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Washington Bans Chemicals; Industry Freaks
Frosty Piss writes "The governor of Washington is scheduled to sign legislation today to ban flame retardants called PBDEs in furniture, televisions, and computers in the state. This is despite the more than $220,000 the chemical industry has spent since 2005 to defeat the legislation. At a time when the federal government is largely ineffectual in regulating long-used but potentially dangerous industrial chemicals, the Washington ban could be the beginning of the end for PBDEs across the nation. 'The industry that makes deca and PBDEs is freaking out because they lost so severely in Washington state and other states will follow,' said a spokeswoman for the Washington Toxics Coalition. 'It really is a message from Washington state and policymakers that we won't accept chemicals that build up in our bodies and our children.'"
burn to death, we're fine with that...
This might be the first recorded Think-Of-The-Children infinite loop:
"If you get rid of the flame retardant, people will die in fires. Think of the children!"
"No, YOU think of the children, who are filling up with toxic chemicals!"
"YOU think of the children, who are currently on fire!"
(and so forth)
Meanwhile, the children grow up and move to Vancouver.
Wow a whole $200k over two years; they must really be serious!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...When you can't buy anything flame resistant or UL listed. Or anything, for that matter. Is Washington a big enough state to overcome the costs associated with a differentiated product line? Will companies even make things that can't cost-effectively comply with other regulations and industry liability practices that require flame resistance?
I'm not sure but I guess we'll find out.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Isn't that a HUGE issue? The chemical is CONCENTRATING itself in the food chain.
Either show that it decomposes into safe, naturally occurring chemicals or realize that it is time to look at banning it BEFORE it hits levels that are hazardous.
... does this mean that work on Vista will have to be moved out of state?
Nah, it goes down in flames at the drop of a hat.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I like that the /. ad on this page was "It only takes a spark" (smokey the bear).
But yeah, if one child catches fire but it saves ten thousand from cancer, that's unfortunately a better decision over all. Note it's not like children are spontaneously combusting without PBDEs, it's just that the companies will happily use the cheapest fire-proofing despite the consequences.
More to the point, a parent can stop a child from playing with a fire a lot easier than they can stop a corporation from leaking toxins into the water supply. This is, oddly enough, how legislation is supposed to work.
A.
"Long-used but potentially dangerous industrial chemicals" is an inflamatory and misleading phrase that can refer to things like gasoline, isopropyl alcohol and super glue.
Someone used the rootkit.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You'd be surprised at the current effectiveness of Vista's Firewall. Talk about retardant!
I'm big on states' rights over federal ones, and local laws over state ones, on the assumption that the closer to home, the better the legislators will deal with what's actually going on. (Also lobbies find it much harder to affect vast numbers of low-level officials, even though you can buy them off with (1) hooker and (1) thimbleful of blow, rather than having to give them a whole sorority for a weekend -- coz there are just so many low-level officials compared to senators.)
But I have to wonder, at the same time, at what point legislation stops being about good-for-the-people, or even look-I'm-doing-something-vote-for me, and starts being about legislating morals, ethics, and such. One part of me wishes more states would make like California and start making effective carbon-emission-reduction laws, or Washington, making effective anti-dangerous-chemical laws, but how long before Tennessee bans birth control pills as suspect carcinogens, or any of a variety of other handwaving subterfuges that are intended not to make people safer but to force them towards different behavior? Maybe states' rights isn't such a hot idea after all.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Whether it occurs naturally or not is not the issue.
The issue is whether it is concentrating itself in the food chain (and humans).
Since it seems that it is, it should be limited until it can be determined whether there is any damage associated with it or not.
And now we're replacing it with ethanol, which doesn't.
MTBE is still better than lead, because lead never breaks down, being elemental. But don't let the facts get in your way.
Requiring a given level of flame resistance is not unreasonable, nor is refusing to use chemicals which are somehow ending up in the food chain. That may mean they end up sitting on a bunch of unpadded metal furniture or something. I don't particularly care.
