it from a local dealer. However, I wouldn't order such a bed without having tested it. There are some parameters like the thickness and the softness of the mattress that should be adjusted to your needs, but maybe the Manufacturer ships also to the US when they get an order.
I'm surprised this was only mentioned so tangentially. Memory foam mattresses are quite popular, and I would wager their users spend considerably more time there than on a couch.
I feel like the article is missing a basic analysis of whether there would be more deaths by an increased number of fires caused by removing the fire retardant, or by cancer cancer caused by fire retardant. Just give me some numbers, and let me decide what kind of furniture I want.
The article quotes a fire-safety scientist named Vytenis Babrauskas, whose study has been used in support TB 117:
"The problem, he argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam — a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren’t compliant — and they burn just as hot. “This is not speculation,” he says. “There were two series of tests that prove what I’m saying is correct.”
The problem is that the government has decided that you shouldn't be able to make that decision for yourself - laws require that couches be sold with retardants. Arlene Blum managed to commission a custom-built couch without fire retardants, but that's neither scalable nor viable for most people.
How does a couch catch fire, though? I suspect falling asleep on a couch with a cigarette is the main cause. Smokers want to die anyway, so I'd give priority to safety of children.
But what about the people living next door to your hypothetical smoker? It's a good idea to have fire safety regulations, for the reason that a fire usually will not just burn the person who caused it in the first place. (Whether this fire retardent helps prevent fires or not is of course a more difficult question...)
The article specifically mentioned this case. The chemicals they put in the foam would have absolutely no benefit if your apartment was burning because the neighbor's started. Furthermore, there is little evidence that the chemicals will prevent your sleeping smoker from burning the place down. Droithomme's comment[1] very much applies.
I've seen a number of fire videos as part of a training class. It is astonishing how fast a couch + room full of furnishings will burn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ult6Biaf7oM. From ignition to flashover/fully-involved in 2-3 minutes. In a major urban area like SF, 5-10 minutes is a good response time for the first units on scene, not to mention the time to coordinate a fire attack, ventilate and flow water.
I don't know whether the claims in the article are well-supported or not (or what type of treatment the couch in the video had, as the videos are from the late 80s/early 90s), but I think most people don't realize just how dangerous a working fire in a single room full of ordinary furnishings can be.
That's where I think droithomme's comment comes into play. Where the downsides are so high, strong positive evidence should be provided and I'm not convinced it's there.
You have a point, we are back to needing more data. Living next door to a smoker, we have at least installed a smoke detector. But I suspect if it goes off it would already be too late.
Arlene Blum is kind of amazing. I met her maybe 20 years ago in the context of mountain climbing. Can't imagine climbing with a baby strapped to myself.
I climbed mountain passes that size with my infants carried in a pack. It was good clean fun and the babies loved it.
They play in the pine needles and the sand and get sap all over themselves and then snuggle up with you in the cold alpine nights. Everybody has a good time.
And I'm nowhere near as tough as Ms. Blum. (Annapurna I! Holy. Cow.)
This is a fundamental problem with our always-on, 24 hour news, headline-based world. Unfortunately, it tends to breed fear, hopelessness and apathy as people feel overwhelmed about too many problems they can't control.
Not sure what to do about it, though. Get outside and disconnected more, I suppose. :)
Not me. For one thing, keep in mind these people are selling page views. If the headline was "Odds of being diagnosed with brain parasite at .00061%", would you even bother reading the story? Dividing things out is a big anxiety stopper.
And think about it when you see something like "...100% increase in your risk of brain cancer," since it represents the doubling of a very small number. Taking percentages of percentages is a sneaky way to make things look more important than they really are.
I don't know which article you're referencing, but we also had brain parasites found in a man who died about 50 miles from me in Indiana. We've basically been told to avoid freshwater lakes and rivers for now.
Those freshwater incidents sound like protozoa (amoeba) infections with an high mortality rate ("Brain-eating amoeba suspected in Indiana death"). GP is referring to another hazard, also seems to be from nasty water. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492244. Don't say you weren't warned though !
After the foam in cushions described in the OP, the biggest source of human exposure to flame retardants is probably consumer electronics. Particularly, most televisions and computer monitors are encased in a plastic housing which by law must be resistant to catching fire, and the universal way that is achieved is by mixing flame retardants with the plastic while the plastic is still "liquid". I read once that flame retardants make up up to 20% of the volume of the material of the housings.
