An article from this week’s NYT Magazine:
How Dangerous Is Your Couch?
Unfortunately, the article isn’t about couches with knife-like edges on the underside, but rather about the alleged dangers of flame retardant chemicals used in couch foam.
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.
The big problems are:
- These chemicals apparently don’t stay bound to the foam, but migrate into the environment.
- These chemicals allegedly have negative side effects on human health.
- And these fire retardants may not be doing a damn bit of good in any case.
In Babrauskas’s view, TB 117 is ineffective in preventing fires. The problem, he argues, is that the standard is based on applying a small flame to a bare piece of foam — a situation unlikely to happen in real life. “If you take a cigarette lighter and put it on a chair,” he says, “there’s no naked foam visible on that chair unless you live in a horrendous pigsty where people have torn apart their furniture.” In real life, before the flame gets to the foam, it has to ignite the fabric. Once the fabric catches fire, it becomes a sheet of flame that can easily overwhelm the fire-suppression properties of treated foam. In tests, TB 117 compliant chairs catch fire just as easily as ones that aren’t compliant — and they burn just as hot. “This is not speculation,” he says. “There were two series of tests that prove what I’m saying is correct.”
One question sort of implied, but not explicitly asked, by this article: many of these standards, like TB 117, were implemented at a time when far more people smoked, and smoke detectors were far less common. The idea was to keep Grandpa’s cigarette from setting the couch on fire if he dozed off in front of the TV set. Now that smoking has decreased dramatically, and smoke detectors are everywhere, do these standards continue to make sense? And shouldn’t this be a consumer choice? If you have kids, buy a couch with all natural fabric and stuffing. If you smoke and drink in front of the TV set and frequently doze off, get a couch that you couldn’t set on fire with a blowtorch and napalm.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2012 at 3:15 pm and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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