Seldom are there ever only two choices.
You're acting like this is the only fire retardant available, or that there aren't ways to reduce flammability that don't involve spraying toxics on your products or otherwise making them unsafe.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would not be surprised either — promises to "cut the red tape" and reduce the regulatory burden is part of the reason I vote Republican...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Will Bush and party push for federal legislation limiting state's rights to enforce stricter than federal laws?
Bush wouldn't be the first. For whatever reason, the Clean Air Act states that nobody can set stricter standards for vehicle emissions than the federal government unless California does, and then those states have to use standards identical to California for a given model year (or back down to the federal requirements).
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Lemme see here:
1. Have mature product with static revenues
2. Have legislature ban mature product
3. Feebly fight against ban so you can tell public you tried
4. Introduce new, more expensive product
5. Profit!!
The post calling for a -1 Flamebait mod being moded -1 Flamebait tickles my weird sense of humor. What's next, a post asking for a +1 Insightful mod getting moded +1 Insightful?
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
...and they also want to require compact fluorescent bulbs which...contain mercury, another cumulative poison which doesn't break down.
Yes, folks, the same government nannies will have your neighbors throwing mercury into the trash. Never mind that it will get into the ground and your water supplies, costs more, is inferior light and sends money to the Chinese communists.
Never mind that the same thinking banned DDT which meant millions of Africans have died from malaria or that liberated prisoners from the Nazi death camps were bathed in DDT to kill the bugs living on them or that "Silent Spring" has been shown to be a work of fiction.
Never mind that banning asbestos created more danger because removing asbestos is more dangerous than using it properly, automobile brakes are nowhere near as capable, costs increased and, oh, yeah, the WTC would have stood longer because it was designed to survive airplane hits provided the guts were protected by asbestos so it would have stood a few more hours.
Nope, those who know what's best for us must rise and save us from ourselves.
So does that mean that Steve Ballmer has to move?
I should hope so, thermodynamics tends to ensure things like that. Ethanol, petrol, coal, etc are all just ways of transporting energy in usable form. You're not magically creating any new energy. The idea behind using ethanol instead of petrol is that currently there's a lot of CO2 stored in petrol, but by growing plants then burning them, we're not adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.
Unless you were referring to energy required to actually process crops into ethanol, in which case you might remember that the crops from which ethanol is refined produce byproducts capable of also being harnessed for their energy content.
im in ur
it's also concentrating naturally
yes, artificial sources can accelerate that concentrating above natural thresholds across which bad things start happening. so ban the chemicals, what do i care? i'm not contradicting the parent or the washington law. good law, i say
my point is simply that the issue is not so simpleminded: "industrial chemicals baaaaad"
no, plenty of natural chemicals rot your body, and plenty of artificial ones improve your health. i'm just sick of the simpleminded rhetoric that industrial chemical makers are out to give all of us cancer just to make a few bucks. that's hollywood, not reality. and reality is that, on the balance, industrial chemicals have improved our lives and our health. yes, that really is the truth
sorry if i'm not so simpleminded and propagandized as other people
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Throwing a CF bulb in the garbage at the end of its life produces releases about half as much mercury as a coal plant powering an equivalent regular bulb. Note that this figure includes the smaller amount of mercury produced powering the CF bulb.
Given that coal is roughly 50% of all the power generation in the US, and that lighting is less than 50% of all power usage-- switching all standard bulbs to CF will result in a net reduction in environmental mercury *in addition* to reducing numerous other pollutants produced by generation.
And as a final note: which do you think is easier to collect and recycle? Mercury in bulbs, or mercury nicely mixed into our atmosphere?
In short, you're an ignorant douchelord
I bow before your superior eloquence.
Asbestos isn't nearly so dangerous, if handled correctly, as to outweigh the benefits it provides. Yes when it was used carelessly (even if from ignorance at the time) and people were working daily in a cloud of the stuff without even a filter mask, it caused some nasty side effects. But on the other hand it could have been tamed with a bit of effort and kept on saving lives.
