The article ran the following January. By April, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the flame retardant from children’s sleepwear. Manufacturers quickly switched to a related compound, chlorinated Tris. Blum and her co-author, a biochemist named Bruce Ames, tested it and found that it, too, was a mutagen and thus likely to be carcinogenic. Chlorinated Tris was then removed from pajamas as well.
Blum went on to a storied career as a mountaineer, leaving biochemistry behind. But while she was adventuring all over the world, Tris was staging a quiet comeback in other products.
Blum discovered this fact six years ago, when, at age 61, she decided to return to science. Looking for a way to put her academic training to use, she attended a symposium on chemical policy in California. There she struck up a conversation with Bob Luedeka, who happens to be the executive director of the Polyurethane Foam Association. He was there, he said, because of worries about chemical flame retardants, which are found in almost all upholstered furniture. One of the most commonly used flame retardants is chlorinated Tris. Blum says she felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a 30-year nap.
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. Because foam is highly flammable, the bureau’s regulation, Technical Bulletin 117, can be met only by adding large quantities of chemical flame retardants — usually about 5 to 10 percent of the weight of the foam — at the point of manufacture. The state’s size makes it impractical for furniture makers to keep separate inventories for different markets, so about 80 percent of the home furniture and most of the upholstered office furniture sold in the United States complies with California’s regulation. “We live in a foam-filled world, and a lot of the foam is filled with these chemicals,” Blum says.
The problem is that flame retardants don’t seem to stay in foam. High concentrations have been found in the bodies of creatures as geographically diverse as salmon, peregrine falcons, cats, whales, polar bears and Tasmanian devils. Most disturbingly, a recent study of toddlers in the United States conducted by researchers at Duke University found flame retardants in the blood of every child they tested. The chemicals are associated with an assortment of health concerns, including antisocial behavior, impaired fertility, decreased birth weight, diabetes, memory loss, undescended testicles, lowered levels of male hormones and hyperthyroidism.
Blum decided she would get the Bureau of Home Furnishings to change its rules so that flame retardants would no longer be used. She had the science. She had the support of the foam industry. And she had already done this once, with children’s pajamas. How hard could it be?
“I thought we’d have one meeting,” she says. “You know, Himalayan mountain climbers are acute optimists because there’s such a high fatality rate. If you do things like that, you have to be optimistic to the point of slight insanity.” (...)
Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist who conducted many of the best-known studies of flame retardants, notes that foam is full of air. “So every time somebody sits on it,” she says, “all the air that’s in the foam gets expelled into the environment.” Studies have found that young children, who often play on the floor and put toys in their mouths, can have three times the levels of flame retardants in their blood as their parents. Flame retardants can also pass from mother to child through the placenta and through breast milk.
The effects of that exposure may be hard to detect in individual children, but scientists can see them when they look across the population. 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. “If you’re a kid who is at the low end of the I.Q. spectrum, five points can make the difference between being in a special-ed class or being able to graduate from high school,” says Julie Herbstman, the study’s author.
There are many flame retardants in use, the components of which are often closely held trade secrets. 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). Newer ones like Chemtura’s Firemaster 550 are just starting to be analyzed, even though it is now one of the most commonly used flame retardants in furniture.
Logic would suggest that any new chemical used in consumer products be demonstrably safer than a compound it replaces, particularly one taken off the market for reasons related to human health. But 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. That’s because industrial chemicals are presumed safe unless proved otherwise, under the 1976 federal Toxic Substances Control Act.
by Dashika Slater, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Jens Mortensen
