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The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Investigative Reporting

Finalist: Chicago Tribune, by Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne

For their exposure of manufacturers that imperil public health by continuing to use toxic fire retardants in household furniture and crib mattresses, triggering reform efforts at the state and national level.

Nominated Work

May 6, 2012

A deceptive campaign by industry brought toxic flame retardants into our homes and into our bodies. And the chemicals don’t even work as promised. 

By Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe

"I'm a well-meaning guy. I'm not in the pocket of industry." — Dr. David Heimbach, a burn expert. Above, Heimbach testifies in 2011 against a California state Senate bill that could have reduced the use of flame retardant chemicals in furniture. Citizens for Fire Safety has paid for his travel to testify and for some of his time, he said later. (Robert Durell, For the Tribune)

Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story.

Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals.

"Now this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home," said Heimbach, gesturing to approximate the baby's size. "Half of her body was severely burned. She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital."

Heimbach's passionate testimony about the baby's death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty.

But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn't true.

Records show there was no dangerous pillow or candle fire. The baby he described didn't exist.

Neither did the 9-week-old patient who Heimbach told California legislators died in a candle fire in 2009. Nor did the 6-week-old patient who he told Alaska lawmakers was fatally burned in her crib in 2010.

Heimbach is not just a prominent burn doctor. He is a star witness for the manufacturers of flame retardants.

His testimony is part of a decades-long campaign of deception that has loaded the furniture and electronics in American homes with pounds of toxic chemicals linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility.

The tactics started with Big Tobacco, which wanted to shift focus away from cigarettes as the cause of fire deaths, and continued as chemical companies worked to preserve a lucrative market for their products, according to a review of thousands of government, scientific and internal industry documents.

These powerful industries distorted science in ways that overstated the benefits of the chemicals, created a phony consumer watchdog group that stoked the public's fear of fire and helped organize and steer an association of top fire officials that spent more than a decade campaigning for their cause.

Today, scientists know that some flame retardants escape from household products and settle in dust. That's why toddlers, who play on the floor and put things in their mouths, generally have far higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies than their parents.

Blood levels of certain widely used flame retardants doubled in adults every two to five years between 1970 and 2004. More recent studies show levels haven't declined in the U.S. even though some of the chemicals have been pulled from the market. A typical American baby is born with the highest recorded concentrations of flame retardants among infants in the world.

People might be willing to accept the health risks if the flame retardants packed into sofas and easy chairs worked as promised. But they don't.

The chemical industry often points to a government study from the 1980s as proof that flame retardants save lives. But the study's lead author, Vytenis Babrauskas, said in an interview that the industry has grossly distorted his findings and that the amount of retardants used in household furniture doesn't work.

"The fire just laughs at it," he said.

Other government scientists subsequently found that the flame retardants in household furniture don't protect consumers from fire in any meaningful way.

TheU.S. Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has allowed generation after generation of flame retardants onto the market and into American homes without thoroughly assessing the health risks. The EPA even promoted one chemical mixture as a safe, eco-friendly flame retardant despite grave concerns from its own scientists about potential hazards to humans and wildlife.

Since the 1970s manufacturers have repeatedly withdrawn flame retardants amid health concerns. Some have been banned by a United Nations treaty that seeks to eliminate the worst chemicals in the world.

Chemtura Corp. andAlbemarle Corp., the two biggest U.S. manufacturers of flame retardants, say their products are safe and effective, arguing that they have been extensively evaluated by government agencies in the U.S. and in Europe.

"Flame retardants provide an essential tool to enable manufacturers of products to meet the fire safety codes and standards necessary to protect life and property in a modern world," John Gustavsen, a Chemtura spokesman, said in a written statement.

His company, Gustavsen said, strongly disagrees with the main findings ofthe Chicago Tribune'sinvestigation.

Heimbach, the burn doctor, has regularly supported the industry's position that flame retardants save lives. But he now acknowledges the stories he told lawmakers about victims were not always factual.

He told the Tribune his testimony in California was "an anecdotal story rather than anything which I would say was absolutely true under oath, because I wasn't under oath."

Heimbach, a retired Seattle doctor and former president of the American Burn Assn., also said his anecdotes were not about different children but about the same infant. But records and interviews show that the baby Heimbach said he had in mind when testifying didn't die as he described and that flame retardants were not a factor.

After the Tribune confronted chemical executives with Heimbach's questionable testimony, he offered, through his lawyer, another explanation for why his stories didn't add up: He intentionally changed the facts to protect patient privacy.

Yet the most crucial parts of his testimony — the cause of the fire and the lack of flame retardants — had nothing to do with privacy. Instead, they served to bolster the industry's argument that chemical retardants save lives.

In the last quarter-century, worldwide demand for flame retardants has skyrocketed to 3.4 billion pounds in 2009 from 526 million pounds in 1983, according to market research from The Freedonia Group, which projects demand will reach 4.4 billion pounds by 2014.

As evidence of the health risks associated with these chemicals piled up, the industry mounted a misleading campaign to fuel demand.

There is no better example of these deceptive tactics than the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, the industry front group that sponsored Heimbach and his vivid testimony about burned babies.

Citizens for Fire Safety describes itself as a group of people with altruistic intentions: "a coalition of fire professionals, educators, community activists, burn centers, doctors, fire departments and industry leaders, united to ensure that our country is protected by the highest standards of fire safety."

Heimbach summoned that image when he told lawmakers that the organization was "made up of many people like me who have no particular interest in the chemical companies: numerous fire departments, numerous firefighters and many, many burn docs."

But public records demonstrate that Citizens for Fire Safety actually is a trade association for chemical companies. Its executive director, Grant Gillham, honed his political skills advising tobacco executives. And the group's efforts to influence fire-safety policies are guided by a mission to "promote common business interests of members involved with the chemical manufacturing industry," tax records show.

Its only sources of funding — about $17 million between 2008 and 2010 — are "membership dues and assessments" and the interest that money earns.

The group has only three members: Albemarle, ICL Industrial Products and Chemtura, according to records the organization filed with California lobbying regulators. Those three companies are the largest manufacturers of flame retardants and together control 40% of the world market for these chemicals, according to the Cleveland-based Freedonia Group.

Citizens for Fire Safety has spent its money primarily on lobbying and political expenses, tax records show. Since federal law makes it nearly impossible for the EPA to ban toxic chemicals and Congress rarely steps in, state legislatures from Alaska to Vermont have become the sites of intense battles over flame retardants.

Many of the witnesses supporting flame retardants at these hearings were either paid directly by Citizens for Fire Safety or were members of groups that benefited financially from Citizens for Fire Safety's donations, according to tax documents and other records.

Albemarle, Chemtura and ICL Industrial Products declined to answer specific questions about the group.

Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne contributed to this report.

May 8, 2012

How industry and its inside man steered a group of fire officials to push flame retardant furniture 

By Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe

The problem facing cigarette manufacturers decades ago involved tragic deaths and bad publicity, but it had nothing to do with cancer. It had to do with house fires.
 
Smoldering cigarettes were sparking fires and killing people. And tobacco executives didn't care for one obvious solution: create a "fire-safe" cigarette, one less likely to start a blaze.
 
The industry insisted it couldn't make a fire-safe cigarette that would still appeal to smokers and instead promoted flame retardant furniture — shifting attention to the couches and chairs that were going up in flames.
 
But executives realized they lacked credibility, especially when burn victims and firefighters were pushing for changes to cigarettes.
 
So Big Tobacco launched an aggressive and cunning campaign to "neutralize" firefighting organizations and persuade these far more trusted groups to adopt tobacco's cause as their own. The industry poured millions of dollars into the effort, doling out grants to fire groups and hiring consultants to court them.
 
These strategic investments endeared cigarette executives to groups they called their "fire service friends."
 
"To give us clout, to give us power, to give us credibility, to give us leverage, to give us access where we don't ordinarily have access ourselves — those are the kinds of things that we're looking for," a Philip Morris executive told his peers in a 1984 training session on this strategy.
 
The tobacco industry's biggest prize? The National Association of State Fire Marshals, which represented the No. 1 fire officials in each state.
 
A former tobacco executive, Peter Sparber, helped organize the group, then steered its national agenda. He shaped its requests for federal rules requiring flame retardant furniture and fed the marshals tobacco's arguments for why altering furniture was a more effective way to prevent fires than altering cigarettes.
 
For years, the tobacco industry paid Sparber for what the marshals mistakenly thought was volunteer work.
 
The Tribune discovered details about Big Tobacco's secretive campaign buried among the 13 million documents cigarette executives made public after settling lawsuits that recouped the cost of treating sick smokers. These internal memos, speeches and strategic plans reveal the surprising and influential role of Big Tobacco in the buildup of toxic chemicals in American furniture.
 
This clever manipulation set the stage for a similar campaign of distortion and misdirection by the chemical industry that continues to this day.
 
Andrew McGuire, a burn survivor and MacArthur "genius grant" winner, said Sparber and the National Association of State Fire Marshals for years were his nemeses as he has pushed for fire-safe cigarettes, which would stop burning when not being smoked. McGuire came up against them again when he battled for reductions in the amount of flame retardant chemicals in Americans' homes.
 
"He played them like a Stradivarius," McGuire said of Sparber's relationship with the fire marshals.
 
A founding member of the fire marshals group disputes that they were unduly influenced, but he said he regrets that the organization accepted tobacco's money.
 
"There is no way you can explain to the public that taking money from the tobacco industry is a good thing," said Tom Brace, who served as a marshal in Minnesota and Washington state. "And had I to do that over again, I would not do that."
 
Brace and the fire marshals group often were at odds with colleagues in the firefighting community who worked to scale back the use of certain flame retardants after studies showed they can make smoke more toxic.
 
The fire marshals organization continued promoting flame retardant products even after it was clear that the chemicals inside were escaping, settling in dust and winding up in the bodies of babies and adults worldwide.
 
The marshals continued even after flame retardants were linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility.
 
And they continued even after government scientists showed that flame retardants in household furniture were not protecting Americans from fire in any meaningful way.
 
