This Label Could Be Really Bad For You

A great NY Times Retro Report about flame retardants warrants a more personal account of our own interaction with the furniture industry.

We bought new couch from IKEA a few months ago When it arrived it smelled like a chemical factory.  We realized that we were so excited to find an affordable convertible sectional that fit our specific parameters we completely forgot about all of the research we had done years ago about flame retardants and their negative health impacts.  While it is likely some of the smell came from the equally worrisome glues and the formaldehyde in the particle board, it did the trick of alerting us to the perils of flame retardants in furniture.

When our first child was born in 2011 we read the Chicago Tribune series about how the cigarette industry convinced California regulators that it was not cigarettes causing house fires, it was the furniture, and how the chemical industry stood dutifully ready to solve the problem.  Of course it turns out the chemicals lower IQ and cause cancer among other things.  At the time we did what we could to mitigate their presence.  Now, three years later, we realized a lot had changed, and much had not.  In 2013 Governor Jerry Brown changed the California law, no longer requiring the chemicals. But the furniture industry was not required to label what it was making.  We had to rely on their word, and a helpful NRDC guide to some manufacturers. In the end we went to the trouble of taking the couch back to IKEA for a refund (I couldn't imagine selling it on Craig's List).  

Last week we ordered a (much more expensive) couch from Room And Board, which by all accounts is be free of flame retardants.  Room And Board, incidentally says that all of their furniture is free of all flame proofing, except a few convertible couched still made in china.  Note: even R&B's own publication is not clear about which fire retardants are NOT in their couches (PBDE flame retardants were largely phased out in 2006/8  it is the chlorinated Chlorinated Tris: TDCP and TCEP that are the culprits du-jour)

Of course with all of these decisions I am struck by the great effort and expense we went to to mitigate the problem in our home. How would a family, relocating regularly for work, with more limited financial resources and less time be able to keep these chemicals out of their children's blood.

And as our dad's old business partner, Robert Kenner, so clearly discusses in Merchants Of Doubt the chemical industry is just part of the systematic undermining of real science that has more severe implications with climate change. 

One thing to do is to sign this petition from Move On (remember them?) And buy a new couch.