While in the Bay Area, California, my eye fell on several articles regarding possible new fire safety standards leading to the discontinued use of toxic flame retardants (e. g., Chlorinated Tris, PentaBDE) in upholstered furniture and children's products.
Chlorinated Tris and PentaBDE have been brought back into the California media forefront due to a recent proposal aimed at revising Technical Bulletin 117, a 38 year old California flammability standard, which led to the use of toxic flame retardants in polyurethane foam throughout the United States. In the original 1975 version, furniture flammability was tested by exposing a sample of polyurethane foam to a small, open flame for a period of 12 seconds. This test allowed for flame retardant chemicals to be used in products to meet this flammability standard. Later, it was found that the "open flame" test was unsatisfactory and unrealistic, as research has been shown that most upholstery fires start due to the igniting of outer fabrics on furniture, not the polyurethane foam. Therefore on February 8, 2013, a revised flammability standard was proposed in California, Technical Bulletin 117 2013, where the new flammability test is three-pronged, and includes cover fabrics, interliners, as well as filling materials being exposed to a lit cigarette, rather than an open flame. Links to both Technical Bulletins are found below:
Technical Bulletin
117 (1975): Requirements, Test Procedures and Apparatus for Testing the Flame
Retardance of Resilient Filling Materials used in Upholstered Furniture
(State of California DCA, 1975)http://www.bhfti.ca.gov/industry/117.pdf
Technical Bulletin
117 (2013): Requirements, Test Procedure and Apparatus for Testing the Smolder
Resistance of Materials used in Upholstered Furniture (State of California
DCA, 2013)
Granted, this subject is not so much a "geochemical" issue, as an "environmental" one. However, I believed it to be worthy of further investigation. Therefore, I took the time to dig up several research articles published in association with the National Ground Water Association (NGWA), the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and the American Chemical Society (ACS) concerning the persistence and fate of Chlorinated Tris and PentaBDE within the environment, and the deleterious effects of flame retardants on human health. I offer the reader the following four articles:
Fate of Chlorinated
Flame Retardants in the Environment and Water Treatment
(DREWES et al.,
2006)
Environmental Impacts
of Flame Retardants (Persistence and Biodegradability)
[SEGEV et al., 2009]
Identification of
Flame Retardants in Polyurethane Foam Collected from Baby Products
(STAPLETON et al., 2011)
Novel and High Volume
Use Flame Retardants in US Couches Reflective of the 2005 PentaBDE Phase Out
(STAPLETON et al., 2012)
(STAPLETON et al., 2012)
Finally, I include a research document from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), California Environmental Protection Agency (CEPA) concerning the carcinogenicity of Tris, for your perusal:
Evidence of the
Carcinogenicity of TRIS (1, 3 –Dichloro-2-Propyl) PHOSPHATE
[OEHHA, 2011]
http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/hazard_ident/pdf_zip/TDCPP070811.pdf [OEHHA, 2011]
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