With the top executives of the largest U.S. cigarette companies gathered in a New York ballroom, Charles Powers rose to report that their trade group's multimillion-dollar investment in the firefighting community was paying off nicely.
 
It was October 1989, and the CEOs behind Marlboro, Camel and other major brands were in a closed-door meeting of the executive committee of the Tobacco Institute, the trade group that fought legislation that could hurt their business.
 
Powers noted that many fire officials who once were hostile were endorsing industry positions in key federal and state legislative battles over fire-safe cigarettes. The strategy by the Tobacco Institute of winning over these officials, including some state fire marshals, with grants and schmoozing was working.
 
"Though our assistance is 'no strings attached' for everyone, it is no accident that the fire service officials most interested in our educational materials are also the fire service leaders whom we have approached for endorsements," said Powers, a top executive at the Tobacco Institute.
 
He boasted: "Many of our former adversaries in the fire service defend us, support us and carry forth our federal legislation as their own."
 
Much of that success can be attributed to the fact that Big Tobacco had planted an inside man within the firefighting community.
 
A former Tobacco Institute vice president, Peter Sparber had spent years at the trade group doling out money to firefighting groups. He left to open his own lobbying and public affairs firm in the late 1980s but retained the Tobacco Institute as a major client.
 
This arm's-length relationship — working for Big Tobacco but having a business card that said "Sparber and Associates Inc." — allowed him to infiltrate an organization of public officials that became what the Tobacco Institute later called "the most politically potent group" in the firefighting community: the nation's state fire marshals.
 
These taxpayer-funded employees, typically appointed by governors, had a low profile nationally until Sparber came along. In 1989, Sparber helped organize the National Association of State Fire Marshals and volunteered to be the group's legislative consultant. The fire marshals put him on their executive board.
 
Sparber became so crucial to the fire marshals that they listed him on their association letterhead and for more than a decade shared a Washington office with him.
 
One of the marshals' first official acts was to endorse a tobacco-backed federal bill that called for yet another study of fire-safe cigarettes rather than a competing bill that would have quickly required cigarettes to change.
 
Like his tobacco industry patrons, Sparber worked to prevent a mandate for fire-safe cigarettes by shifting the focus to furniture.
 
For years, Sparber promoted an obscure California state rule on furniture flammability, one that manufacturers met by adding flame retardant chemicals to the foam in sofas and easy chairs.
 
California regulators had enacted the rule in 1975 out of frustration that too many residents were dying in fires caused by cigarettes. State and federal lawmakers had tried unsuccessfully since the 1920s to enact fire-safe cigarette requirements, so California regulators instead sought to fireproof the world around the cigarette.
 
With Sparber's help, the fire marshals in 1992 sought federal rules for flame retardant furniture, and Sparber went on to represent the marshals in years of meetings with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. His expense reports show that for several years he was billing the Tobacco Institute $200 an hour for his work with the marshals, including time he spent on the marshals' petition for flame retardant furniture.
 
Sparber reported to the institute on the fire marshals' key activities and even passed along their internal documents. Tobacco Institute President Samuel Chilcote Jr., in turn, sent detailed memos to the CEOs of cigarette companies about the marshals' activities.
 
Chilcote declined to comment to the Tribune, saying he couldn't recall what happened so long ago.
 
Brace, a founder of the fire marshals group, said he knew Sparber was a former Tobacco Institute executive. But Brace said he didn't know in the association's early days that the institute was paying Sparber for his work with the marshals and didn't know that Sparber funneled so many of the marshals' internal documents to the cigarette industry.
 
Nevertheless, Brace said the marshals made their own decisions.
 
"The inference that the state fire marshals sitting around the table are easily led by this Svengali — there were arguments back and forth of what we should get involved in," Brace said in an interview. "We had some hot debates. But the characterization that Sparber led us out of the wilderness, I don't see it."
 
But records in tobacco executives' files show that Sparber helped set the fire marshals' agenda, suggesting who should speak at a key conference, which consultants they should retain and why they should oppose aggressive fire-safe cigarette requirements.
 
He also assisted the fire marshals with fundraising, nudging tobacco colleagues to contribute to the group.
 
Assisting Sparber was an old fan: Karen Deppa.
 
Deppa had solidified Sparber's reputation in the world of spin when, in a previous job as a journalist, she penned a glowing profile of Sparber for a magazine aimed at trade association executives. The story described him as a master of crisis management whom others could emulate, noting the deft way he had positioned smoking as a fundamental freedom and cast doubt on studies documenting the health hazards of smoking.
 
"I go home to my family every night, and not once have I felt uncomfortable about facing them over anything I've done at work," Sparber said in that article.
 
Within a year of the publication, the Tobacco Institute hired Deppa and made her the coordinator of its fire program. Records show she frequently signed off on Sparber's hourly billings for his work with the marshals.
 
Deppa ensured the Tobacco Institute pampered the marshals — faced with lean state budgets — with perks at the group's conferences, including bottles of wine, a hospitality suite and free mountain bike rentals, records show. She pressed the institute to fund a media-training seminar for the marshals, suggesting this would make them more confident speakers as they publicly discussed fire-safe cigarettes and other issues.
 
The fire marshals wound up using tobacco's talking points in the industry's protracted delay game.
 
When leaders of the marshals association addressed federal regulators, they would say they supported the concept of a national fire-safe cigarette requirement. But in the next breath, the marshals would nitpick the test methods federal scientists created to determine which cigarettes were less likely to cause fires.
 
Tobacco executives loathed those tests. Publicly, they argued that the tests failed to replicate "real world" conditions. Privately, they feared the tests would pave the way for laws that would force them to alter cigarettes — products that made them billions of dollars each year — in ways that their customers wouldn't like, records show. Some prototypes had an unpleasant taste or were difficult to smoke.
 
An internal R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. report noted that the lack of a standard test method had served to delay the adoption of fire-safe cigarette bills in 12 states.
 
The marshals' criticisms of the details of the tests were straight from Big Tobacco's playbook. This wasn't a coincidence. Questioned by a government scientist at a meeting of the federal panel crafting the tests, one marshal acknowledged that Sparber had briefed him on the issues, records show.
 
"They learned very quickly from their puppet masters how to craft the arguments to seem reasonable but cause delay," recalled McGuire, the burn survivor, who was a member of the panel and was at that meeting.
 
David Sutton, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, rejected the notion that his company and the fire marshals worked together to delay fire-safe cigarette rules. For more than a decade, he said, the company worked hard to develop marketable cigarettes that were more likely to extinguish on their own.
 
Philip Morris collaborated with the marshals on flame retardant furniture standards in the early 1990s, he said, because the company believed those might present "a potentially more effective alternative for improved fire safety."
 
By 1993, records show, the fire marshals were so vehemently opposed to fire-safe cigarette test proposals — and so financially and philosophically connected to the cigarette industry — that a top Philip Morris lobbyist told the Tobacco Institute she feared that the marshals had actually become a liability. Records show she told colleagues she thought the National Association of State Fire Marshals was "tainted."
 
The lobbyist worried that "the relationship of the industry — especially Philip Morris — to the National Association of State Fire Marshals (NASFM) may eventually be disclosed publicly." She suggested to the Tobacco Institute that the fire marshals stop discussing fire-safe cigarettes and focus solely on furniture flammability standards.
 
But the industry didn't sever ties, in part because other cigarette executives thought they needed the marshals to counter fire-service groups that were pushing for fire-safe cigarette laws, records show.
 
A key prong in R.J. Reynolds' 1996 strategic plan to fight these laws was the marshals' petition to the Consumer Product Safety Commission for flame retardant furniture rules. A handwritten note on the first page directs an R.J. Reynolds employee to file the plan under "Fire Safe Sparber."
 
The plan used italics to hammer home the urgency of focusing on the furniture fueling fires, not the cigarettes igniting them: "In 1996, fire officials must keep the pressure on the Commission to focus on the fuels rather than ignition sources."
 
The fire marshals' actions helped Big Tobacco fend off fire-safe requirements for years. But the delays couldn't go on forever.
 
The Tobacco Institute shut down in 1999, a requirement of the multibillion-dollar court settlement between the industry and state attorneys general. Not long after that, states succeeded in passing rules requiring fire-safe cigarettes, so tobacco no longer had an incentive to promote flame retardant furniture.
 
But by then Sparber had found new clients with problems of their own: chemical manufacturers.
 
With each passing year, health concerns were growing as the most commonly used types of flame retardants were discovered in human breast milk and blood.
 
As Sparber worked to preserve and even expand the market for flame retardants, the fire marshals were again at his side. So was Deppa, whom he had hired from the Tobacco Institute.
 
So intertwined were Sparber, the chemical companies and the fire marshals that even Sparber couldn't always differentiate where the agendas diverged.
 
For instance, one of Sparber's clients as a lobbyist was the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, an international trade group representing large manufacturers of flame retardants. Sparber revealed to federal regulators in 1999 that although the forum was paying his company's fees, the chemical group's goals for fire prevention were so aligned with those of the fire marshals association that he often lobbied for both groups on the same matters.
 
Chemtura Corp.,Albemarle Corp.and ICL Industrial Products — the three largest companies that fund the bromine forum — declined to answer questions about their relationships with Sparber or the fire marshals. Chemtura and Albemarle said their flame retardants are safe and effectively protect people and property from fires.
 
Brace, the former marshal, confirmed that his association became "heavily involved" with the flame retardant trade group and supported its agenda. He said he worked with the forum because of his desire to save lives, and he was leery of studies that linked the chemicals to health problems.
 
The bromine group, Brace said, paid for him to go to Japan, Korea and Taiwan, where he urged electronics manufacturers to add flame retardants to the plastic exteriors of computer monitors and televisions. The marshals later pushed for worldwide standards requiring that the plastic casings of electronics resist a candle flame and posted Internet videos comparing name-brand computer monitors that went up in flames with those that didn't.
 
John Dean, the fire marshals' president from 2006 to 2008, said that during his time the marshals were not being swayed by chemical companies and did not focus solely on flame retardants. "The fire marshals were concerned about preventing fires, and we didn't really care how they did it," said Dean, a retired state fire marshal from Maine.
 
