Flame Retardants: A Cautionary Tale

By Lisa Carey Moore

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We all have moments when our personal and professional lives intersect. For me a particularly poignant moment involved a couch and my first Living Building Challenge project. I was just starting research on products, learning about chemicals of concern and, more important, exactly where they are used in building products. Including furniture.

Purchased in 2011, my couch represented myriad decisions—relative to cost, aesthetics, quality of workmanship and comfort. My measure for “healthier” was narrowly defined by Greenguard, an emissions standard, because my understanding of what was “healthier” was based on my experience in the LEED V3 realm. One day I flipped my couch cushions over to find a CA-TB-117 label. Flame retardants! Suddenly I recognized that the fusion of work knowledge and home life would present new challenges.

Since the 1970s, flame retardant chemicals have been added to a range of consumer products, including upholstered furniture, mattresses, carpets and their pads and window treatments.  They’re added to plastic polymers found in electronic wiring and electronic cases, rigid foam, duct insulation, paints, coatings and ceiling panels. Worst of all, we find them in children’s products such as nap mats, stuffed toys, strollers and car seats.

In addition, recycling foam and plastics means that some products have flame retardants due to contaminated feedstock, rather than any specific intent to add them. Fourteen states¹ [1] now regulate these chemicals in some subset of products, but there’s no federal standard in the U.S. Consumers must be intentional about avoiding them in product selection, as they’re employed in manufacturing world-wide.

Why should we care?

Extensive peer-reviewed research has shown that certain flame retardants are linked to cancer, neurotoxicity, developmental toxicity and endocrine disruption. Unfortunately, they don’t stay in our products. As products degrade over time (and all products do) they get into the dust in our homes and the air that we breathe, and ultimately, our bodies. Particularly into our children’s bodies. Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, has said, “We need to realize that these flame retardants threaten the brain development of a whole generation.” ²

Tests show that infants and toddlers have flame retardant chemicals in their blood at levels far higher than their parents, from four to 10 times as high, because of their more extensive hand-to-mouth contact.  This is particularly concerning —chemical flame retardants can cause the greatest neurodevelopmental harm during critical windows of development in infancy and childhood.

Research by New York University in 2019, reported in the journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, shows that flame retardants contributed to a loss of 162 million IQ points among children from 2001-2016. ³ One of the study’s doctors called flame retardants a “hit and run” chemical, because the damage can be sudden and is irreversible.

The economic cost of childhood brain damage due to chemical exposure is real. Researchers noted that each individual IQ point is worth roughly 2% of a child’s lifetime economic productivity. Collectively this loss across society could amount to trillions of dollars.

In light of the ongoing pandemic, it is worth recognizing that flame retardants are a class of chemicals that, masquerading as hormones, can impact our endocrine system. They can exacerbate certain diseases, resulting in underlying conditions that may increase susceptibility to COVID-19. They also can cause immunosuppression, which heightens our vulnerability to infections.⁴

Most frustrating perhaps, is that research shows that chemical flame retardants do not even provide meaningful fire safety benefits when added to consumer products! Rather, they cause delayed ignition and smoke, which can do more harm than good.⁵

So where we can, we should avoid flame retardants. In categories where they’re necessary, we should explore alternative materials to make our products safe and less toxic. Many companies are already doing this, and optimized product marketplaces like Declare, the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, and even Cradle2Cradle can shed light on products that exclude this class. (Note that while the C2C banned list includes many families of flame retardants, consumers should follow up with manufacturers to confirm whether their products exclude this class as these labels don’t provide ingredient transparency.)

When projects and procurement teams eliminate toxic chemicals in specifications and purchases, they send manufacturers a clear signal about what we want and what we don’t. Let’s do this with choices for our home, too. Each of these conversations can help lead to the removal of chemicals of concern that will benefit everyone, from workers who add flame retardants to the chairs we sit in, to communities—typically disadvantaged communities—that are exposed to toxic emissions from manufacturing and disposal. This also includes your average consumer, buying that new couch for their family.

Next Steps

Transparency

Ask suppliers and manufacturers if their products have chemically added flame retardants.

Identification

Identify furniture and furnishings with CA TB-117-2013 label, which indicates “No Added Chemical flame retardants.” Wool, tightly woven cotton, polyester and new materials like “Trevira” that are used in shade fabrics (and sold by various manufacturers under different brand names), are examples of alternatives to chemically treated fabrics that resist flame spread. Add: “no chemical flame retardants” to your specifications, starting in high touch divisions 09 and CA TB117-2013 “no added chemical flame retardants” for furniture in Div. 12.

Precautionary Steps

If you do have furniture pieces with the TB-117 flame retardant label and don’t want to junk them, clean regularly with a HEPA-filtration vacuum, or wipe clean with a wet cloth for solid surfaces, so that that flame retardant dust isn’t getting into the bodies of friends, family, and pets. And as we’ve learned in this year of Covid, it’s always important to frequently wash your hands so you don’t accidently ingest flame retardants and other substances that can do harm.

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1. In January 2021, the Governor of Massachusetts at last signed a flame retardant ban bill into effect, citing the significant show of support for the measure from the design build community and, specifically, the ability of our industry to show that removal of chemicals is possible without having severe economic impact. ↩︎
2. University of Toronto, “New flame retardants, old problems: Replacement flame retardants present science risks, caution scientists,” Science Daily, October 22, 2019. ↩︎
3. Bendix, Aria. “Exposure to flame retardants is causing US kids to lose millions of IQ points. They’re more damaging than lead or mercury.” January 14, 2020. Accessed on September 15, 2020. ↩︎
4. Birnbaum, Linda S. and Jerrold J. Heindel. “Endocrine-disrupting Chemicals Weaken Us in our COVID-19 Battle.” Environmental Health News. Accessed on July 15, 2020. ↩︎
5. Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Chicago Tribune reporters, “Fear fans flames for chemical makers,” Chicago Tribune, and Shaw et al, “Halogenated flame retardants: do the fire safety benefits justify the risks?” Review of Environmental Health, Oct-Dec 2010, 25 (4), 261-305. ↩︎

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Lisa Carey Moore is the International Living Future Institutes’ Director of the Buildings Team, one of the three pillars of ILFI’s Impact Group.