I'll Take The Bed And Couch Without The Evil Crap In Them, Thanks!
A lesson I learned early on: When they say, "it's not the money, it's the principle," it's almost always the money.
Turns out the fire retardant chemical manufacturers lobbied hard to get their shit put in our couches. And soon, it'll probably be in our beds, too.
Now, perhaps there are those who want these chemicals in their furniture. I am not one of them. Why can't I, and everyone else, have a choice?
A caution: I haven't read the studies here -- so if you do read them and find flaws, do tell. Also, they're only on animals and not on humans as of yet. I still don't want this crap in my couch or my bed. And if I don't, and I need a new couch, what does that mean -- that I have to spend extra to get my couch shipped from out of state? And can I even get a couch shipped in without this stuff? (Nanny-state, nanny-state, go away...and stay the hell away, wouldja?)
Arlene Blum,executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Department of Chemistry, is also opposed to having the fire retardants in our furniture. She asks, in the LA Times, "Did the state kill my cat?":
My beloved cat, Midnight, died a few days ago -- possibly because of toxic chemicals in my furniture. In two years with hyperthyroid disease, Midnight went from a plump 14 pounds to a skeletal five. A year ago, a veterinary epidemiologist found that Midnight's blood contained among the highest levels of PBDEs documented in animal research. That's when I learned that the chemicals in my cat came from my couch. And that my furniture is uniquely toxic because I live in California.Since the 1980s, fire-retardant chemicals such as PBDEs have been added to furniture to meet a California-only requirement that the foam inside resist a 12-second exposure to an open flame. The chemicals evaporate from the foam, settle in dust and coat walls with a thin film. Cats that groom themselves and toddlers who crawl in dust show especially high levels of PBDEs, but everyone with this chemically treated furniture gets some exposure.
In dozens of animal studies, these fire retardants also have been shown to harm reproduction and scramble brain development. Studies are underway to determine if PBDEs are contributing to increases in autism, hyperactivity, birth defects, infertility, diabetes and obesity in people.
...The fire retardant is known to cause thyroid problems in rats, mice, kestrels and frogs. The EPA suspected a link after its 2007 study of cats found substantially higher levels of PBDEs in the ones with hyperthyroidism. In 1980, when PBDEs were first added to furniture, hyperthyroid disease in cats hardly existed, according to my veterinarian. Now it is an epidemic in California.
Were Midnight and my family safer from fires because of the toxic chemicals in our couch? Probably not. Furniture fabric in California is not required to be fire resistant. In a fire, fabric burns long enough to ignite even treated foam.
...San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Mark Leno's AB 706, a bill that sought to remove toxic fire retardants from California furniture and maintain fire safety, was just voted down by the state Senate. Manufacturers of fire retardants -- Chemtura Corp., Albemarle Corp. and Israel Chemicals Ltd. -- spent millions on lobbying to stop it.
Instead, more Californians may soon be sleeping in a cocoon of chemicals. Technical Bulletin 604, a proposed state regulation requiring comforters, mattress pads and pillows to resist an open flame, is expected to be enacted soon by the California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation. Yet the state has not asked for any information on the health or environmental effects of the chemicals likely to be used.
When you allow the state to make decisions about your life, there is no end to what they will do for you. They are never liable for the consequences.
Why aren't the greens protesting this?
MarkD at October 18, 2008 7:05 AM
Although two wrongs do not make a right, and I am not suggesting that monitoring at my own job be stepped down -- this is a fine example of how public perception is exploited by various parties, and how unintended consequences are everywhere.
The fire retardants were pushed by the idea that chemicals are harmless, and that keeping people from dying in the first few minutes of a fire was a good idea. I suggest that all of the people involved knew nothing of the actual behavior of the chemicals once placed in a home, and that a bunch of them have... interesting... opinions about Savannah River Site and Yucca Mountain, both far from their home and continuously monitored.
Chemicals are orders of magnitude more likely to cause acute and genetic effects in all creatures than radiological sources where exposure is permitted, and this is widely known by professionals, who are shipping millions of tons of it throughout the USA daily.
Radwaste at October 18, 2008 7:38 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2008/10/18/ill_take_the_be.html#comment-1598372">comment from MarkDThis situation is yet another example where, I think, most people had no idea of what was being required. Government by the lobbyists, for the big companies that pay them. This is why I would like to see more libertarian candidates running. When you aren't on guard, maybe they'll be more likely to guard against this shit than the lobbying-as-usual Dems and Republicans.
Amy Alkon at October 18, 2008 9:58 AM
Another revelation about the distorted thinking of regulators and legislators.
A few micrograms of "pesticide" on food drives regulators crazy, regardless of many studies showing safety. Pesticide is a bad chemical; it kills things.
Many grams (millions of micrograms) of "flame retardant" on couches, or "ozone reducer" (MTBE) in gasoline are required because their purpose is pure, although they have not been studied. These are good chemicals, with a high purpose.
Why won't people distrust regulation and government, given the multiple and repeated displays of stupidity and risk-taking in the name of the "public good"?