But the marshals did press for national furniture flammability rules that would have increased the use of flame retardant foam in the U.S., even though federal scientists had concluded that this type of chemically treated foam didn't provide any meaningful protection in fires.
 
To sway legislators and opponents, the marshals and Sparber characterized couches and easy chairs as dangers to society, sometimes referring to the foam inside cushions as "solid gasoline."
 
While Sparber was a registered lobbyist for Chemtura and its predecessor, Great Lakes Chemical Corp., the fire marshals asked federal regulators to require warning labels on furniture made with non-fire-retardant foam and sought a "hazardous material" designation for this type of foam.
 
In 2007, Sparber emailed executives at Chemtura and Albemarle about his efforts to get furniture stores declared "hazardous occupancies," a classification usually reserved for locations handling gasoline and other highly combustible materials.
 
Such a designation, Sparber wrote, "threatens to shut down any number of retailers," limit the number of sofas they could store or force them to install extensive sprinkler systems.
 
"Literally," he wrote, "a single sectional couch might exceed the limit."
 
The goal, Sparber wrote, was to make furniture manufacturers and retailers fear these "obviously draconian consequences" and thereby support strict flammability standards or face the wrath of code enforcement officials.
 
"This is hardball of the first order," Sparber wrote.
 
While these rules weren't adopted, the intimidating message hit a nerve with the industries Sparber threatened. Joseph Gerard, a retired furniture industry lobbyist, said he recalls Sparber sending him an inches-thick binder filled with copies of the same Associated Press story clipped from newspapers across the country. The story blamed the death of a South Carolina teenager on sofas that lacked flame retardants and quoted a fire marshal about the need for the chemicals.
 
Gerard said of Sparber: "His way of operating was so offensive, it just tore at me."
 
To the fire marshals, though, Sparber was a hero. The National Association of State Fire Marshals gave him its Hall of Fame award in 2008.
 
Sparber and Deppa declined to comment for this story.
 
Jim Narva, the fire marshals' current executive director, said Sparber has not represented the group for "a number of years" and that he took over Sparber's Washington office in 2008 or 2009.
 
"It's history," Narva said.
 
The marshals' policy statement on flame retardants, which hasn't been updated since 2008, says products that exist to fight fires should not be banned unless there is "significant evidence" that they cause harm or until other methods of fire protection are found to replace them.
 
Narva, who declined to answer detailed questions, said the fire marshals are not currently involved with flame retardant issues.
 
But the marshals' industry ties remain strong.
 
Deppa left Sparber and Associates in 2008 and, according to the marshals' website, became the group's "liaison to US government agencies and their staffs."
 
The marshals just last year helped defeat a crucial bill in California that would have reduced flame retardants in products nationwide. The association's president at the time wrote a letter opposing the legislation. A lobbyist for the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, a front group for the largest makers of flame retardants, read excerpts of the letter at the hearing where the bill was voted down.
 
And who remains a financial sponsor of the fire marshals, with its logo on the group's home page?
 
Chemtura, one of the world's largest producers of flame retardants.
 
Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne contributed to this report.
May 8, 2012

This component will be re-posted as the new pulitzer.org continues to evolve.

May 9, 2012

Distortion of science helped industry promote flame retardants, downplay the health risks

By Sam Roe and Patricia Callahan

Twenty-five years ago, scientists gathered in a cramped government laboratory and set fire to specially designed chairs, TVs and electrical cables packed with flame retardants. For the next half-hour, they carefully measured how much the chemicals slowed the blaze.
 
It was one of the largest studies of its kind, and the chemical industry seized upon it, claiming the results showed that flame retardants gave people a 15-fold increase in time to escape fires.
 
Manufacturers of flame retardants would repeatedly point to this government study as key proof that these toxic chemicals — embedded in many common household items — prevented residential fires and saved lives.
 
But the study's lead author, Vytenis Babrauskas, told the Tribune that industry officials have "grossly distorted" the findings of his research, which was not based on real-world conditions. The small amounts of flame retardants in typical home furnishings, he said, offer little to no fire protection.
 
"Industry has used this study in ways that are improper and untruthful," he said.
 
The misuse of Babrauskas' work is but one example of how the chemical industry has manipulated scientific findings to promote the widespread use of flame retardants and downplay the health risks, a Tribune investigation shows. The industry has twisted research results, ignored findings that run counter to its aims and passed off biased, industry-funded reports as rigorous science.
 
As a result, the chemical industry successfully distorted the basic knowledge about toxic chemicals that are used in consumer products and linked to serious health problems, including cancer, developmental problems, neurological deficits and impaired fertility.
 
Industry has disseminated misleading research findings so frequently that they essentially have been adopted as fact. They have been cited by consultants, think tanks, regulators and Wikipedia, and have shaped the worldwide debate about the safety of flame retardants.
 
One series of studies financed by the chemical industry concluded that flame retardants prevent deadly fires, reduce pollutants and save society millions of dollars.
 
The main basis for these broad claims? A report so obscure it is available only in Swedish.
 
When the Tribune obtained a copy and translated it, the report revealed that many of industry's wide-ranging claims can be traced to information regarding just eight TV fires in western Stockholm more than 15 years ago.
 
Although industries often try to spin scientific findings on the safety and effectiveness of their products, the tactics employed by flame retardant manufacturers stand out.
 
Tom Muir, a Canadian government research analyst for 30 years, called the broad claims based on the eight Stockholm TV fires "the worst example I have ever seen of deliberate misinformation and distortion."
 
The American Chemistry Council, the leading trade group for the industry, said flame retardants are safe products that help protect life and property. "ACC's work is grounded in scientific evidence, as we believe regulatory decisions related to chemistry must be evaluated on a scientific basis," the trade group said in a written statement.
 
But when the Tribune asked the trade group to provide research that showed flame retardants are effective, the council initially provided only one study — the one Babrauskas wrote and now says is being distorted by industry.
 
Later, in response to additional questions from the newspaper, the trade group highlighted a different study as evidence that flame retardants work well: research based largely on the obscure Swedish report.
 
In reviewing key scientific studies and analyses behind the chemical industry's most common arguments, the Tribune identified flaws so basic they violate central tenets of science.
 
When Babrauskas and his team of scientists began their pioneering research in 1987, it was well-established that flame retardants slowed fires — at least when massive amounts were packed into products.
 
Less clear was what that meant in terms of precise gains in fire safety. Seeking answers, the chemical industry commissioned Babrauskas' team at the National Bureau of Standards to conduct one of the first large-scale studies on the effectiveness of flame retardants.
 
The industry, Babrauskas said, wanted to know what would happen if the most potent and expensive chemicals were embedded in common items, such as TV cabinets and upholstered chairs. The industry picked out the flame retardants to be used, and Babrauskas' team began custom-building the household items to be tested.
 
Working out of a yellow-brick laboratory with a large chimney, the researchers set fire to each item and then, in what Babrauskas called the "grand finale," ignited a room full of samples containing large amounts of retardants and a room of items containing none. Among the conclusions: The room of flame retardant samples would provide people 15 times more escape time than the other room.
 
The results weren't surprising. More noteworthy was the way industry misrepresented the results.
 
For example, the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum has regularly cited the 15-fold increase in escape time to argue that the flame retardants in everyday household products, such as TVs, save lives. "This should allow sufficient time for the fire brigade to reach your place before it is too late," states the website of the forum, a Brussels-based industry group that is funded by the largest makers of flame retardants.
 
Babrauskas calls such claims "totally bogus" because the amounts of flame retardants in the burned samples in his tests were so much greater than what is found in typical consumer items.
 
"Where you would see them is in the aviation industry, NASA, naval facilities — the market where there is no sensitivity to dollar costs," he said.
 
In fact, as Babrauskas explicitly noted in his study, research shows that the flame retardants in household furnishings such as sofas and chairs do not slow fire.
 
Many couches, love seats and chairs sold nationwide contain flame retardants to comply with a California flammability rule. But studies by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission have concluded that this standard provides no meaningful protection from deadly fires.
 
The standard requires that raw foam withstand a candle-like flame for 12 seconds. But, Babrauskas said, upholstered furniture is covered with fabric, and if the cover ignites, the flames from the fabric quickly grow larger than that of a candle and overwhelm even flame retardant foam.
 
"The fire just laughs at it," Babrauskas said.
 
The bottom line: Household furniture often contains enough chemicals to pose health threats but not enough to stem fires — "the worst of both possible worlds," he said.
 
Babrauskas, who spent 16 years as a fire scientist at the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he didn't know the chemical industry was misrepresenting his study until two years ago when a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California contacted him. Babrauskas addressed the distortion in a paper he presented last year at an international conference, but the industry continues to misquote his work.
 
In its written statement, the chemistry council said the group has not mischaracterized Babrauskas' study, saying the group has stated the research shows flame retardants "can provide" a 15-fold increase in escape time.
 
Babrauskas, now a consultant, said the industry is being "flat-out deceptive" and should stop misrepresenting his work in order to sell more flame retardants. "I don't want to be part of anything that willfully and needlessly poisons the planet," he said.
 
The report written in Swedish is so obscure you won't find it online or among the millions of papers listed in government and industry databases. The American Chemistry Council says it doesn't have a copy. Even the chemicals' most vocal critics say they have never seen one.
 
Yet the paper about electrical fires in Sweden has had significant influence, thanks to the chemical industry's manipulation of its findings.
 
The Tribune obtained a copy of the study from the only library in the world believed to have one, the National Library of Sweden, and had it translated. The 50-page report, written by a Swedish federal board, estimated the total number of electrical fires in Sweden by analyzing the causes of all fires in and around western Stockholm in 1995 and 1996.
 
The report's main conclusion — that electrical fires in Sweden were less common than previously thought — was relatively insignificant. But a chemical industry team zeroed in on a tiny portion of the report and used it to manufacture several flimsy arguments for why flame retardants are good for society.
 
At the time the Swedish report was published, in 1997, environmentalists in Europe were raising concerns about flame retardants in TVs and other electronics. The chemical industry began searching for evidence that the benefits of flame retardants in those products outweighed any risks.
 
