Chemicals known as PBDE’s are used as flame-retardants in many products. But PBDE’s have been showing up in people and in wildlife. Now, one of the biggest manufacturers of PBDE’s has announced that it will be phasing out the chemical. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
Chemicals known as PBDE’s are used as flame-retardants in many products.
But PBDE’s have been showing up in people and in wildlife. Now, one of the
biggest manufacturers of PBDE’s has announced that it will be phasing out
the chemical. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
Some animal tests have shown that PBDE’s can be toxic – but the EPA says
it’s “not yet concluded that the chemicals are an unreasonable risk to human
health.”
However, the Great Lakes Chemical Corporation has announced that it will
voluntarily stop producing a widely used PBDE, known as Penta, by the end of
2004. This chemical is used mostly to prevent fires in furniture cushions.
Anne Noonan is with Great Lakes Chemical. She says the company started
developing an alternative in the mid 1990’s when research began to show that
PBDE’s gets into the environment and eventually the food chain:
“We understood that it did bioaccumulate and there was growing public
concern that this would start building up in the environment. So with that
in mind, we started developing this product.”
The new product is called FireMaster 550, and according to the EPA, initial
tests have shown that this chemical should be safe.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.