News Coverage
Concerns rise over fire retardant
Published December 26, 2003
Susan Oliff tells everyone to take off their shoes when they enter her house. The Demarest mother doesn't want fertilizers and pesticides that may be on the soles to be tracked all over the carpet where her children play.
"I do what I can not to expose them to a lot of chemicals," she explained.
But like plenty of other environmentally aware mothers, Oliff never realized that her children could get a dose of toxic substances from exposure to one of the planet's most natural substances - her breast milk.
New research is telling a disturbing tale - that high levels of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, have been found in the breast milk of American women. The flame-retardant chemicals are widely used in furniture cushions and the plastic that encases computers and electronics.
100 studies show unexpected spread
This unexpected spread of PBDEs, documented in about 100 studies across the globe, has increasingly concerned scientists, environmentalists and regulators. High levels of PBDEs have been shown to cause cognitive impairment, memory loss and even brain damage in laboratory animals.
The worry is that PBDEs could be on their way to becoming the next PCBs, the cancer-causing chemicals used for decades to insulate electrical equipment. Although their use was discontinued in 1977, they were in so many products that PCBs are still persistent polluters of the water, soil and wildlife - also making their way into the human body through the food chain.
"There are a lot of similarities to the PCB story," said Sonya Lunder, environmental analyst for Washington-based Environmental Working Group.
Now that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has eliminated two types of PBDEs, known as the penta and octa forms, environmentalists are asking the agency to reconsider the safety of a third type, known as deca. They are also questioning the wisdom of the EPA's recent approval of a substitute flame retardant containing bromine because of similar health concerns.
Groups such as the Environmental Working Group argue the United States needs to consider a less-toxic approach to preventing fires.
The group did its own tests of the breast milk of 20 women across the country. The levels of PBDE found in those samples far exceed amounts found in Europe, which has widespread bans on PBDE.
Scientists test breast milk, rather than urine or blood, because it contains a high percentage of fat, and PBDEs are fat-soluble. The downside of the studies is they have led to headlines that make breast milk sound like the culprit rather than a clue to the contamination in the human body, said Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist who wrote a book on fetal and infant toxic exposures.
While nursing mothers do pass toxic substances in their bodies along to their infants, physicians still say the immunity boost that breast milk gives babies far outweighs any possible risk posed by PBDEs. Toxic chemicals in the mother's body also will be passed along before birth - through the placenta - so bottle-fed babies are also exposed, Steingraber said.
But at what point those substances can cause health problems is unknown.
"Toxic exposure is never a good thing," Steingraber said. "And the concern here is that the levels are seen to be rising. But we still don't know at what level an infant will start to show signs of neurological damage."
It's possible the health effects may not be seen until the future, because PBDEs persist in the environment and "bioaccumulate."
Still, the message as Steingraber sees it is not for women to stop nursing, but to get the chemicals out of the environment.
Several studies testing how PBDEs affect the neurological systems of laboratory animals have just begun. Scientists hope to determine the levels at which human health might be affected. Other researchers hope to discover how the chemicals get from the foam underneath the fabric of a sofa to the fat cells of fish and humans, said Robert Hale, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. His own research has found PBDEs in treated sewer sludge in four states.
Industry and EPA scientists at first thought that PBDE molecular compounds, when baked into the foam used to make cushions or encased in the plastic of computers and stereos, would not break down and disperse in the environment. Recent studies suggest otherwise, Hale said.
Unclear how chemical spreads
The question is, how?
Perhaps PBDE dust rises from the textile factories that make the cushions, Hale said. Perhaps it's spilled on the floors of plastics factories, then washed down the drains and into sewers and out into rivers. Or perhaps old ripped-up couches or broken stereos are dumped illegally, with the PBDEs left to bake and break down in the sun.
"It's something we're scratching our heads over," Hale said.
Similar pathways have been suspected in the spread of PCBs, which is why environmentalists argue history could continue to repeat itself if PBDEs are replaced with other flame-retardant chemicals that could turn out to have their own unsuspected reach into the environment.
"We're replacing one chemical we know a lot about with another we know very little about," Lunder said. But officials at the company manufacturing what will be the next generation of flame retardants argue a new bromine chemical called Firemaster 550 has passed tests to determine it doesn't break down in a harmful way or persist in the environment.
"The tests have shown that it's free of those properties," said Wendy Chance, spokeswoman for Great Lakes Chemical, which will completely replace its products containing penta and octa PBDEs with Firemaster 550 by the end of 2004.
The EPA, which had its scientists review the data, concurs that Firemaster 550 won't present the problems of the penta and octa varieties of PBDEs, said agency spokesman Dave Deegan.
The agency will not recall products made with those chemicals, although studies of flame retardants overall will continue, Deegan said.
Environmentalists fear the more stringent fire standards, whether set by states or the federal government, could lead to the introduction of more chemicals that could have similarly unpredictable environmental consequences.
Furniture makers hear potential liability in both arguments, said Russ Batson, vice president for government affairs for the American Furniture Manufacturers Association.
"When a hazard is found, everybody gets sued," Batson said. "We obviously want to try to make furniture that is as resistant to fire as possible, but we don't want to do it by using a chemical that's going to cause health problems."
Batson and others are cheered, however, by new flame retardants being developed that use inert materials to form a flameproof liner around furniture cushions. One such product uses Kevlar, the material in bulletproof vests.
But the cost of manufacturing these products remains too high, Batson said.
"What we can hope for is that in the future, we'll begin to have more flame-retardant options on the market that are chemical-free," he said.