Leading the search were three people with close industry ties: an executive with flame retardant maker Albemarle Corp.; a public relations specialist with a unit of Burson-Marsteller, a global PR firm; and Margaret Simonson, a fire scientist at a leading research institute in Sweden.
 
The three were collecting statistics on electrical fires when some data in the Swedish study caught their eye: Western Stockholm, with 265,000 residents, experienced 32 electrical fires in a two-year span. Of those 32 fires, eight — or 25 percent — were caused by TVs.
 
A basic principle of science is that broad conclusions should not be based on small or unrepresentative samples. Flip a coin five times and it might land on heads each time. But you couldn't then conclude that 500 coin flips would always come up heads.
 
Yet the three industry researchers used the 25 percent figure to estimate that Europe as a whole — a region of roughly 500 million people — had experienced 165 TV fires per million sets annually.
 
That rate, the researchers wrote, was far higher than the U.S. rate, which they put at five TV fires per million sets. And because the outer plastic casings of televisions in the U.S. typically contained flame retardants, while European sets did not, the researchers concluded that the "dramatic difference" in TV fire rates was due to the chemicals.
 
When the researchers published their figures in 2000 in a peer-reviewed journal, one of the authors listed was the PR specialist.
 
Simonson, the fire scientist, went on to write several additional papers — all funded by the flame retardant industry — that also relied on the eight fires as support for her broad conclusions.
 
For example, in a 2002 study that looked at the environmental impact of TV sets, Simonson concluded that sets with flame retardants actually are responsible for lower emissions of certain hazardous pollutants over their lifetimes than TVs without retardants. This is primarily because, she wrote, TVs with retardants are involved in fewer and smaller fires, so they produce less smoke.
 
Industry repeatedly has pointed to this study when addressing environmental concerns about flame retardants.
 
Simonson's figures have been quoted far and wide. European regulators credited her statistics for prodding some international TV manufacturers to add flame retardants to sets sold in Europe.
 
One of the few to question Simonson's studies has been Tom Muir, a retired analyst for Canada's environmental protection agency.
 
He translated bits of the obscure Swedish report but said he couldn't entirely understand Simonson's methodology. In an interview with the Tribune, Muir said her studies appeared to be "an elaborate, manufactured platform of assumption strings and assertions and extrapolations."
 
When the Tribune provided Muir with a complete translation of the Swedish study as well as Simonson's responses to the newspaper's questions about her methods, Muir was even more critical.
 
"It's worse than I thought," he said, noting that Simonson repeatedly estimated crucial statistics when solid data did not exist. "She's just making these numbers up."
 
Also critical of Simonson's calculations is the author of the Swedish study that Simonson relied on in her work.
 
Ingvar Enqvist said in an interview that he did not know Simonson and the chemical industry were relying on the eight TV fires mentioned in his report as the basis for sweeping claims about the benefits of flame retardants, a fact he called "a little peculiar." He also said Simonson shouldn't extrapolate the eight fires to all of Europe, given the vast differences among the countries.
 
Simonson, who now uses her maiden name and goes by Margaret Simonson McNamee, is a research manager at the SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden. She denied Muir's accusation of fabricating numbers but acknowledged using many statistical extrapolations and assumptions because, she said, solid data were scarce.
 
"We certainly did the best that we could given the data that we had available," she said. She added that a British study had found similar TV fire rates in various European countries, so she thought it was fair to extrapolate the blazes in Sweden to all of Europe.
 
Simonson emphasized that her methods were transparent, allowing critics to redo her studies with different numbers if they like. "Part of the scientific process is having a dialogue and not necessarily being in agreement with your peers," she said.
 
Besides receiving industry money for her research, Simonson chairs the science advisory committee of the National Association of State Fire Marshals, a group of American public officials that has worked closely with the chemical industry to push for wider use of flame retardant products.
 
But Simonson said she has never skewed findings to suit industry needs. "Marketing material is something that they produce themselves," she said. "Our research was independent research."
 
Muir disagrees. "She's never erring on the other side," he said. "Her numbers are always pointing in the same direction — in industry's favor."
 
When chemicals receive bad publicity, industry has a go-to person: Dennis Paustenbach.
A veteran toxicologist and industrial hygienist, he has sided with industry on some of the most controversial health issues. Working for tobacco industry lawyers, Paustenbach disputed federal regulators' conclusion that secondhand smoking causes lung cancer in adults. His industry-supported work was used to cast doubt on the risks of some occupational exposures to benzene and asbestos, two carcinogens.
 
"Industry loves him," said Peter Infante, a former senior administrator with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "They know what answer they are going to get. Nothing is ever harmful."
 
For the makers of flame retardants, Paustenbach helped interpret data about whether a widely used retardant posed a risk to children.
 
In 2002, concerns had been growing about a flame retardant known as deca that was being added to TVs and other electronics. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wanted more information about possible health risks to children, and chemical manufacturers volunteered to collect data and present them to an EPA-sponsored panel of industry, government and university researchers.
 
For help, the chemical-makers hired Exponent Inc., a California-based scientific consulting firmwhere Paustenbach served as vice president. After analyzing various ways children might be exposed to deca, including inhaling dust and chewing on consumer products, Paustenbach's company wrote a 123-page report concluding the chemical posed little risk.
 
But its conclusions had a weak foundation: They were based to a large degree on a study of serum samples collected from just 12 adult blood donors in Illinois in 1988. Again, the chemical industry used a small sample to reach a broad conclusion.
 
In the Illinois blood study, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Stockholm University found that five of the 12 serum samples had detectable amounts of deca. But when Paustenbach's firm wrote up its report for the chemical industry, it flipped the findings around, emphasizing the seven samples where none of the chemical was detected.
 
"Given that the majority of serum samples tested had non-detectable levels of (deca), it is most likely that the majority of the U.S. population has very low, if not zero, exposure," the report states.
 
The industry's report also stated — contrary to the conclusion of the Illinois blood donor study — that no further evaluation of the flame retardant was warranted.
 
When the EPA panel of researchers reviewed the industry report, many members objected. They said the risk to the nation's children should not lean so heavily on just 12 blood samples, let alone samples from adults, who tend to be less vulnerable to chemical exposure. Some members also noted the samples were collected in 1988, when levels of deca in the environment might have been lower.
 
Industry officials "were trying to pull a fast one," recalled panel member Ruthann Rudel, a toxicologist at the Silent Spring Institute, an environmental research organization.
 
Paustenbach and five others went on to write up the report for a peer-reviewed journal, which can lend the results of a study more credibility.
 
Their paper was published in the Journal of Children's Health — a year-old publication edited by Paustenbach.
 
In an interview, Paustenbach said it was appropriate to publish the report in a journal that he edited. He also defended the report's use of the small sample of Illinois blood donors to cast doubt on the health risks of deca. "We did the best job we could with the available data," he said.
 
Paustenbach is now president and founder of ChemRisk, a San Francisco-based consulting firm, and an adjunct professor of toxicology at the University of Michigan. Regarding criticism of his work for industry on controversial topics, he said: "It's unfortunate there is such polarization in the environmental sciences on views on chemicals."
 
In 2009, the three largest manufacturers of deca reached an agreement with the EPA to phase out sales of the chemical by the end of next year.
 
The journal that Paustenbach edited folded a few months after the questionable paper was published. Paustenbach said it closed because of competitive pressures.
 
It was in existence less than two years.
May 10, 2012

Flame retardants get a pass from regulators with little assessment of potential health risks

By Michael Hawthorne

By the early 2000s, the flame retardant known as penta had become a villain.

Packed by the pound into couches and other furniture, the chemical was turning up in the blood of babies and in breast milk around the world. The European Union voted to ban penta after researchers linked it to developmental and neurological problems in children, and manufacturers pulled it from the market.

But the only U.S. company that made penta soon introduced a replacement, hailing it as the beginning of an eco-friendly era for flame retardants.

The new product even had a heroic name: Firemaster 550.

TheU.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whose mission is to safeguard America's health and environment, praised the withdrawal of penta as a "responsible action" and promised that the new flame retardant had none of the problems of the old one. Unlike penta, Firemaster 550 would neither stick around in the environment nor build up in people and wildlife, a top EPA official declared in a 2003 news release.

Not everyone at the EPA believed that rosy public assessment. Documents obtained by the Tribune show that scientists within the agency were deeply skeptical about the safety of Firemaster 550, predicting that its chemical ingredients would escape into the environment and break down into byproducts that would pose lasting health hazards.

Behind the scenes, agency officials asked the manufacturer to conduct basic health studies, citing the same concerns that forced penta off the market.

Today, in sharp contrast to the promises of industry and government, chemicals in the flame retardant are being found everywhere from house dust in Boston to the air in Chicago. There also are signs the chemicals are building up in wildlife, prompting concern that Firemaster 550 or its byproducts could be accumulating in people.

The manufacturer's own health studies, obtained by the Tribune, add to that troubling picture. They found that exposing rats to high doses of Firemaster 550 can lower birth weight, alter female genitalia and cause skeletal malformations such as fused ribs and vertebrae.

The history of Firemaster 550, pieced together through records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, highlights how EPA officials have allowed generation after generation of flame retardants onto the market without thoroughly assessing health risks.

The previously unreleased documents also show how the nation's chemical safety law, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, gives the government little power to assess or limit dangers from the scores of chemicals added to furniture, electronics, toys, cosmetics and household products.

At a time when consumers clamor for more information about their exposure to toxic substances, the chemical safety law allows manufacturers to sell products without proving they are safe and to treat the formulas as trade secrets. Once health effects are documented, the law makes it almost impossible for the EPA to ban chemicals.

A growing list of critics — including the nation's leading group of pediatricians and the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress — are calling for a sweeping overhaul of the law. Some compare the situation to Whac-A-Mole, the carnival game where plastic moles keep popping out of holes even after a player smacks one down.

"By the time the scientific community catches up to one chemical, industry moves on to another and they go back to their playbook of delay and denial," said Deborah Rice, a former EPA toxicologist who works for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chemtura Corp., the Philadelphia-based company that makes Firemaster 550, said in a statement that the flame retardant is safe for use in polyurethane foam, the kind often used in furniture. The company also said the studies that found Firemaster 550's chemical ingredients in homes and wildlife don't prove that those compounds came from its product.

