Opinion: The Hidden Risk of Fire Safety Standards

In December, news broke that scientists at the University of Texas School of Public Health found extremely high levels of a class of recently banned flame retardants, PBDEs, in brand-name butter.

This adds fuel to the long standing -- and fiery -- controversy about the use of flame retardants in consumer products.

Certainly the argument for fire safety is a strong one. However, on the other side of the debate there are a growing number of scientists who are increasingly concerned about the specific chemicals used as flame retardants -- the PBDEs and now their replacements -- pumped into furniture, electronics and even baby products.

The trouble, they say, is that the chemicals migrate from these products into house dust, which is ingested by people, especially small children who are closer to the floor and exhibit more hand-to-mouth activity.

The resulting high body levels of flame retardants are associated with rising rates of reproductive and endocrine problems (including infertility and thyroid disease), neurodevelopmental delays in children (such as autism and learning disabilities) and certain types of cancer.

That might be acceptable if these chemicals carried a fire safety benefit that outweighed these health risks. But they don't. In fact, when these chemicals do burn in a fire, they increase the amount of carbon monoxide and smoke produced -- the inhalation of which is the primary cause of fire deaths.

The fight against flame retardants is nothing new. The PBDEs and their replacements are just the most recent installment of a legacy of similar flame retardant chemicals whose toxic properties were discounted before attracting sustained regulatory attention.

However, because of weaknesses in the law that regulates industrial chemicals -- the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 -- neither federal nor state environmental protection agencies have had adequate authority to require that manufacturers ensure their flame retardant chemicals are safe.

Even if a chemical has vast amounts of toxicology and even human epidemiology data showing adverse health associations, it is has been exceedingly difficult to meet the TSCA standards necessary for the EPA to ban the chemical. Even the EPA's 1989 ban on asbestos was overturned. (So technically it is still legal for use in consumer products in the U.S., although individual lawsuits have been so successful that they've discouraged its use in more than trace amounts. And it is banned by the European Union.)

Another problem is that TSCA affords no incentive for the development of actually safer alternatives. Since it is beneficial for manufacturers to exploit their existing expertise, equipment and patents, production tends to shift from one compound to another based on structural similarities.

So flame retardants, when finally banned or phased out because of their toxicity, have historically been simply replaced by chemicals of similar structure -- and therefore, similar toxicity.

For example, in the late 1970s, a chemical called brominated Tris was used to treat children's sleepwear until it was found to cause DNA mutations after one night of wearing brominated Tris-treated pajamas. Chlorinated Tris was the main replacement. Chlorinated Tris was removed from sleepwear a year later when it, unsurprisingly, was also shown to be a mutagen and carcinogen.

Don't be too relieved -- today chlorinated Tris is used in furniture and certain baby products to comply with a California flammability standard.

Two bills were introduced last year in the House and Senate: the Toxic Chemicals Safety Act and the Safer Chemicals Act of 2010. If this or similar legislation is implemented in 2011, the EPA would have more ability to protect human health and the environment from toxic chemicals and provide the necessary incentive to move the U.S. chemicals market toward green chemistry.

That would mean that toxic flame retardants could no longer be replaced by their chemical cousins. Manufacturers would actually have to find truly harmless alternative chemicals or materials, which scientists believe would maintain or increase fire safety anyway.

In the end, we shouldn't have to trade fire safety for exposure to highly toxic chemicals.

Rebecca Daley is an environmental health scientist and an associate at the Green Science Policy Institute in Berkeley, Calif., and is a Center for Health Leadership fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Gregory Fuoco is currently a Teach for America corps member and is active in Bay Area legal clinics.