When you remove this toxic plastic housing, there is another housing underneath made of steel, which holds the monitor or TV together just fine on its own. The exception is the buttons for adjusting brightness, etc.
Last year, I removed all the urethane foam from my home and the plastic housing from my monitor. There is a row of buttons for brightness, etc, that now hangs by wires, and there is a button near the top of the monitor for power which now hangs down the back of the monitor by wires. Now that the buttons are no longer held in place by the plastic housing, it is much harder to press them, but that is OK because I never adjust the brightness (preferring to use OS X to "switch black and white" at night). And I never use the power button. (The monitor draws one watt when it is on but not receiving video input).
Except for the small and not particularly noticeable row of buttons hanging by wires from the bottom of the monitor, the monitor has a tidy, trim appearance and does not prevent me from feeling proud of how my computer looks.
I recommend these home modifications to almost everybody.
The way the flame retardants get into the human body, by the way, is by attaching to dust, which gets ingested in small amounts. Consequently, after removal and disposal of the housing, I recommend cleaning the area under and around the device.
Or get a recent Apple monitor, which has an aluminum housing.
by Peter Norvig, Google's director of research. To resolve the issue of the safety trade-offs of not treating furniture with flame-retardant chemicals (the status quo when I was a child) and treating it (the status quo for quite a while now in the United States) will take careful examination of the actual risk ratios of any disease said to be correlated with the chemicals, the risk ratios of injuries and deaths from fires, the cost of other preventive measures for each kind of harm, and so on. Public policy is not easy. The best public policies have to be carefully examined in light of verifiable facts.
that he has a professional role in investigative journalism, and indeed I have enjoyed reading (and of course have upvoted) many of his comments here on HN over the past year. The piece submitted here mentions about its author that "Dashka Slater is the author of six books for children and adults. Her latest children’s book, 'Dangerously Ever After,' is out this month," which prompted me to look up other information about the author. Her personal website
declares her educational background. There is some interesting reporting here, but as a regular reader of Mother Jones (one of the publications that most often publishes her work) and of other "alternative" publications, I would like to see more follow-up on this issue before writing to my elected representatives, as I sometimes do, asking for a change in current law. I do remember when newspaper and magazine articles in my childhood were all about the fearsome dangers of fires killing little children.
A recent submission to HN based on very reliable statistics pointed out that life expectancy in the United States at birth, at age 40, at age 60, at age 65, and even at age 80 has been steadily RISING
since 1960, so new regulations introduced since then so far don't seem to have net harm for the population in balance with all other social and environmental changes since then. Perhaps the purported flame-retardant chemicals don't prevent as many fires as people suppose. But perhaps they also don't cause any serious human illness in actual use. Let's not rush to judgment on this issue, but let's do actual, verifiable science that with sound economic and policy analysis can help guide lawmakers to the best currently available trade-off in regulation.
I think the thing that is reflexively offensive about this whole thing is that the government has taken a risk that is reasonably easy for a responsible adult to avoid (setting their couch on fire) and implemented a measure that is harmful and difficult or almost impossible to avoid. It's as if we are all made to pay for the morons who can't resist playing with matches in their couch.
It is not particularly easy to avoid setting your couch on fire. The problem with flaming couches is not just those cases where the couch is the primary contributor to the fire; it's also the cases where couches rapidly accelerate the intensity of a smaller fire, like from an electrical malfunction.
The regulation says, "the foam inside upholstered furniture be able to withstand exposure to a small flame, like a candle or cigarette lighter, for 12 seconds without igniting." so if a fire has already started and it is bigger than a small flame then this regulation isn't meant to help with that. In fact if you look around you can find http://laurasrules.org/2012/04/15/sofa-saga-part-3-interview... people talking about studies that show that in a actual fire these chemicals only slow down the burn rate by a couple seconds.
I'm hard put to believe I could be that careless even if I were a smoker, but apparently some people are.
Anyway, as a matter of policy, maybe as smoking continues to become less popular (here's hoping) it will seem less like a good trade to provide some very slight protection against smokers setting their furniture on fire at the cost of exposing all of us to carcinogens.