Introducing Firemaster 550 "was an early example of our strategy of Greener Innovation and the success it could have, even under significant EPA scrutiny," the company said.

Nevertheless, the EPA is now concerned enough that in February it targeted two of Firemaster 550's key ingredients for a "high priority" review, citing potential health hazards and widespread exposure from household products.

"We didn't think it would bioaccumulate, but it turns out that prediction isn't borne out by reality," Jim Jones, the EPA's top chemical safety official, said in an interview. "We want to make sure we understand it and that nothing bad is going to happen."

When Firemaster 550 replaced penta, its chemical makeup was a mystery to all but the manufacturer and a select group of EPA employees who were sworn to secrecy. That made it difficult for outside scientists to identify its ingredients in the environment and determine if they are harmful.

Not until two young, independent chemists revealed the formula of Firemaster 550 did it become clear how far the flame retardant had spread in just a few years' time.

One of the chemists, Duke University researcher Heather Stapleton, was among the first scientists to figure out that most human exposure to flame retardants comes from ingesting surprisingly large amounts of contaminated household dust, rather than from people's diet or what they absorb through their skin.

Young children are exposed to significantly higher levels than adults, the EPA has since concluded, primarily because they spend so much time playing on the floor.

Stapleton's interest in the chemicals started during graduate school in the late 1990s, when she was sent to Lake Michigan to monitor water pollution. Her discoveries in the Great Lakes helped document how penta and related flame retardants were spreading around the world, just like the banned pollutants DDT and PCBs.

She knew that many flame retardants in the U.S. are made with bromine or chlorine, chemicals known as halogens that take the place of oxygen and slow the combustive reaction that creates and spreads fire.

But other researchers have found that the way flame retardants are used in household furnituredoesn't protect people from fire in any meaningful way. And because of their chemistry, some of the most popular flame retardants spread easily and widely, persist in the environment and build up in the food chain.

In 2006, Stapleton discovered two mystery chemicals with high levels of bromine while analyzing dust samples from homes in Boston. The chemical structures didn't show up in standard databases.

Around the same time, Susan Klosterhaus, a friend of Stapleton's, got a job studying environmental contamination in San Francisco Bay. Mindful that Californians have some of the world's highest recorded levels of flame retardants in their bodies, Klosterhaus wanted to know if Firemaster 550, the penta substitute promoted by the EPA, was showing up in the bay.

Like others at the time, Klosterhaus had no way to test for it because its formula was secret.

To solve the puzzle, she did two things: She sent Stapleton a small piece of foam from her new couch, and she called Chemtura to ask for a sample of Firemaster 550. To her surprise, the company sent a half-liter bottle containing an oily mixture the same color and thickness as maple syrup.

Stapleton analyzed the substance and confirmed the two chemists' suspicions. The foam from the couch and the Boston dust samples both contained ingredients of Firemaster 550.

The scientists had identified a new pollutant. Without more study, though, there was no way to determine if it was dangerous.

"We end up finding a chemical mixture that's produced in large volumes, yet there was next to nothing available in the public scientific literature about whether or not it might be harmful," Klosterhaus said.

In May 2010, at a conference where Stapleton was speaking to foam manufacturers about her dust studies, Chemtura distributed a letter to the audience. It acknowledged that one of the company's own animal studies had shown that Firemaster 550 had "some effects" on prenatal development.

Even so, the letter said, there was nothing to worry about because the company had found that the fire retardant doesn't escape from treated products, indicating that "the risk of exposure … is negligible."

The Tribune obtained a copy of the study Chemtura cited in the letter. It involved researchers placing saline-soaked filter papers on a cotton-covered block of foam and observing whether Firemaster 550 leached out during the following eight days.

"The study was designed to simulate potential migration from direct skin contact with the foam, and also oral contact, such as a person chewing on the foam," the company said in a statement.

The study, the company said, "showed no detectable migration from the foam."

Independent scientists say the Chemtura study was flawed. Other research has found that flame retardants escape from products over periods of time far longer than eight days.

Moreover, Firemaster 550's brominated chemicals have turned up not only in common household dust but in sewage sludge around San Francisco Bay, polar bears in the Arctic, harbor seals off the coast of Maine, mollusks in North Carolina and porpoises in the South China Sea.

Indiana University researchers reported in November that airborne concentrations are rising in Chicago and other cities around the Great Lakes as well as in more remote areas, such as Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

So far, little is known about whether Firemaster 550 is building up in people. Early research suggests that its brominated compounds quickly break down into other chemicals in the body, so scientists are studying if they can track those byproducts in blood or breast milk.

"It's ridiculous that they would keep saying this isn't migrating from couches and other products," Stapleton said. "We know this chemical is out there, and we know kids are chronically exposed to it."

EPA officials acknowledge they know little, if anything, about the safety of not only Firemaster 550 but most of the other 84,000 industrial compounds in commercial use in the U.S.

Unlike Europe, where companies generally are required to prove the safety of their chemicals before use, U.S. law requires manufacturers to submit safety data only if they have it. Most don't, records show, which forces the EPA to predict whether chemicals will pose health problems by using computer models that the agency admits can fail to identify adverse effects.

The EPA can require studies of new chemicals that it anticipates could affect people's health — as it did with Firemaster 550 — but this step is rare, and the research doesn't need to be completed before the chemicals are sold.

To ban a chemical already on the market, the EPA must prove that it poses an "unreasonable risk." Federal courts have established such a narrow definition of "unreasonable" that the government couldn't even ban asbestos, a well-documented carcinogen that has killed thousands of people who suffered devastating lung diseases.

When the EPA approved Firemaster 550, the agency knew that it contained two brominated compounds, known as TBB and TBPH. Both are structurally similar to a plastic-softening phthalate that Congress has banned in children's products. Called DEHP, the phthalate is listed in California as a known carcinogen and developmental toxin.

EPA scientists also have known since the mid-1990s that burning products containing TBB could release highly toxic dioxins, records show.

The only health studies of Firemaster 550 conducted to date are two Chemtura-funded papers that the company submitted in 2008 at the EPA's request, five years after the agency declared it was safe.

The effects seen in some of the test rats, such as low birth weight and skeletal malformations, often lead to more serious health problems later in life. Yet the industry researchers repeatedly dismissed those effects as "spurious," "unclear" or "incidental," saying the problems weren't seen in all of the animals or when different doses were tested.

The company said its animal tests found no harmful effects at levels "expected to be seen in the environment" and proved that Firemaster 550 is "acceptable for use in the applications for which it was intended."

Stapleton and Heather Patisaul, a toxicologist at North Carolina State University, now are researching whether low doses of the brominated chemicals in Firemaster 550 could cause harm. Scientists increasingly are finding that the body can mistake tiny amounts of certain chemicals for hormones.

Based on earlier findings about such endocrine disrupters, including penta, Stapleton and Patisaul are looking for signs that Firemaster 550 could mimic or block hormones during critical stages of development.

"This is not a case where we are looking for missing arms and legs," said Linda Birnbaum, directorof the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a veteran government scientist who has raised concerns about toxic chemicals for years. "We're looking at reduced ability to learn, altered behaviors, decreased sperm count, premature ovarian failure — things that are more difficult to pick up in the standard studies."

EPA officials said they still think penta is more toxic than Firemaster 550, but they acknowledge missing some of the early warning signs about the newer flame retardant. They blamed the agency's delayed response on a lack of sufficient staff and funding to assess hundreds of new chemicals introduced by industry every year.

"We are always learning," said Jones, the EPA's acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. "We want to make sure we have a better understanding of the human health and ecological risks before we commit to any course of action."

Last year, Stapleton was back in her lab testing for flame retardants, this time in baby products.

About a fifth of the nursing pillows, car seats, highchairs, diaper-changing pads and other products made with polyurethane foam contained Firemaster 550, she found. But the most common flame retardant detected was another chemical: chlorinated tris, also known as TDCCP.

Of all the flame retardants used over the years, chlorinated tris is one of the most notorious. Manufacturers voluntarily took it out of children's pajamas more than three decades ago after it was linked to cancer.

Scientists and regulators thought chlorinated tris had all but disappeared from the marketplace. But because it wasn't banned, companies could legally use it in other consumer products without informing government officials or the public.

After penta was pulled from the market, chlorinated tris joined Firemaster 550 as the most widely used flame retardants in household furniture.

Chemical companies say chlorinated tris is safe. The American Chemistry Council, the industry's leading trade group, declined to answer specific questions but emailed a link to its position paper, which states that a 2008 risk assessment by the European Union found "no concerns for consumers in relation to carcinogenicity from potential inhalation or exposure to children via the oral route."

But several other major health and regulatory agencies have identified the flame retardant as a cancer risk, including the World Health Organization, National Cancer Institute and National Research Council.

In 2006, researchers at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission cautioned that adding chlorinated tris to furniture would expose children to nearly twice the daily dose deemed acceptable by the federal agency. The cancer risk for children during the first two years of life would be seven times higher than what most physicians, scientists and regulators consider acceptable, according to the safety commission's report.

"Industry has had years to come up with safer alternatives," said Arlene Blum, a University of California at Berkeley chemist whose 1977 study helped pressure manufacturers to take chlorinated tris out of children's sleepwear. "They can't do better than this?"

In a statement, the EPA said it is largely powerless to do anything about chlorinated tris. The agency cited industry's continued use of the chemical as a stark example of why it supports "much needed reform" of the nation's chemical safety law.

Jerome Paulson, a George Washington University pediatrician who last year wrote a stinging critique of the law for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the system especially fails to protect children. The group wants safety standards for industrial chemicals to be more like those governing pharmaceuticals and pesticides, with chemicals being approved only if a "reasonable certainty of no harm" can be verified.

Birnbaum and Ake Bergman, a Swedish researcher who was one of the first to sound alarms about penta building up in mothers and babies, wrote a 2010 editorial in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives that summed up the scientific community's frustration with the lack of oversight.

"Why do we not learn from the past?" they asked.

