Part 1: The next PCBs

As highly flammable synthetic materials have replaced less-combustible natural materials in consumer products, chemical fire retardants have become ubiquitous in consumer products. Of the many different kinds of fire retardants, one of the most common is a class of bromine-based chemicals known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. Today PBDEs are in thousands of products, in which they typically comprise 5 to 30 percent of product weight. [1] During manufacturing, PBDEs are simply mixed in to the plastic or foam product, rather than chemically binding to the material as some other retardants do, making PBDEs more likely to leach out.

Products Often Containing PBDEs

Materials used in	Types of PBDEs used	Examples of consumer products
Plastics	Deca, Octa, Penta	Computers, televisions, hair dryers, curling irons, copy machines, fax machines, printers, coffee makers, plastic automotive parts, lighting panels, PVC wire and cables, electrical connectors, fuses, housings, boxes and switches, lamp sockets, waste-water pipes, underground junction boxes, circuit boards, smoke detectors
Textiles	Deca, Penta	Back coatings and impregnation of home and office furniture, carpets, automotive seating, aircraft and train seating
Polyurethane foam	Penta	Home and office furniture (couches and chairs, carpet padding, mattresses and mattress pads) automobile, bus, plane and train seating, sound insulation panels, imitation wood, packaging materials
Rubber	Deca, Penta	Conveyor belts, foamed pipes for insulation, rubber cables
Paints and laquers	Deca, Penta	Marine and industry protective laquers and paints

Source: WHO 1994, Danish EPA 1999

There are 209 structural variants, or congeners, of PBDEs, classified by the number of bromine atoms in a molecule of the chemical: Penta-BDEs have five bromine atoms, octa-BDEs have eight, deca-BDEs have 10, and so on. The commercial PBDE flame retardants are actually mixtures of several different congeners, with the three major products called Deca, Penta, and Octa. (The common name of the commercial product can be somewhat misleading; the Penta product, for example, is actually a mixture of 40 percent tetra-BDE, 45 percent penta-BDE and 6 percent hexa-BDE congeners.) Worldwide, Deca is the most widely used of the PBDEs with 83 percent of the global market by weight, followed by Penta with 11 percent and Octa with 6 percent. [2]

PBDEs are the chemical cousins of PCBs, another family of persistent and bioaccumulative toxins that came to the attention of regulators only after millions of pounds had been released into the environment. In the 26 years since PCBs were banned, numerous studies have documented permanent, neurological impairment to the developing child from low level PCB exposure. [3-7] Recent evidence suggests PBDEs and PCBs may work together to cause adverse health effects. Not only do PBDEs appear to be acting through the same pathways as PCBs and dioxins, but a 2003 study found that early exposure of lab animals to a combination of PCBs and PBDEs affected motor skills ten times more strongly than exposure to the individual chemicals. [8, 9]

PBDE use has skyrocketed in the last three decades, with Penta production almost doubling between 1992 and 2001. [2, 10] The market took off after the ban of a previously popular class of fire retardants, polybrominated biphenyls or PBBs, following the catastrophic contamination of cattle feed in Michigan during 1973 and 1974 that exposed nine million people to tainted meat and dairy products. [11] Today, half of the PBDEs used worldwide are used in North America, with 73 million pounds being used in 2001. [2] An unknown amount of PBDEs, probably millions of pounds, is also imported into the country each year in manufactured goods. Chemical industry analysts say the North American market for brominated flame retardants is $1 billion a year and growing by about 3.7 percent annually; the European market is a little more than half that size. [12]

Global Use of PBDEs in 2001
(in thousands of pounds)

Commerical PBDE Product	Americas	Europe	Asia	Other	Total	Percent used in the Americas
Deca	54,010	16,760	50,710	2,315	123,700	44%
Penta	15,650	331	331	221	16,530	95%
Octa	3,307	1,345	3,307	397	8,356	40%