When companies pay off Congressmen and Senators with campaign contributions to get favorable laws passed, why does the blame go solely to the companies? Do you believe it when your Congressman or Senator says "Poor me, I am just an ordinary person, and I couldn't resist the money when those filthy, unprincipled, money-loving companies put it before me. They must be investigated so this corruption can be rooted out."
Andrew Garland at October 18, 2008 10:41 AM
Christ, yet another health concern out of our control! And when you bitch, you're the lone nutcake or at least that's what they treat you like.
Things aren't going to change unless we can shake people out of their apathy and stir them up to fight. There's so much going on precisely because people take it lying down. Just try to stir them up -- I sure have -- and they shrug their shoulders and say, you can't do anything about it then roll their eyes when I ask where would we be if the founding fathers and Martin Luther King, Jr. felt that way?
It's like your fight -- and keep on truckin', girl -- with BofA. People take an attitude that it's pointless to fight and you should choose your battles. I always want to scream yeah, I'm choosing this battle because this is one I happen to find worth fighting for. You got a problem with that? Usually I just glare at them and say evenly, I am.
I have enough health problems -- many of which have roots in childhood malnutrition. I don't need any more added because of bullshit like this. The scary thing is the industry is trying to enact laws requiring it at the Federal level.
What NY has is a law that cigarettes have to self-extinguish. I guess the thing is most furniture fires start from dropped cigarettes. And that's apparently done through the design of the paper and how it burns, from what I found by googling, by putting rings, banding, the paper. Far safer measure than CA's.
It's more of this nonsense that we want to make the world a risk-free place to live. Well, guess what? We can't. It ain't gonna happen. There's good and bad in life and no one lives for ever. All we can do is minimize risk and that ain't what's happening here. Because people occassionally get killed in house fire, we're exposing a far greater number of people to the risk of these chemicals. Retarded.
T's Grammy at October 18, 2008 11:02 AM
Well, somebody should do the math before you guys start getting cranky. Have more people (and more house pets) been protected from gruesome fire deaths (and smoke inhalation) than have been lost to these infrequent, speculative poisonings? I wouldn't be suprised. There are a lot of house fires.
Also, the crazy Michigan parents don't get their kid back. But don't worry, they have others. And also, Dad is in the picture, which I thought unlikely. Also, the parents are both named "Terry", why may be psychologically telling. (All of this may have been covered in Amy's original post.)
Crid [cridcridatgmail] at October 18, 2008 11:53 AM
Yeh, chemicals are really dangerous. Did you know that Dihydrogen Monoxide kills thousands every year? And yet the government has pretty much ensured that it's in every house in this country. You've probably ingested at least of a pint of it in the last month alone.
Get the facts about this silent killer: http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
franko at October 18, 2008 2:17 PM
Very funny, franko. Now take a look around your own house and find out what you have indoors already.
As a homeowner, you are permitted to bring home more pesticide than friends running orange groves are allowed on a hundred acres of citrus. No one monitors your lawn for fertilizer runoff; that's for other people, other nations.
Anecdotal: a friends stepfather died from several cancers. The house was empty for awhile, then I was over to help clean it out, as him mom was moving. In the garage: eleven dusty 5-pound bags of Chlordane, leaking.
You can't live as you do without the careful use of chemicals, and it behooves you to find out what they are and what they do. I suggest you have a lot to learn. All I have is a head start.
Radwaste at October 18, 2008 2:56 PM
Don't waste your time, Rad. Franko's an asshole.
This is case of "we didn't know it was harmful". Well, fine. Now you do, so get it the fuck out of new furniture and find something else to use.
Of course, someone's going to try to sue for big bucks on the premise that "they should have known", but they didn't. Get over it.
Of course, this is California, the state that "knows" that lead causes cancer when it does no such thing.
No accounting for sanity.
brian at October 18, 2008 8:34 PM
Yes; we should all be aware of the chemistry in our homes. But it's a safe bet that furniture manufacturers would prefer not using that stuff anyway, but must to protect themselves from lawsuits when their customers fall asleep drunk while smoking and set their new couches on fire.
Civilization seeks equilibrium for competing interests.....
Crid at October 18, 2008 9:15 PM
This is much like the hullabaloo over asbestos. Sure, asbestos is really, really bad for you - asbestosis is a fucking bitch. But there are unintended consequences. Eliminating asbestos from new production,`great idea. Removing asbestos from existing structures - not so good. After years of a default assumption that getting the asbestos out of existing structures is of tantamount importance, we learned that the best thing to do is to seal it in place.
Meanwhile, with all the focus on asbestos, we ignore a far more common, but not quite as dangerous a carcinogen - fiberglass. You watch someone who for whatever reason has to handle asbestos, they wear a tyveck suit and respirator with helmet. You watch a guy working with fiberglass and it is likely he isn't even wearing a dust mask. Then compare microparticles of both asbestos and fiberglass - the difference, fiberglass has only three quarters the barbs that asbestos has.
The problem with fire retardants, is that they are pretty much all toxic. Some are less toxic than others, but ultimately you have to make a tradeoff somewhere.
There are a lot of house fires.