With the federal government failing to take action, more than a dozen states are considering legislation that would ban chlorinated tris in children's products. This spring, Washington state legislators rejected such a ban amid heavy lobbying from the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, a front group for the world's largest makers of flame retardants.

Last year, however, California added chlorinated tris to its Proposition 65 list of cancer-causing chemicals.

That means consumers shopping for furniture and baby products might soon be confronted with two labels: one meant to reassure them that the product meets the state's flammability standards and another to warn them about a chemical linked to cancer.

Aware that new warning labels might scare away customers, Chemtura already is marketing an alternative flame retardant called Emerald NH-1. The company's website describes the chemical as a member of its "new family of high-performing, greener fire safety solutions."

The company says the polymer-based substance doesn't contain bromine or chlorine, the troublesome chemicals in other flame retardants.

But the ingredients remain a trade secret.

Tribune reporter Patricia Callahan contributed.

December 28, 2012

Testing for Tribune finds flame retardants linked to cancer in some popular baby mattresses, surprising and alarming scientists

By Patricia Callahan and Michael Hawthorne

Three popular brands of baby mattresses that were marketed in recent months to families and day care centers contained toxic flame retardants linked to increased cancer risk, according to laboratory tests conducted for the Chicago Tribune.
 
One member of that family of chemicals, known collectively as chlorinated tris, was removed from children's pajamas over cancer concerns a generation ago.
 
Yet that same flame retardant turned up in significant amounts in 11 baby mattresses sold recently by national and local retailers under the Babies R Us, Foundations and Angeles brands. Two other mattresses made by Angeles contained a related form of tris.
 
While furniture-makers often add flame retardants to the polyurethane foam cushioning in sofas and upholstered chairs, the test results on infant mattresses surprised and alarmed some scientists who have studied the chemicals. Babies and even toddlers can spend 12 or more hours a day in a crib, and foam mattresses can meet federal fire-safety rules without the use of chemicals.
 
Linda Birnbaum, director of the federal government's National Institute of Environmental HealthSciences, said regulators had assured her that chlorinated tris and other toxic flame retardants weren't used in mattresses.
 
"These are bad chemicals, and we've known they've been bad for a long time," said Birnbaum, a toxicologist. "If these chemicals are in your child's mattress, they are going to be constantly exposed."
 
In the late 1970s, University of California at Berkeley scientists found that TDCPP, a form of tris, could cause mutations in DNA, and its manufacturer removed it voluntarily from the market for children's pajamas. When researchers look for flame retardants in house dust, they still find TDCPP, which was never banned.
 
The Tribune tested 27 mattresses. All of the mattresses containing chlorinated tris had one thing in common: labels saying they were made in China or imported from China. None of the tested mattresses made domestically contained significant amounts of any form of chlorinated tris.
 
The response to the test results from manufacturers, importers and retailers varied.
 
Wayfair, the retailer that fulfilled the Tribune's Wal-Mart order through the retail giant's online marketplace program, halted sales of the Angeles crib mattress, which fits cribs that are popular at child care centers.
 
One importer, however, vigorously defended its product.
 
Summer Infant Inc., the importer of the Babies R Us branded crib and bassinet mattresses that contained chlorinated tris, noted that the mattresses "are in a sealed impermeable plastic covering," which "ensures no exposure of the inner mattress foam to the child."
 
Responding to questions from the Tribune, the company wrote, "Simply put, the statements made are misleading and reckless in that they imply a health hazard that doesn't actually exist."
 
But Birnbaum and Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist who studies flame retardants, questioned whether any foam product can be sealed completely. They said chemicals escape when they vaporize and seep through seams or holes and get into air and dust.
 
And Inez Tenenbaum, chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, stressed that she sees no need for flame retardants in children's mattresses, which can be protected with inherently flame-resistant wraps or barriers.
 
"I strongly encourage all mattress manufacturers to comply with our performance standard through the use of barrier technologies and to avoid using any potentially harmful chemicals to which children can be exposed," she said in a statement. "The law strictly prohibits children's products from having hazardous chemicals that children could be exposed to and could foreseeably cause substantial illness or injury."
 
The agency is awaiting approval from its federal safety commissioners for a broad study of children's exposure to flame retardants in consumer products. Responding to the Tribune, agency officials last week began purchasing the same models tested by the Tribune for their own studies to determine how much chlorinated tris could escape and be absorbed through a baby's skin, ingested or inhaled.
 
The findings from the testing commissioned by the Tribune echo those of a California environmental group. The Center for Environmental Health, in Oakland, hired a lab to conduct tests but did not release the precise results in announcing its findings earlier this month. Instead, that group is using a California labeling law and the threat of a lawsuit to prod companies to reformulate their products without tris.
 
Neither the Tribune nor the Center for Environmental Health knew that the other was testing baby mattresses.
 
Because they are smaller than adults and their bodies are still developing, children face greater risks from exposure to toxic chemicals, said Dr. Jerome Paulson, a George Washington University pediatrician.
 
Last year, Paulson wrote an American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement calling for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's chemical safety law to protect children.
 
"We know these flame retardants are hazardous," he said in an interview. "The fact that you found these chemicals in crib mattresses is evidence of an ongoing problem that we as a nation have been unwilling to confront."
 
In May, the Tribune published its "Playing With Fire" series, which revealed how flame retardants are commonly found in American homes as a result of a decades-long campaign of deception by the tobacco and chemical industries. Among other things, the leading manufacturers of flame retardants created a phony consumer group that stoked the public's fear of fire to protect and expand the use of their chemicals in furniture, electronics and other products.
 
Readers repeatedly asked Tribune reporters about mattresses, especially those for babies. Furniture-makers use flame-retardant foam to meet a California flammability rule that has become a de facto national standard. Mattresses are a different story. Instead of the California rule, they must pass federal fire-safety tests that are far more stringent.
 
A safety commission spokesman in September said his agency had never tested baby mattresses for chlorinated tris or other flame retardants that the Tribune spotlighted in "Playing With Fire." Federal flammability rules for mattresses were created "in a way so that manufacturers did not have to use flame retardant chemicals," spokesman Scott Wolfson said.
 
A 2011 study led by Duke's Stapleton found forms of chlorinated tris in six portable crib mattresses purchased between 2000 and 2008. That study did not name the brands, and most were made before the current fire-safety rules favoring barriers took effect.
 
To see what was in the mattresses sold today, the Tribune hired Stat Analysis Corp., a private Chicago analytical lab, to test popular brands used by consumers and child care centers.
 
The Tribune purchased the baby mattresses at major retailers, including Amazon.com, Babies R Us and Wal-Mart's online site. Stat Analysis performed the tests from October to December.
 
There are several kinds of flame retardants used in foam. Chemical manufacturers have said chlorinated tris is safe, but the Tribune chose to test for tris because the science showing potential harm is well documented.
 
The World Health Organization, the National Cancer Institute, the National Research Council and the safety commission have identified TDCPP as a cancer risk. Safety commission researchers in 2006 cautioned that adding TDCPP to upholstered furniture could expose children in their first two years of life to a cancer risk seven times higher than what most scientists and regulators consider acceptable.
 
Decades ago, the National Toxicology Program found the second form of chlorinated tris, known as TCEP, to be a cancer risk. The state of Washington requires manufacturers to report to state regulators the use of TCEP in children's products, and a New York state ban on TCEP in products for young children will take effect in December 2013.
 
Less is known about the third form of chlorinated tris, known as TCPP. A 2000 report by the National Research Council concluded that TCPP had not been adequately studied for possible health effects. Eight years later, a risk assessment by the European Union concluded that the flame retardant is a possible cancer risk because it is chemically similar to TCEP and TDCPP.
 
When tests showed a mattress contained any form of chlorinated tris at levels that Stat Analysis considered above a trace amount, the Tribune bought sister products from the same brand and had them tested to see if there was any pattern.
 
An Angeles portable crib mattress manufactured in April 2012 and bought from Wal-Mart online earlier this month had the highest levels of TDCPP of any of the mattresses tested. Two other Angeles mattresses, both manufactured in June 2011, contained some TCPP but did not contain any TDCPP.
 
David Curry, a general manager at Angeles, said his company was conducting its own investigation and declined to comment further.
 
Wal-Mart noted that Wayfair stopped selling the Angeles mattress when informed of the Tribune's results.
 
"Some of our largest suppliers of baby products have already begun eliminating the use of flame retardants that appear on lists of chemicals of high concern," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Dianna Gee added in an email. "We encourage our suppliers, who have not done so, to evaluate the use of chemicals of concern in advance of regulation."
 
Foundations cribs, which are sold with the company's mattresses, are "used in more hotels and child care facilities worldwide than any other brand of cribs," according to its website. For testing, the Tribune bought six different Foundations mattresses, and all contained TDCPP and TCPP.
 
Two of them also contained TCEP. However, foam samples taken from a different location in one of those mattresses did not contain TCEP, the lab found. It is possible that chemical levels will vary within foam if they're not mixed properly or if flame retardant residue from one batch of foam contaminates the next, according to experts.
 
The Foundations mattresses that were tested came from Amazon.com. Amazon continues to sell those mattresses, but its listings now include a "click here" link for California residents that takes consumers to a page that says, "WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."
 
A spokesman for the retailer said in an email: "We require our vendors and third party sellers to comply with all applicable laws and regulations."
 
The Tribune sent lab test reports and product details to officials at Foundations, but they did not respond to phone calls or emails seeking comment.
 
The company did, however, briefly post a statement on its website saying it had received assurances from its suppliers that its mattresses were free of TDCPP. In that statement, which Foundations later removed, the company said the Center for Environmental Health alleged that some Foundations products contained TDCPP and required warnings under California law.
 
"Foundations has begun testing to ascertain whether TDCPP, contrary to the assurances it received, was or is present in any of its products," Foundations wrote on its website. "Second, the company will confirm and ensure that no new production contains TDCPP."
 
In the meantime, the company said it was adding warning labels to products shipped to California and asked retailers selling to customers in that state to add the labels "out of an abundance of caution."
 
On Oct. 28, California started requiring warnings on products sold in that state if the products could expose people to harmful amounts of TDCPP.
 