Source: BSEF 2002

The Bromine Oligopoly

Worldwide, eight companies manufacture PBDEs, with the two largest in the U.S.: Great Lakes Chemical Corp. of West Lafayette, Ind., and Albemarle Corp. of Richmond, Va. In 2002, Great Lakes reported total sales for all products of $1.4 billion, up 4 percent from the previous year. Albermarle reported sales of $980 million, up 7 percent. [13, 14] To Americans familiar with toxics issues, the corporations are notorious as the manufacturers of methyl bromide, a volatile, acutely toxic, ozone-depleting pesticide gas used to fumigate strawberries, tomatoes and other crops. (Albemarle also has the dubious distinction of being a spin-off of Ethyl Corp., whose leaded gasoline additive was banned in the U.S. in 1972.) The main areas of bromine production in the world are southeastern Arkansas, where Great Lakes and Albemarle pump it from underground pools of brine, and Israel, where a company named Dead Sea Bromine extracts it from the briny inland sea. A chemical industry journal describes the global trade in brominated chemicals as “an oligopoly controlled by Albemarle, Great Lakes and the Dead Sea Bromine Group.” [15]

Despite their heavy use, until recently data were scarce on the toxicity or environmental fate of PBDEs. But in the last few years, it has become clear that PBDEs and other brominated flame retardants have joined PCBs, DDT and dioxin on the list of persistent, bioaccumulative chemicals contaminating people, animals and the environment everywhere on Earth. PBDEs are now found in house dust, sewage sludge and the water and sediments of rivers, estuaries and oceans. They’ve been found in the tissues of whales, seals, birds and bird eggs, moose, reindeer, mussels, eels, and dozens of species of freshwater and marine fish. [16-21] Like scores of other industrial chemicals, they have also been found in human breast milk, fat and blood.

The reach of PBDE pollution is global, found essentially everywhere scientists have looked: Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, Germany, Greenland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and numerous U.S. locations. [16, 17, 19, 22-25] PBDEs can travel great distances. They’ve been found in birds and marine mammals in remote locations including the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Arctic Ocean. [26]

Of greatest concern is the exponential rate of PBDE increase in the environment. PBDEs in California harbor seals increased by a factor of 100 between 1989 and 1998, and in Lake Ontario trout by a factor of more than 300 between 1978 and 1998. [27, 28] Similar dramatic increases have been seen in human blood samples from Norway, ringed seals from the Canadian arctic, and gull eggs from the Great Lakes region. [18, 29, 30] In each of these studies, the time it took for PBDEs to double in concentration was remarkably short — from less than two years to five years.

U.S. Dominates Global Use of PBDEs

The problem is global, but the U.S. is clearly a hotspot. The average PBDE concentration found in the breast tissue of California women was among the highest yet reported — three times higher than Swedish tissue samples, 10 times higher than German blood samples and Canadian milk samples, and 25 times higher than Spanish tissue samples. [27]

It is still unknown why U.S. levels are so much higher than in other industrialized nations, but part of the explanation is the kind of PBDEs favored by American manufacturers. North America uses the lion’s share of all the various PBDE products — 44 percent of global Deca production by weight and 40 percent of Octa — but uses an estimated 95 percent of global Penta production. [2] The commercial Penta product is almost exclusively used in flexible polyurethane foam for home and office furniture, carpet padding, and mattresses. But only about 7.5 percent of the more than 2.1 billion pounds of foam produced in the United States each year contains penta-DBE. The majority of the Penta-laden foam is sold in California, where components of upholstered furniture are required to meet stringent fire retardancy standards. [31] Research shows that Penta is by far the most likely of the PBDEs to be absorbed by and build up in living organisms.

A separate but related concern is that PBDEs can form polybrominated dioxins and furans (PBDD/Fs) when heated or burned — in a municipal solid waste incinerator, for example. [32] Low levels of the very similar polychlorinated dioxins and furans are known to cause cancer, birth defects and chloro-acne. PBDD/Fs have recently been measured in human tissue samples and the environment in Japan. [32, 33]