The use of flame retardants in auto interior seats pollutes the air in car cabins with the highly toxic chemicals, putting those who spend significant time in cars at the most risk, peer-reviewed research in the US has found.
Flame retardants are added to seat foam to meet regulations the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration implemented in the 1970s that require automakers to include flame retardants to prevent the ignition and spreading of fires.
But the chemicals’ effectiveness was overstated at the time, and their toxicity was not understood. Flame retardants do “little to prevent fires for most uses and instead makes the blazes smokier and more toxic for victims, and especially for first responders”, said Patrick Morrison, director of the International Association of Fire Fighters’ safety division.
Most also showed organophosphate ester flame retardants, which in children are thought to cause asthma, early growth, adiposity and brain damage. Meanwhile, two of the chemicals are listed as California Proposition 65 carcinogens, and people with the highest levels of some flame retardants in their blood have about four times the risk of dying from cancer.
The average US child has lost three to five IQ points from exposure to one flame retardant used in cars and furniture, epidemiological studies have shown.
The average US child has lost three to five IQ points from exposure to one flame retardant used in cars and furniture, have shown.
Here’s a direct link to the study. Of note is that there wasn’t a significant trend in detected levels by year (odd, since you’d expect the amount off-gassed to decline over time), but that electric cars in the study had ~10 times lower levels of the chemicals being studied. The authors note that this may be more an effect of vehicle brand since most of the electric cars in the study were from one unnamed manufacturer (probably Tesla?) but it suggests that even within the current regulations there are ways to reduce exposure.
I’d like to see the scatter plot for detected levels by year of manufacture, and maybe it’d be good to extend the study’s coverage of vehicle age a bit further, because the lack of a noticeable trend doesn’t jive with my intuitive sense of what ought to be happening. That said, it’s a reasonably solid study, I think.
Videos of Teslas bursting into flames with fires unable to be put out makes me wonder if maybe they went too far in the other direction though…
As fun as it is to dunk on Elmo I think we both know it’s not the seat foam that’s the problem there. 😅
I’m actually right now in the process of developing design criteria for a battery testing lab, and as part of that I had to do a hazardous materials analysis. Lithium as it is in batteries is considered a water-reactive chemical, and the code only allows you to have ten pounds of it in a building before you’re pushed into a special hazardous occupancy type with lots of extra fire and explosion precautions required. I ran the numbers and figured out that’s about 8000 of your typical cylindrical cells – which is right about the number of cells in a Model S. And in a Model S, you’re just kinda… sittin’ on 'em. Fun thought…
Only 10 pounds of lithium? I work in IT and I’ve probably had triple that on a desk at times (I sometimes wonder where that cardboard box of spicy pillows ran off to in my last job).
Edit: Oh that’s probably raw lithium, not total weight of battery, isn’t it?
Oh that’s probably raw lithium, not total weight of battery, isn’t it?
Yes
Right, it’s the weight of lithium inside batteries, not the weight of the batteries overall. I think the biggest laptop batteries I’ve seen had something like 6 16850 cells, and you’d need north of 1,300 of those laptop batteries in a building before it crossed a threshold for hazardous materials.
Well, I can say I’ve seen that many laptops in one place before, but definitely not in one room (outside of a warehouse and a couple larger buildings). Most I’ve had in a small place is a couple hundred.
I should clarify that the actual language in the building code is per control area rather than per building, and in most cases a control area only covers a single floor (and in some cases not even that, if there’s a sufficient fire separation between tenants sharing a building floor). I think that the amount of lithium batteries in laptops and mobile devices is a bit of a blind spot in code enforcement these days, but from a practical standpoint it’s not likely that a typical office is going to cross the threshold into hazardous-occupancy territory.
Good to know. Definitely agree, mobile device batteries really should be more controlled from a fire safety perspective, Id be surprised if most IT departments even have disposal policies for them, existing policies can also be so convoluted that it’s easier to just stuff them in a cabinet and forget they exist).
I’ve seen laptops and phones sitting on a shelf for a year or two because disposal forms require signatures that are invalidated due to turnover, starting the process over from scratch.
That’s from the batteries.
We can make something that is flame retardant or not give you cancer but not both. Same as 1991
This has also been a problem in things like children’s pajamas. Unless that has been outlawed I doubt the industry fixed it.
Yup. And afaik it’s still a rule.
People wonder why all of the water is contaminated with PFAS/OS? It’s because for decades children’s pj’s have been soaked in fire retardant chemicals which, ofc, start coming out when the clothing is washed.
I bet this thread will be fun to read from the Lemmy instances that censor words
Sure let the news call fires retarded, but when I do it I get yelled at!
So that new car smell is poisonous?!?!
The new car smell used to be from the material the dash was made of. Now, the dashes are made differently and the smell is pumped in because people expect it.
Yes, but what if you’re in a Hollywood movie? You’ll be glad to have flame retardant in your car!