California's Center for Environmental Health found TDCPP in Foundations and Angeles crib mattresses and in a Babies R Us bassinet pad. The center did not test for TCEP, which also can trigger warning requirements under California law, or TCPP.
 
All four Babies R Us branded mattresses purchased by the Tribune — two products made for portable cribs and two for bassinets — contained TDCPP and TCPP, Stat Analysis found. Babies R Us continued to sell those kinds of mattresses: One of the chain's stores in Niles had them on its shelves Thursday.
 
Jennifer Albano, a spokeswoman for Toys R Us Inc., which owns the Babies R Us chain, said all products in its stores meet or exceed applicable laws, including flammability standards.
 
"As always, we will continue to monitor any emerging product safety concerns and to work with our suppliers to identify new ways to raise the bar on the safety of the products sold in our stores," Albano wrote in an email.
 
Summer Infant, the importer of those Babies R Us branded mattresses, in a written statement faulted the Tribune for analyzing the chemical content of the foam inside a product rather than "risk assessment models" that look at whether a consumer is exposed.
 
The company wrote that its products comply with all safety commission regulations and that "there is no hazardous exposure to the cited flame retardants."
 
"Summer Infant's top priority in manufacturing juvenile products is the health and safety of every child," the company wrote.
 
Stapleton, the Duke University chemist who led the largest study of flame retardants in babyproducts, offered a different take on the permeability of mattresses. She said chemicals like TDCPP can escape from products such as mattresses any time air moves through them. A truly sealed mattress would pop like a balloon when compressed, she said.
 
"Can you push your hand down on it, and does air escape?" Stapleton asked. "There's no such thing as hermetically sealed if you have air coming out."
 
Summer Infant mattresses had seams with visible stitches and had ends covered with overlapped fabric. A reporter was able to stick her finger between the overlapped plastic and touch foam. Though it's unlikely a baby would ever reach into that space, air can escape through it.
 
The Foundations mattresses also had visible stitching, and one had similar overlapped fabric. In contrast, the Angeles mattresses had no obvious stitching or gaps. But all of the mattresses could be compressed with little pressure before springing back to their original shape.
 
Measuring a child's exposure to chemicals in a mattress is complicated. The safety commission's proposed testing would apply 100,000 cycles of pressure over 24 hours to represent years of use, while sampling the air above. To simulate bed-wetting and sweating, agency scientists plan to apply wet fabric to see what chemicals wick out of the mattress, agency spokesman Wolfson said.
 
"Once a thorough assessment of risk is completed, scientists can estimate the likelihood of a child experiencing any adverse effects," the agency said in a written statement.
December 30, 2012

On the defensive over toxic flame retardants, the chemical industry turns to the questionable conclusions of a friendly scientist

By Sam Roe

Under attack since May for relying on flawed studies to justify the use of toxic flame retardants in furniture and household products, the chemical industry has turned to a familiar tactic: It has begun pointing to a new scientific paper.
 
Industry representatives have touted the paper in news releases, before lawmakers and in a video shown to policymakers. They have also shared the paper with two U.S. senators, who cited it during congressional hearings.
 
But the new paper reaches unsupported conclusions and misleads the public, much like previous studies embraced by industry, a Tribune investigation shows. The paper's author is Matthew Blais, a scientist and chemical industry adviser who had never previously written a paper about flame retardants.
 
Blais' major finding is that the retardants in typical residential furniture provide a substantial safety benefit, but a Tribune examination of the paper's underlying test results found flawed data and questionable claims.
 
For instance, his paper relies heavily on a test result that Blais' own colleagues had rejected as invalid.
 
Of the 79 pieces of furniture that his colleagues tested for an earlier arson study, only one was identified as taking unusually long to burn. The scientists concluded the result for the slow-burning piece of furniture was an outlier and tossed it out.
 
But Blais highlighted it in his paper as the main evidence that flame retardants slow fires.
 
Blais also states that scientists at his lab tested a fabric "common in furniture items" and found that the flame retardants in the material dramatically slowed fires, giving families 10 extra minutes to seek safety.
 
Yet the fabric his colleagues tested isn't used in furniture; it's used in theatrical curtains that are designed to self-extinguish in case of fire. The scientists obtained the fabric from a North Hollywood, Calif., store serving the film industry.
 
Blais' paper was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. One leading fire scientist who has examined the work is Vytenis Babrauskas. When informed of the Tribune's findings, he called Blais' paper "exceedingly misleading."
 
In his opinion, Babrauskas said, "the truth has gone out the window."
 
Blais, the director of fire technology at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, one of the nation's largest nonprofit laboratories, defended his paper. "I think the data is accurate and the conclusions are correct," he said.
 
To understand Blais' methodology, the Tribune analyzed the data, charts and codes from more than a hundred lab tests conducted at the institute, then questioned Blais over the phone and in emails more than a dozen times.
 
He acknowledged he was unsure whether the theatrical curtain fabric his colleagues tested is used in furniture as his paper stated. He also gave varying explanations as to why he used a key test result that his colleagues concluded was invalid, saying he has conducted additional testing that shows the result was not an outlier.
 
Blais has been an adviser to the American Chemistry Council, the industry's chief trade group, since 2011. The organization said it pays him a small honorarium to attend occasional meetings. Blais said he doesn't keep the money; it goes directly to his institute.
 
Blais' paper is based on data from an institute study that was aimed at aiding arson investigators and did not focus on the effectiveness of flame retardants. Blais said that no one paid him to write his paper, but that the trade group produced the video based on the report and paid his travel expenses to two conferences to present his conclusions.
 
When asked why he did not disclose his ties to industry in his paper, in the video or at a recent conference, he said he didn't think it was relevant. "I am not advocating any particular flame retardant or company," he said.
 
In a written response to questions, the American Chemistry Council said that Blais was "a noted and respected scientist," and that "flame retardants help products meet fire safety standards."
 
"Dr. Blais' study provides us with some helpful information, and we would like to see it go through the next steps of being peer-reviewed and published," the group wrote.
 
Blais' paper is important because it has emerged as the industry's main defense against moves by regulators to halt the use of flame retardants found in most couches, love seats and upholstered chairs.
 
These chemicals — some of which have been linked to cancer, neurological deficits and impaired fertility — migrate from furniture and settle in dust.
 
Government research shows the amount of flame retardants added to furniture foam to meet flammability rules provides no meaningful protection from fires, and so some health experts argue that the chemicals do more harm than good. Makers of flame retardants say their products are effective and save lives.
 
In May, the Tribune investigative series "Playing With Fire" documented how industry has misrepresented the effectiveness of flame retardants for years.
 
Industry officials frequently pointed to a government study from the 1980s that they claimed showed flame retardants in common household items gave people a fifteenfold increase in time to escape fires.
 
But Babrauskas, the study's lead author, told the Tribune that industry officials "grossly distorted" his findings and that flame retardants in home furnishings offered little to no fire protection.
 
Chemical-makers then highlighted a series of industry-financed studies that concluded flame retardants prevented deadly fires, reduced pollutants and saved society millions of dollars.
 
But the Tribune showed that a major foundation for these studies was a report documenting eight television fires in and around Stockholm. That report had nothing to do with flame retardants and was so obscure it was available only in Swedish.
 
Lawmakers and health advocates began calling for reforms. U.S. senators held two hearings, advocates marched at the U.S. Capitol, and California announced plans to scrap the rule that made flame retardants common in American furniture.
 
Industry pushed back: In June, a lobbyist for the chemical-makers handed California lawmakers copies of a slide presentation about Blais' new paper and read from the conclusions, which included that the use of flame retardants in furniture "increases the escape time for a family, saving lives, and increases the available response time for fire services."
 
The findings of the new study caught some health experts and scientists off guard, as did the paper's supposed sponsor. The chemical lobbyist said Blais' paper was funded by an arm of the U.S. Justice Department, an association that lent the work credibility. This claim would be often repeated by industry officials.
 
But only the arson study upon which Blais based his paper was funded by the government, not his report.
 
A month later, in July, an industry consultant showed a five-minute video about Blais' paper to California policymakers studying reform measures.
 
As the video shows mock-up chairs engulfed in flames, Blais tells viewers that without fire retardants, upholstered furniture is going to burn "very, very quickly" and flames will spread throughout the room.
 
"Your curtains catch on fire, your rug is on fire — anything else that's flammable in the room will catch on fire," he says.
 
The next day, Blais' paper came up at a U.S. Senate hearing on the health risks of flame retardants.
 
One chemical executive testified that the paper showed flame retardants provided families greater safety, while Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe cited the research and asked that it be entered into the hearing's record.
 
The Tribune found several fundamental flaws in Blais' paper, including one that came to light after a telephone call to a Hollywood-area fabric supplier.
 
Blais writes that testing at his lab for the arson study showed that using a flame-retardant fabric on upholstered furniture dramatically improves fire protection compared with using an untreated cotton covering.
 
A chair with the untreated covering, his paper states, catches fire easily, and the blaze spreads throughout the room in about three minutes. With the retardant fabric, the fire doesn't spread until 13 minutes.
 
"By then, your fire alarm hopefully has gone off in your house, and you're awake enough to get out the door," Blais said at an industry conference in May, according to the audio of his presentation.
 
But what Blais did not disclose — in his paper, in the video or in his presentation to industry — was that the chemically treated fabric his lab tested was not a material typically found in homes.
 
Both his paper and the arson study identify it as a black Milano fabric bought from Dazian, a North Hollywood firm serving the film and entertainment industries. When the Tribune called Dazian, a representative said the black Milano was a velvet material used almost exclusively for theater drapes and not intended for furniture.
 
The fabric also meets a strict flammability test that some communities have adopted for drapes and curtains in public places, such as theaters and school auditoriums.
 
That test, called NFPA 701, was developed by the National Fire Protection Association. Tracy Vecchiarelli, an NFPA associate fire protection engineer and expert on fire codes, said she has never heard of a fabric meeting the drapery requirement being used on furniture. Such material, she said, is designed to essentially self-extinguish.
 
Asked about the fabric, Blais said both his paper and the arson study made a mistake: The fabric tested at his lab wasn't black Milano, but rather Supercote Heavyweight Duvetyne, also bought from the North Hollywood supplier.
 