One of my coworkers had his 4 year old child set fire to his couch (he pushed and pushed until it was next to the gas stove - it's easier here in Uruguay due to smaller houses and different gas stoves).
Irresponsible, absolutely, for not supervising the kid, but it is possible.
I assume flame retardants are mainly only needed for couches of smokers (I've never randomly put a flame onto my couch for fun to see if it would burn), so even if fire retardants save 100 people from fires they caused through voluntary negligence while subjecting 1 additional person to cancer or other illness due to chemicals, I'm not sure if it's a fair trade. Saving firefighters might be a reasonable argument, though.
Do we know that anyone has contracted cancer as a result of flame retardants used in furniture? I re-read the article looking for clear evidence, and what I saw on close read was weasel-wording: when direct health effects are being talked about, the subject of the sentence becomes "flame retardants" rather than a specific chemical; when lax investigations become a topic, it's the EPA's laxity (the EPA isn't solely responsible for evaluating chemicals).
The closest the author comes to accusing a specific flame retarded is chlorinated trisphosphates. You can go to the EPA and look up the safety record of these chemicals; long story short, you can give rats reproductive and kidney cancer if you feed them chlorinated tris every day for 2 years.
Do we know that any lives have been saved as a result of flame retardants being used in furniture?
The article suggests that flame retardants do not slow down furniture fires in real world scenarios. The problem is that they are used in only the foam padding. The couch fabric is not treated. The foam itself appears to offer little resistance to fire if it is already covered in flames (like if fabric is on fire). This is where more research is needed.
If the chemicals don't slow down furniture fires and save lives, then there is no value to having them inside foam.
The old stuff (PCBs and PBBs) definitely had health (and environmental) risks. PCBs are famous, and PBBs are in the EU RoHS, so I'd consider them comparable to lead solder in badness at a first glance (not horrible, but not great). Cancer is pretty hard to prove, but other health effects have had studies (at least for PentaPBDE, nothing for TDCPP (Chlorinated Tris)).
TDCPP might actually be on balance worth using; similarly, I think DDT probably is on balance worthwhile for some applications, and asbestos is still used for some purposes. It's all about tradeoffs, but it is easier to justify a tradeoff when the people paying the costs and receiving the benefits are the same. I get close to zero benefit from fire retardant foam in my couch, probably less than the financial cost of the chemicals.
(I am generally anti whacko unsubstantiated environmentalist/save-the-children activists, but I have some personal experience with PCB contaminated transformers; bleh.)
1. Cancer: does it matter whether it's cancer or something else? Surely the criteria here is "harm" not "cancer".
2. "Flame retardant" vs. "specific chemical": the article specifically cited recent research regarding PBDEs, why did you not consider this valid evidence?
"Researchers from the Center for Children’s Environmental Health, at Columbia University, measured a class of flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, in the umbilical-cord blood of 210 New York women and then followed their children’s neurological development over time. They found that those with the highest levels of prenatal exposure to flame retardants scored an average of five points lower on I.Q. tests than the children with lower exposures, an impact similar to the effect of lead exposure in early life."
Furthermore, the article made it clear that the ingredients of some flame retardants, such as Chemtura’s Firemaster 550 (apparently one of the most common flame retardants), are trade secrets. The study in (2) makes it clear it can take years to demonstrate an effect. So Chemtura can't even know if their product is safe but they're quite happy to sell it to you! Surely the logical conclusion is: beware.
3. Risk vs. Benefit.
Unfortunately, and this is the crux of the problem, it seems that unless one can afford to commission a couch and pay for laboratory analysis of the foam supplier's product, avoiding these substances is very difficult given the present legal situation. And that definitely seems a point worth fighting given the potential harm identified. If you want to risk poisoning your children for little apparent benefit, that's your choice, but it's unethical to make that choice for me.
The article mentions a letter from Chemtura saying that there were 1400 deaths from furniture fires in 1980 and only 600 in 2004.
So what that actually means is we've saved 800 or less lives a year for the past 3 decades while exposing basically the entire nation (and presumably a lot of non-nationals with exports) to a whole host of chemicals that we don't know the effect of because the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act declares that all substances are to be presumed safe.
I can't begin to understand how in the universe it is acceptable to subject everyone to "shit thrown together in a lab" and just assuming it's safe. It's unbelievable how often the USA makes laws like that. I presume because "regulation" is "bad for business"...regardless whether the products of business are killing people (albeit somewhat slowly in this case).