True, but they are most often caused by electricity - whether faulty wiring, electrical appliances or both. Further, it's not usually the furniture that makes them so tragic, it is the construction of the house. Newer houses (twenty or less years in most places - the newer the better) put a lot into containing fire at it's point of origin, making it more likely that folks inside can get out. Older houses however, lack any sort of fire blocking, have frames that are extremely dry and often lack any kind of fire rated wall and floor surfaces. Too, they often lack proper egress.
The main problem with burning furniture is one, people who fall asleep and it catches fire and the fact that the foam produces highly toxic gasses when it burns. Ironically, formaldehyde, a common flame retardant, adds more toxic gasses when it finally does ignite.b
Civilization seeks equilibrium for competing interests.....
Absolutely true and all too often tragic.
DuWayne at October 20, 2008 10:49 AM
DuWayne, your post inspired me to go look up some recent fire stats. It used to be a truism that most residential fire fatalities were caused by careless smoking. Well, it appears that's not quite true anymore. The U.S. Fire Administration has some 2006 stats up on its Web site:
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov
Although the data is covered up in caveats, it's still pretty interesting to look at. According to their charts, if you are going to die in a residental fire, it is most likely to be an intentionally set fire (they use the word "suspicious"), accounting for 12% of all residential fire deaths. Smoking comes in second at about 8%, and everything else trends down to tiny numbers after that. Apparently there are either a whole slew of onesey-twosey events hiding down below the chart's cutoff, or there are a whole bunch of "unknown" causes that were omitted from the data.
Electrical fires accounted for only about 1.5% of all residential fires, and 3% of all residential fire deaths. I'm not too surprised at that, actually. There has been a heck of a lot of progress in electrical wiring standards in the U.S. since the mid-'70s. It's been my observation that, these days, most electrical fires occur in old structures with substandard wiring. Interestingly, the 2006 data had "cooking" rated as the #1 cause of residential fires, accounting for 26% of all such, but cooking fires accounted for relatively few fatalities. This is probably because one is presumably awake while cooking, so that if a fire starts, one can react to it immedately. Fires that start in bedrooms are only about 5% of all residential fires, but they account for a quarter of all fatalities.
The National Fire Protection Agency's charts show that there has been, since the late 1970s, a long-term downward trend in fire deaths -- about a 50% reduction from then to today. The NFPA also says that two-thirds of residential fire deaths occur in homes that lack working smoke detectors.
Back to the topic, I've seen some demonstrations of furniture fires that are positively frightening. Once the fire catches up, the scene goes from placid to you-can't-see-your-nose-in-front-of-your-face in about a minute. So I can see the motivation for wanting to make furniture fire resistant. However, given the numbers I quoted above about smoke detectors, I wonder how effective it would really be -- you can't make any fabric (except fiberglass and asbestos) totally fireproof, and fire retardants might just give the fire longer to smolder. Also, it seems like it would be more effective to fireproof padding and stuffing (which are big contributors to furniture fires) by wrapping them in Nomex or something similar, rather than trying to make the material inside inherently fire resistant.
Cousin Dave at October 20, 2008 1:23 PM
I love california. You can't smoke anywhere there, but they will expose everyone buying furniture there to carcinogens just to save a few people that burn themselves to death while smoking. Brilliant. Because how else would a piece of furniture be the first thing to ignite? No mattress is going up in a cooking fire.
momof3 at October 20, 2008 6:48 PM
Cousin Dave -
My bad, I tend to discount arson when talking about house fires (I am surprised to see that it is so high though), because I tend to focus on safety - an area where arson is not as applicable. Not that safety isn't of value even with arson, but it is not applicable in prevention of fire.
It should also be noted that smoking was the leading cause of residential fire deaths, not of fires themselves. I tend to think that it has gone down overall because more and more folks are choosing to keep the smoking outdoors.
I am looking at electrical as an aggregate though and if you add the numbers that apply - appliances, misuse of appliances (a huge one, as it includes stoves, ovens and microwaves), lights (a big one as it includes decorative lights), accidental mixing of water and electricity and faulty wiring - the numbers look a lot different.
I would also note that while improvements in wiring and appliances has lowered the incidence, there are still plenty of problems. For example, GFCIs have a limited life span and unless you have GFCIs manufactured in the last ten years, they don't always stop working when they no longer offer the protection they are supposed to. Even worse, if you blow the circuit of a faulty GFCI, it will cause massive sparking. Older GFCIs could also be installed improperly and still be live - just not offering any protection.
And not all appliances are up to snuff either. To this day, toaster ovens are a huge hazard. They should always be unplugged when not in use. This is true of all small appliances, but it is critical with toaster ovens - especially cheaper ones. Because they are so small, they are prone to problems with melted components. Basically they can turn themselves on when not in use. Give it several hours and the fucking thing will ignite.
momof3 -
Because how else would a piece of furniture be the first thing to ignite?
Not that it changes anything or makes your comment less reasonable, but if I were an arsonist, the furniture would be the ignition point I would choose. Flame retardant or not, once it gets going, it will be a hell of a fire.
DuWayne at October 21, 2008 10:19 AM
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