The problem with Asbestos is that it was used as an every day building material. This meant you had every day builders working with it. The sort of guys who wont even bother to wear proper boots or a hard hat because, well, whatever. There is no reason in the world to believe that they could ever work safely with asbestos.
Not to mention the poor bastard homeowners who just want to hang a picture or knock a wall down, and don't stop to think that perhaps putting a sledgehammer in their wall might one day cause them to develop a very nasty and painful form of cancer. Let alone their kids, who end up breathing in the dust. Yes, I know, they should stop to think, but people are dumb.
Expecting dumb people to safely handle something as nasty as asbestos was never going to work. It would be like selling regent grade sulfuric acid on the shelves of Wal*Mart as a drain cleaner and expecting people to handle it safely and not dispose of it down the nearest storm drain.
Long ago, when bad things happened for reasons no one understood, the people of that time blamed "evil spirits" or "the devil" or witches or sorcerers. Folks were afraid. You can still see this occur in primitive societies. Someone will get sick or the weather will be bad or the cows will die and it'll be blamed on evil sorcerers. Sometimes, someone is accused and killed for doing their evil magic -- often a personal enemy or rival or someone envied.
Some modern folks don't believe in magic, but bad things still happen that they don't understand. People still get sick unpredictably. Now it gets blamed on "chemicals". People are afraid. Sometimes someone will be accused and harmed financially (but not killed) for using these "chemicals" -- often a political enemy or rival or someone envied.
Rather than asking for their god (or God) to protect them from evil, they ask their government. Rather than asking for a blessing before they eat their meals, they buy government-blessed "organic" foods. Like their ancestors, they fear becoming "polluted" by something bad.
.
Fear, ignorance, and a lack of understanding shouldn't be the basis for decisions. The government makes a poor god and is unworthy or your faith.
Try being responsible for yourself. Instead of reacting, think. Instead of fearing, learn. Instead or harming or forcing (or killing), choose.
I repeat : any chemical, that is not bio-degradeable, ends up on our plate and accumulates in the whole eco-system.
Any material that is not biodegradable, stays in the foodchain for thousands of years. We are slowly poisoning ourselves. You think too small-scale.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The industry got slammed for using sat fats and then got blamed for the transfats when it was the well-intentioned food nannies that lead to the change?
Next thing you know, someone is going to suggest that we shouldn't drive faster than 70mph, and you'll start driving 1mph just to show them. Maybe, just maybe, the appropriate response to "Don't put unhealthy stuff in food" is to find healthy stuff to put into food. But that would require that corporations not resort to childish petulance whenever they don't get their way.
Did the furniture industry start putting PBDEs in the materials or were they compelled by some well-intentioned safety group or legislation?
Sure, they were required to not have their furniture burst into flames, so naturally they went out, did some research and found the safest flame-retardant they could find... right? Right? Well, after Penta-BDEs were found in breast milk in the '90s, that research was done, resulting in the banning of Penta- and Octa- BDEs in Europe. Further research into DecaBDEs "revealed a number of uncertainties concerning possible effects on the environment".
Funny, in most arguments, the person making the assertion is the one that has to provide the burden of proof, but when corporate interests are on the line, suddenly the laws of logic fly out the windows, and by default many people blindly accept whatever the corporation says as truth by assertion: "The company asserts that their flame retardant is safe, therefore it must be so." Demands for the company to prove their claim are unacceptable to these people.
*shrug*
Or maybe manufacturers should get off their asses, stop buying everything from Dow chemical, and switch to purchasing cost-competitive, biodegradable fire retardants that vastly exceed the performance of existing chemicals on the market.
Competing products are out there. We make one that blows the doors off any other fire retardant, performance-wise, and is eco-friendly to boot. So why are we having difficulty getting into the market? Because without legislation than bans nasty brominated materials major manufacturers see no reason to upset their supply chains.