The specific mix of chemicals in F550 is a trade secret. The constituent chemicals themselves appear on F550's MSDS. I think the article is misleading on this point, saying that research is just starting on F550 (yes, academic research, at a program just started to evaluate all flame retardants) and that the EPA hasn't studied it (because the EPA isn't the agency most responsible for doing that).
You can't backtrack a specific cancer to a specific source. Skin cancer and lung cancer have famous "causes" but there statistical in nature with some people getting skin cancer despite minimal exposure to sunlight. Expose a billion people to low doses of a well known carcinogen and you expect a statistical increase in cancers, but there only estimates and it's impossible to track down specific people affected.
Is there statistical evidence of any sort correlating an increase in the specific kinds of cancer attributed to chlorinated tris to the phase-in of flameproofing in upholstered furniture?
The chronic carcinogenicity data for chlorinated tris is specific.
The question at the end of the day though is when we are going to pass regulation that a set of chemicals must be used who has the burden of proof to show that this is a safety gain? I think that the regulator has that burden, and if you have a sort of revolving door of chemicals used there (use it for a time throw it out because of health problems, move on to the next without testing) then you know you have a problem.
I know that this is hard, and it means effectively if there is such a burden of proof patents will expire long before it is met, but it's time to stop that cycle.
Its not just firefighters, but people who live in shared buildings -- apartment, condominium, co-op, etc. In which case, it would appear evident to me that the real policy issue is one of allowing smoking indoors.
Unfortunately the bureaucratic process tends to lean towards spending enormous amounts of time and resources on issues that could be "hacked" fairly easily.
When we add a lot of variables to a problem we end up with solutions that not only are challenging to rationalize, but also tend to have ugly side effects. This is something I've learned from running my own business, and it seems to be reflected on a government level as well.
Kind of tangentially, down is one of the few products where the "humane" way to harvest involves killing the animal; the "pluck living geese over and over again" method is apparently quite painful for them.
Yes, it is a by-product of food consumption. So there is no waste.
Its very sustainable, in that regards. [1]
Edit: citation added.
________
[1] "Some 70 percent of the world's supply comes from China, typically from birds killed for their meat. Most of the rest comes from Europe and Canada, from birds harvested for meat or pâté.", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_feather#cite_note-24
Wool is also hard to burn (apparently) and sheep don't need to be killed to shear them. Not sure how humane it is. (Better than milk, eggs, leather, etc.)
I've been to sheep-shearings - as long as the sheep is regularly sheared, it'll know what's going on and won't be upset; it's not painful (as long as the person with the trimmer is expert enough not to nick the skin), and the wool starts peeling off in chunks anyway if you don't shear it during the summer.
Caveat: I have no idea if there's some horrible mechanized way to shear sheep at greater scale. But on the smaller scale the most efficient way is to keep the sheep calm and cooperative. The cheapest way to keep large numbers of sheep also seems to be to let them wander over a large area of cheap land (rocky, steep, uneven, etc. -- unusable for cow grazing or farming is just fine). On the Isle of Skye in Scotland there are simply sheep wandering everywhere, often in the roads, as the sheep farmers don't always bother with much fencing.
This last winter, we had a nasty ice-storm that coated everything in about a 1/8 to 1/4 coat of ice. I was working in a nearby city, so going home was nigh impossible.
I ended up staying with a friend. She has a roommate, and they both smoke. I ended up sleeping on a bed there. What I saw disturbed me greatly:
The pillow, sheet, and 2 blankets all had various amounts of burns from ashes and cigarettes. The sizes on some of the burns were so big I could fit my index finger through.
I have to wonder: how do they keep from catching their surroundings on fire?
Fire is dangerous, and we know it kills a bunch of people.
Fire retardants may be dangerous, they may harm a bunch of people, but we're not sure how many, nor how they are harmed. Research is sometimes conducted poorly, or good research is interpreted poorly by reporters.
We need to balance risk and cost. People dying in fires is bad. People getting a bunch of diseases is also bad. We need to find out which is more likely.
Having worked in the insurance industry, I can tell you there are less and less fires. The main cause are that there are less people who smoke and that old electrical wiring are replaced by the newer standards.
