perrins57 wrote:Just pass a law forcing all flag producers to use only flame retardant materials and voila your flag is safe
Pardon the pun but brominated flame retardants are one of the hottest topics in environmental toxics. They are used liberally in consumer products, save lives, and are emerging as a very worrysome contaminate. I grabbed this off the web. Lots of uncertainty but very disturbing. Five years ago no one was looking at thia group of chemicals. Late 1990s studies in Sweeden and San Francisco turned up startingly high levels of BFRs in breast milk.
Executive Summary
In the first nationwide tests for brominated fire retardants in house dust, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found unexpectedly high levels of these neurotoxic chemicals in every home sampled. The average level of brominated fire retardants measured in dust from nine homes was more than 4,600 parts per billion (ppb). A tenth sample, collected in a home where products with fire retardants were recently removed, contained more than 41,000 ppb of brominated fire retardants — twice as high as the maximum level previously reported by any dust study worldwide.
Like PCBs, their long-banned chemical relatives, the brominated fire retardants known as PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers) are persistent in the environment and bioaccumulative, building up in people's bodies over a lifetime. In minute doses they and other brominated fire retardants impair attention, learning, memory and behavior in laboratory animals.
EWG's test results indicate that consumer products, not industrial releases, are the most likely sources of the rapid buildup of PBDEs in people, animals and the environment, which has been documented by tests from Europe to the Arctic. Scientists now recognize that indoor environmental contamination, including contaminants accumulating in household dust, pose a substantial health risk to the population. Our findings raise concerns that children may ingest significant amounts of toxic fire retardants via dust, and indicate that the impending federal phase-out of two PBDEs doesn't go far enough to protect Americans.
http://www.ewg.org/reports/inthedust/summary.php
