California Revises Furniture Fire Safety Standards

After years of acrimonious debate between fire safety scientists and environmental and public health activists, revised fire safety standards for upholstered furniture were approved on Nov. 21 by California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. Furniture manufacturers will be able to eliminate virtually all flame retardant chemicals from their products—most notably in polyurethane foam filling materials—and meet the new standard, which is effective January 2014.

“Today, California is curbing toxic chemicals found in everything from high chairs to sofas,” Brown says. “These new standards will keep the furniture in our homes fire-safe and limit unnecessary exposure to toxic flame retardants.”

California’s Bureau of Electronic & Appliance Repair, Home Furnishings & Thermal Insulation says the previous fire safety standards for upholstered furniture included an open-flame test for foam and other filling materials. The revised standards eliminate open-flame tests, says Bureau Chief Tonya Blood, in part because fires don’t start in the filling materials.

“The new standards were developed to address where the fire begins, which is the cover fabric, and to focus on the interactions of the cover fabric and filling materials,” Blood adds. The current and revised standards are both highly technical documents that run hundreds of pages and describe many different types of fire safety testing protocols.

California has long maintained some of the toughest fire safety standards for upholstered furniture in the country. At the same time, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission has never succeeded in passing national fire safety standards for upholstered furniture. The California standards had thus become the de facto standards nationwide.

Chemist Marcelo M. Hirschler of GBH International, a fire safety consulting firm in Mill Valley, Calif., calls the revised furniture fire safety standards “a disgrace.” The new law “takes away a protection we have had,” he says in reference to the open-flame test. He and many other fire safety scientists say California’s changes are less of a “revision” and more a lowering of standards that have long protected Californians from fire risks.

Indeed, Hirschler has long advocated for even more stringent fire safety standards and often cites U.K. standards, which include open-flame ignition tests, as a model to aspire to. He says flame-retardant-treated polyurethane foam provides a much lower risk of furniture fire ignition than untreated foam and adds that treated foam retards the spread of fires that do happen.

But Arlene Blum, a chemist and a well-known environmental and anti-flame-retardant-chemical activist, is celebrating Brown’s action.

“Beginning in January, furniture will no longer need toxic flame retardants, and we will all be healthier as a result,” she writes in a newsletter of the Green Science Policy Institute, an environmental group she helped found.