You can bet your ass my company is drooling all over this, and we'll be pushing hard on distributors in Washington state.
Heck, if anyone out there is interested in using our products, leave a reply to this post with contact info and I'll get someone to get into contact with you.
Good thing...
I've been wanting those industry freaks banned for a while.
-- Working to secure tomorrows technology. Honestly Officer!
erin brockovitch?
kindly entertain me with what you think i'm ignorant about that i'm not
meanwhile, i ask you to look at the contributions to modern healthy society the "evil chemicals" have made
such bullshit
it's NOT the chemical industry out to kill you, unless you're a paranoid schizophrenic. it's mistakes are made, and things are corrected, like rachel carson and silent spring/ ddt
oh wait, sorry, i forgot: i lack the historical knowledge to be aware of rachel carson. scratch that. thanks to you, i know you know more about me in your prejudicial judgments of me than i know about myself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. Discover mature product contains harmful chemical.
2. Ignore discovery until enough people hear about it that politicians decide to "lead".
3. Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against change.
4. When finally forced to change, find some way to write off cost of change (and lobbying) so as to not pay taxes this year either.
5. Profit!
6. Brag to stockholders.
7. Get stock bonuses.
8. Dump stock and leave company before it augers into ground.
9. Profit!
10. Use small percentage of huge personal wealth to run for office on issue of cutting "unnecessary anti-competitive regulations".
11. Win by insulting "tree huggers".
12. Keep campaign promise by cutting regulations -- but only the ones that affect your biggest donors. Leave in place measures that hurt their competitors.
13. After leaving office, become corporate lobbyist.
14. Profit!
There is more than one way to start a fire: Dell Laptop Burns House Down
Congress finds the following:
(1) More than two billion pounds of polyurethane foam are sold in the United States every year.
(2) Polyurethane foam is found in mattresses, bedding, upholstered furniture, carpet padding, soundproofing materials, and countless other objects commonly found in homes and office buildings.
(3) Firefighters refer to polyurethane foam as `solid gasoline' because of its flammability, and when burning, it emits deadly gases including arsenic.
(4) Between 1980 and 1998, mattress, bedding, and upholstered furniture fires killed almost 30,000 people in the United States. During the same period, these fires injured more than 95,000 people.
(5) Direct property damage from foam fires over the same period was nearly $10 billion.
(6) Exposed polyurethane soundproofing foam led to 100 deaths and 200 injuries at the Station nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island, on February 20, 2003.
(7) A typical room fire will reach `flashover', the high temperature point at which all combustible materials in a room ignites, in 5 minutes or less from the time at which polyurethane foam filled furniture catches fire. The National Fire Protection Association's standard requires that 90 percent of the time, the first firefighters must arrive at the fire within 4 minutes. Foam Fire Safety Act
What can't truly be described - but only understood through experience - is the amount of smoke generated by a smoldering coach or mattress; fog gray and impenetrable it leaves you blind and disoriented, no lamp, no flashlight, will be of any use to you at all. You must not let go of anything that can guide you.
Don't forget about dihydrogen monoxide! It's been found in over 50% of all cancers examined! Inhaling excessive amounts has been known to cause death! This substance should be banned world wide!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBDE
Nathan Friedly
What about purified silicon? Glass? Drywall? Aluminum, or any pure metal?
I'm a huge fan of not slowly poisoning ourselves, but I think your criteria of using only biodegradable materials is unreasonable. There are ways of neutralizing chemicals outside of biology.
Then what about naturally occurring chemicals? PDBEs are found in nature (with carbon isotopes not found in synthetic chemicals).
While I agree that PDBEs should be replaced with currently available chemicals that are biodegradable, we don't know everything. We don't know where naturally occurring PDBEs come from or where they go. Technically, there may be some bacteria out there capable of degrading PDBEs, but we still shouldn't be using them.
