I want to let everyone know that civil servants are preventing changes to the law which would greatly reduce levels of flame retardants in our furniture.
Hundreds of studies show that flame retardants get into house dust, then into our children's blood and mother's breast milk. They can have severely detrimental effects on a child's development. FRs also cause cancers, thyroid problems and other illnesses. Our sofas and mattresses are stuffed with them.
UK homes have very high levels of FRs due in large part to the requirements of the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations. Two years ago, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (now called BEIS), published proposals to change the 'match test' in the FFRs. The match test, as it's name suggests, means furniture cover fabrics must not ignite after being exposed to a match flame. This proposal would have cut FRs in cover fabrics by up to 50% overnight and opened the door to new technology that would have quickly eliminated them altogether. Furniture would actually also have been safer from fire (for reasons too complicated to go into here).
The USA changed its furniture laws in 2014, after huge pressure from firefighters (who get more cancers than normal, in the UK too), green scientists, the Chicago Tribune and consumers. Now, US furniture does not need to contain any flame retardants.
In the UK, however, the chemical industry worked on weak-willed civil servants at BEIS and the new test was put on hold.
This, despite BEIS's research having proved that the current match test doesn't work in most cases anyway! Think about that: retailers are selling you sofas stuffed with toxic FRs that aren't even preventing fires as they're supposed to. Worse still, when a sofa catches light, within a very short space of time these FRs give off large amounts of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide (one of the deadliest poisons).
For two years BEIS officials tried to justify their delays by looking for changes they could make to the proposed new test. They failed. A couple of weeks ago, they re-released proposals that are exactly the same as those published two years ago. But there's a catch. In order to cover their backs, they've included other changes to the rest of the FFRs that are unworkable. This guarantees further delays to the new match test, by at least another year but more like several more years.
In the meantime, people are continuing to die in furniture fires that aren't supposed to happen and we're all at risk from cancers from excessive FR dust in our homes.
In the US, consumers lobbied Macy's until the store promised to stop selling furniture containing FRs. In the UK, unfortunately, all our major retailers continue to poison us, knowing their sofas are ignitable anyway.