Everyday Poisons

Now, in the face of growing evidence that the myriad consumer goods our civilization depends on have set a major health threat loose in our homes, government regulators are under pressure to explain why pbdes were allowed to be used in the first place. The short answer is simple enough: brominated flame retardants were developed and marketed long before the government started subjecting industrial chemicals to regulatory scrutiny.

Prior to that, companies were largely free to introduce chemicals into their manufacturing process without comprehensive scrutiny. According to Claude-André Lachance, who served as parliamentary secretary to Liberal justice and trade ministers in the late 1970s, and has been public affairs director for the Canadian arm of the US chemical giant Dow since 1986, huge numbers of potentially toxic chemicals have “grandfather status.” Translation: they were never actually reviewed by any government agency, and that lack of oversight raises disturbing questions about how safe many of these chemicals are.

Hale offers a more complicated answer. From the 1970s on, whenever safety issues surrounding the chemicals were raised, the value of pbdes as flame retardants superseded concerns about their toxicity. “Government safety regulators probably figured these things will help our fire-safety regulators,” he says. “That double layer of regulatory accountability makes it even harder for anybody to admit they made a mistake.”

But slowly governments are accepting that a terrible mistake has been made and are banning octa-bde and penta-bde, two of three commercial versions of pbdes, primarily contained in polyurethane foams and rigid plastics used in consumer appliances. The third formulation of fire retardant, known as deca-bde, used in textiles, computers, TVs, and electronic components, is under growing scrutiny and could also be banned in some jurisdictions.

Health and Environment officials recommended last May that Ottawa follow the lead of the EU, California, and now New York, and severely limit octa-bde and penta-bde by declaring them to be toxic. But that review has run into a storm of opposition from pbde manufacturers. Once again, the industry lobby’s defence of pbdes comes down to fire prevention.

According to the Bromine Science and Environment Forum—a Washington, DC, lobby group funded by American pbde manufacturers Albermarle Corp. and Great Lakes Chemical Corp., as well as icl Corp. of Israel and Japan’s Tosoh Corp.—the chemicals are indispensable fire suppressants. The presence of fire retardants in consumer products, the Bromine Forum claims, saved as many as three thousand lives in Britain between 1988 and 2000, as well as 280 people in the United States in 2000.

The plastics industry generates $310 billion in revenues annually in the US alone. And Marion Axmith, director general of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, which represents plastics users in the automotive, construction, packaging, vinyl, and recycling industries in this country, also emphasizes pbdes’ fire-suppression capabilities at every opportunity. “The purpose of these chemicals is to protect the public and prevent fires,” she says bluntly. “From that perspective, the public is protected.” But when asked about toxicity levels in our homes and offices, she replies: “I’m not a scientist.”

With mounting scientific evidence that these chemicals be banned, some industry giants may be getting ready to drop pbdes. One of the first to do so was the Swedish furniture maker ikea, which in 2002 switched from brominated flame retardants in furniture to phosphorus-based fire-protection chemicals. “It’s very often a bad sign,” says Magnus Bjork, who until recently was ikea’s US-based product laws and standards chief, “when you have something persistent and man-made accumulating in human tissue.”

Bjork says his company’s move to eradicate pbdes from its products came after they looked at research that revealed a potential disaster. “We’d heard rumours about possible endocrine disruption. And we were concerned that disposal of products made with pbdes might generate toxic compounds. What we learned didn’t make us less worried.”

Scientists working with the Canadian government are also worried. Danie Dubé, who assesses the safety of chemicals for Environment Canada, says pbdes were among 123 substances to be screened for safety under a new system adopted in 2001. The screen was developed to rapidly assess the backlog of 23,000 chemicals requiring review before 2006 under the new Canadian Environmental Protection Act, passed in 1999.