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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.
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.
You'd be surprised at the current effectiveness of Vista's Firewall. Talk about retardant!
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.
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!!
...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?
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.
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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?
*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.
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.
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.
You can't just show up at the border waving a firearm.
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?