It's enough to say that we shouldn't use dangerous chemicals unless we have to.
- Learn some chemistry.
- Not say incredibly stupid things like the quote above.
I infer from the above quote that we will ban all food products since they build up in our body in the form of - wait for it - our cells. It makes me wonder if people are aware that we are all made of chemicals. What do they think amino acids, lipids, and carbohydrates are? (Or water for that matter?)Seriously, that's awesome that you live somewhere so fully green. But, as you pointed out-- 10% of your power is *still* dirty, and according to a quick google, residential lighting accounts for roughly 9% of total residential power consumption, which you will notice is a full percentage point lower than the amount of non-renewable power generation in your area. (even assuming that there is nothing but residential use, which is fairly certain to not be the case, skewing the figures even further in favor of switching) I've also given you the benefit of the doubt on your "renewable" power sources and assumed that none of them produce any emissions at all.
You would be hard-pressed to find *any* location in the United States where it doesn't make sense to switch to CF bulbs, even assuming nobody is recycling them, and every single bulb ends up in the landfill. It's a net power reduction, and a net pollutant reduction across the board.
Even with 90% zero-emission renewable power (something that is vanishingly rare in the US)-- the switch to CF bulbs is a gain without even recycling them.
no evil corporate america is out to get you. life is not a hollywood movie. yes, there are bad people in this world, but the vast majority are stupid and bumbling, not evil. and they mean well, and with a little education, they right the errors of their ways. and besides, there are plenty of safeguards in place to protect the american consumer. remember rachel carson/ ddt? remember love canal? remember thalidomide?
people learned from these MISTAKES and put safeguards in place. it is just as wrong to assume every chemical is evil as it is to assume every chemical is safe, and your problem is that you think the status quo is to actually shove random untested chemicals on the marketplace and see what happens. ha! there are plenty of safeguards in place. do you know what kind of hurdles the pharmaceutical industry has to jump through before a drug is let on the market?
and mistakes STILL happen. and they are fixed. this is life. you will NEVER get a chemical indsutry that never puts a chemical out there that hurts someone somewhere somehow. and you will also never get a chemical industry that serves us with products that dramatically improve our lives without some missteps. you completely ignore the valid positive contributions, and dwell upon the mistakes, as if it were some weird capitalistic plot to kill you. so weird
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You can't just show up at the border waving a firearm.
Why not just ban matches?
EU has invented similar laws under the acronym RoHS. Those too are driving manufacturers of embedded devices nuts: without Pb., solder points corrode much faster - which is bad for equipment designed to be put in remote areas with extreme weather conditions... of course: far away from population centers where people could get hurt. RoHS compliant equipment can't last as long as current gear; and guess who's paying the price of replacing that stuff much faster than needed? And this replacement comes at a cost for the environment too...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Agreed. They should use chemicals that cause more painless forms of cancer.
So, once these are all banned can the residents of Washington sue their state government when what would have been a mild exploding capacitor turns into a house fire?
Seriously people. The environmentalists are constantly shooting themselves in the foot. They banned a similar substance used in transformers. Then the largest (at that time) solar generating plant in the US had a transformer failure and the entire plant burned down. Of course the owners of the solar plant closed up shop and didn't rebuild. Why put billions into something to protect the environment when the environmentalists make it impossible to protect that investment by using the latest technologies.
Now there's a brilliant idea! Posting my personal contact information on slashdot. Should I leave you my pager number too, to make sure I don't get any sleep for the next two weeks?
Got any stats to back that up? (i.e. your tacit assertion that traffic fatalities have gone up...)
So you make your argument, then say, "My argument is based on pulling a fact out of my ass."
Nice.
Had the World Trade Center buildings been finished with asbestos many experts believe they would have survived.
m l
The WTC did have asbestos. It all blew off in the big explosion. Ignorance at work indeed.
http://www.asbestos.org/news/wtc_02_newfinding.ht
We are all just people.