In urban areas, at the level of units or buildings, aren't improved regulations leading to better fire containment, and/or improved firefighting response and techniques, likely to be contributors as well? There are still apartment fires in Manhattan and Chicago, but they seem much more contained than in the past, with whole-building and especially multi-block conflagrations now quite rare.
I am not sure on that point this reality didn't affect the area I was working on. What I do know is that the number of fires has severely decreased (nearly halved just in the last 5 years). If the number of fires, the ammount claimed per fire has increased dramatically, part of that is the price of building material, work hours and just the value of the insured assets. But it doesn't seem that having fire retardant makes fires any smaller.
I did not mean to assail? The original comment was lengthy and I did not understand what the overall message was (is the author of the article a fraud? Or not?). So I asked for a TL;DR which seems to be "maybe there is a problem or maybe there isn't", which for me condenses to zero content. How is that assailing?
Perhaps my tone came across as snarky because the person providing the TL;DR actually "assailed" me for asking for a TL;DR. Sorry about that.
The reality is with this kind of thing we're really off into rounding errors. To the extent you can affect your odds of getting cancer, the extent to which you do the things your mother told you to do (don't smoke, don't drink, eat your vegetables, and don't get too fat) swamps your cancer risk from environmental sources.
Your environmental risk of cancer is probably not dominated by scary industrial chemicals, either; aflatoxins are probably much more carcinogenic than chlorinated trisphosphates used in flame retardants, and mother nature does just fine producing those on her own, often in our houses, and often in our pantries.
Well, you can't compare broccoli to nothing. Broccoli is probably a big improvement over the food most people eat, mutagenic properties notwithstanding.
Broccoli has some mutagenic properties, and some anti-mutagenic properties. This study was to see whether the overall effect was more damage or more protection, and the damage won.
I thought the connection to Bruce Ames was interesting. I remember reading Ames' discussion of carcinogens in foods and realizing that by the standards he was measuring, everything would give us cancer and the only thing we could do was ignore all that.
I do think that regulations mandating the use of new chemicals without decades of health testing is pretty irresponsible though.
The single best way to protect your home against fire, by far, is to have a fire sprinkler system installed. Unfortunately, this can only be done when the house is built. So if you are planning on building a house, specify a sprinkler system.
Why can't you retrofit fire suppressing foam in the kitchen, like one does in a commercial kitchen range hood? I've seen this done on kitchen remodels. There are residential range hoods (Viking, Wolf, ...) which have a wall-mounted button or a pull which 1) kills the fuel source and 2) smothers the range area with fire suppression (class BC or K) to put out the fire and prevent re-ignition. Totally ruins your food AND needs to be cleaned off promptly since it's corrosive.
Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.
> Kitchens are by far the most likely source of domestic fires.
Interesting; I would've guessed it'd be in closer running with other causes, but it looks like they constitute around 55% of total residential fires. According to some U.S. statistics from 2010 [1], the leading causes of residential fires are cooking, with 166k fires, followed by heating at 47k fires, electrical and "other unintentional" at ~25k each, and open flame and "intentional" at just under 20k each.
When reading the title I thought the article will be about how dangerous the couch is for our generation, because we are spending more and more time on it and so do not exercise enough our body, etc. You know, related to Tablet devices and Internet which allow more and more entertainment from the couch.
Was quite surprised it is about another type of danger. I guess I am too much on portable devices and on the couch ;)
>The baby’s mother had placed a candle in her crib, he said, and the candle fell over, igniting a pillow.
I'm pretty sure the baby's mother didn't deserve to be the mother of anyone. Either that or she spent too much time sniffing her own couch and it lowered her IQ enough to put a CANDLE IN A FREAKING CRIB WITH A BABY.
The Chicago Tribune has a good series about how Big Tobacco and chemical companies have pushed for more flame retardants in everything despite health concerns:
What is the EPA doing about it right now? You'd be surprised to learn that many U.S. environmental laws were passed by Republican presidents. There's a "Nixon-goes-to-China" aspect to it. Indeed, Nixon created the EPA...
"The problem, [the fire expert] argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam - a situation unlikely to happen in real life. ... In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren't compliant - and they burn just as hot."
So the entire country is now exposed to the dangers of these chemicals because in 1975 some bureaucrats at an obscure government agency in California came up with an arbitrary standard that was not based in reality.