But that fabric, also known as "Commando Cloth," is used for theatrical curtains and set designs. It, too, meets the strict NFPA 701 standard and is designed to self-extinguish.
 
Blais' paper explicitly states that the fabric tested in his lab was "common in furniture items that are currently on the market."
 
Now Blais says he is not certain about that. He told the Tribune the goal was to show the effect of a fabric that was clearly flame retardant — "not to say that this is a couch you can buy."
 
What about couches and chairs that are not wrapped in theater fabric but more closely resemble furniture found in people's homes? Blais' staff tested plenty of those, and he says the results showed items that contained flame retardants in the cushions performed better in burn tests than those that did not.
 
To assess that claim, the Tribune examined the study upon which his paper is based — his staff's 207-page arson report — and analyzed its underlying data.
 
The arson study wasn't focused on whether flame retardants worked. The researchers largely wanted to know how different ignition sources, such as a matchlike flame or gas burner, and different ignition locations, such as a chair's seat or back, affected fire behavior.
 
Such data, they thought, might help arson investigators determine how fires started.
 
Blais' staff built 79 mock-up pieces of furniture, mostly chairs and three-seat couches. Six kinds of cushions were used, four containing flame retardants. The scientists ignited each item and took a variety of measurements.
 
For each test, the researchers assigned a nine-character code to represent the nine variables in the experiment, such as where the item was ignited and whether it contained flame retardants.
 
Of the 79 pieces of furniture ignited, researchers identified only one that took an oddly long time to catch fire — a "very extreme" result, according to the study. The researchers determined that the result was an "outlier" and eliminated it from their analysis.
 
According to a footnote in the researchers' final report, the outlier result was from test SRM131BB2 — indicating, in part, a chair with flame retardants in the cushions.
 
The Tribune compared this test code with the codes of experiments that Blais had cited in his paper. The codes matched. Blais had cited the same test — the one that his staff concluded produced the outlier — as his main evidence that flame retardants in residential furniture provided considerable safety benefit.
 
He did not describe the result as an outlier in his paper. Instead, he compared it with a result from a chair without flame retardants, concluding that fire spread twice as fast on the untreated item.
 
When asked why he highlighted a test result that his own staff had thrown out, Blais gave varying answers.
 
His staff threw out the test result only in terms of "ignition delay," a measurement from the time a piece of furniture is lit to when the fire is self-sustaining. He said the focus of his paper was different. He highlighted another measurement: the time from ignition to the blaze's peak intensity.
 
The Tribune noted that these were very similar measurements, both of which basically measured the time it took for an item to burn.
 
Blais then said it can be difficult to determine outliers, "and it is the judgment of the scientistmaking the call."
 
But Blais oversaw the arson study and signed off on it. Did he disagree with that conclusion?
 
He responded, "We have since generated more data showing that it's not really an outlier."
 
The arson study's lead author, Marc Janssens, a senior engineer at Southwest Research Institute, did not return messages seeking comment. An institute spokesman declined to make Janssens available for an interview, saying only Blais would answer questions.
 
Janssens' arson study reported only one main conclusion about flame retardants: Chairs with the chemicals produced a lower "peak heat release rate," or a less severe fire, than untreated chairs. But when the three-seat couches were tested, researchers saw little difference.
 
The data were far from perfect: In most key tests, researchers isolated more than one variable, making it difficult to draw precise conclusions.
 
The Tribune found just seven examples in which researchers isolated the kind of flame retardant foam common in U.S. furniture as the sole variable. That allowed direct comparisons to be made between the treated and untreated foam. The results were mixed. In four of the seven cases, fire actually spread more quickly in the foam treated with flame retardants.
 
In terms of the peak amount of heat released, the chemically treated foam generally produced less severe fires, but that might be because most of the untreated foam was twice as dense. Fire scientists say denser foam produces more severe fires simply because there is more material to burn.
 
In all, the arson study's data offer little evidence that flame retardants in typical furniture are effective.
 
Blais acknowledged that the arson study data provided limited direct comparisons to precisely assess the effectiveness of flame retardants. But he said he thought there was "a clear indication" that the chemicals worked well.
 
More measurements are needed, he said, to "make an ironclad conclusion," and he has been conducting new experiments to help fill the gaps.
 
He said he hoped to have his new paper written soon.

 

June 19, 2012

By Patricia Callahan and Michael Hawthorne

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday called for a sweeping overhaul of his state's 1970s-era flammability standard, a change that could dramatically reduce or eliminate the toxic flame retardant chemicals in sofas, easy chairs and baby products in homes across the nation.

Last month, the Tribune's "Playing With Fire" series exposed a deceptive, decades-long campaign by the tobacco and chemical industries to promote the California flammability rule, which has not undergone a major overhaul since it was adopted in 1975.

Brown's decision to revamp the rule affects consumers nationwide because many manufacturers apply his state's standard to furniture and baby products sold across the country. Federal and independent scientists say flame retardants added to meet the rule provide no meaningful protection from fires, and some of the chemicals are linked to cancer, neurological deficits, impaired fertility and developmental problems.

"We must find better ways to meet fire safety standards by reducing and eliminating — wherever possible — dangerous chemicals," Brown said in a written statement.

Changing the obscure rule, known as Technical Bulletin 117, would be the most significant step any state has taken to reduce the use of flame retardants that scientists say are building up in people's bodies and in the environment around the globe.

Scientists know that flame retardants migrate from products and settle in dust. That's why toddlers, who play on the floor and put things in their mouths, generally have far higher levels than their parents. Expectant mothers also can unwittingly pass the chemicals to their children; the typical American baby is born with the highest recorded concentrations of flame retardants among infants in the world.

Brown is stepping in after efforts to change the rule through legislation repeatedly failed amid heavy lobbying from the chemical industry. California Sen. Mark Leno, perennial sponsor of measures to reduce the use of flame retardants, said the Tribune's investigation "completely altered the debate."

"I've been fighting this for five years and losing at every step, and then a lot of change is happening suddenly," said Leno, who applauded the governor's decision.

The rule requires the foam inside furniture to withstand a candlelike flame for 12 seconds. To pass that test, manufacturers add flame retardant chemicals to cushions — up to 2 pounds in a large couch.

But federal statistics show that the leading cause by far of furniture fires is smoldering cigarettes, not candles. By the time the upholstery fabric catches fire, the flames are large enough to overpower the chemicals in the foam.

In tests conducted in a government lab, federal scientists touched a small flame to a pair of upholstered chairs — one with a flame retardant in the foam and one without. They found that both chairs burned similarly and were engulfed in flames within four minutes.

Tonya Blood, head of the California state agency that will craft the new rule, said she plans to propose a new standard by August. Hearings and responses to public comments could delay a final decision for a year.

Federal regulators have been wrestling for decades with the issue of how to fireproof furniture. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is pushing the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to finalize a 2008 proposal that would require upholstery to resist smoldering cigarettes.

A federal smolder standard would trump the California rule with or without action by the state. The question is which arm of government — state or federal — will act first.

The fabric covers on most furniture sold today would meet the federal proposal without the use of flame retardants, the safety commission has concluded. If furniture fabric stops a fire from starting in the first place, the commission's staff says, there is no reason to keep adding chemicals to the foam underneath.

The Citizens for Fire Safety Institute, which the Tribune found to be a front group for the largest manufacturers of flame retardants, vowed to remain involved in the debate. The group has been the primary opponent of efforts by Leno and other California lawmakers to change the state's furniture rule.

The industry group's star witness, a burn surgeon, testified last year about a 7-week-old patient who was fatally burned on cushioning that lacked flame retardants, but the Tribune revealed that the baby as he described her did not exist.

Seth Jacobson, a spokesman for Citizens for Fire Safety, said the group continues to believe the California standard saves lives.

"We've always been about fire safety," Jacobson said. "We will be part of the discussion, 100 percent. As much as we can."

Groups that represent manufacturers of furniture, baby products and the foam inside them said they support Brown's call for a new California standard that reduces or eliminates the use of toxic chemicals.

"A lot of things have changed since the '70s," said Andy Counts, chief executive of the American Home Furnishings Alliance, a trade group. "It's about time they took another look at their standards."

Rick Locker, general counsel to the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association, said parents are clamoring for baby items made with natural fibers.

"It's a ridiculous requirement," he said of the California standard. "Children are not at risk of fire from those products."

Blood, the California state official, said her office is considering exempting certain baby productsfrom the state's flammability rules.

In a peer-reviewed study published last year, scientists found flame retardants in 80 percent of the baby products they tested. The most common flame retardant detected was chlorinated tris, also known as TDCPP, which manufacturers voluntarily took out of children's pajamas more than three decades ago after it was linked to cancer.

Scientists and regulators thought TDCPP had all but disappeared from the marketplace. But because it wasn't formally banned, companies can legally use it in other consumer products without informing government officials or the public. It has become one of the most widely used flame retardants in household furniture.

Arlene Blum, a University of California at Berkeley chemist whose study led to the removal of TDCPP from children's sleepwear in the late 1970s, said Brown's decision could lead to "equal or greater fire safety without pounds of toxic and untested chemicals in our homes."

"The whole world should be healthier because of this," Blum said.

July 18, 2012

As Senate panel learns of probe, 2nd agency seeks power to remove toxins from homes

By Michael Hawthorne

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday announced it will conduct a broad investigation of flame retardants that a Tribune series identified as examples of the government's failure to protect Americans from toxic chemicals.
 
Meanwhile, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission urged lawmakers to grant special authority that could speed the removal of hazardous flame retardants from new upholstered furniture, including sofas that can contain up to 2 pounds of the chemicals in their foam cushions.
 
The initiatives, outlined at a Senate subcommittee hearing, opened new fronts in a debate about chemicals that for years have been added to a wide variety of household goods and baby products, even as a growing amount of research has identified health concerns and raised doubts about whether flame retardants prevent fires.
 
The Tribune's "Playing With Fire" investigation, which prompted the hearing, exposed a deceptive, decades-long campaign by the tobacco and chemical industries to promote flame retardants. Tapping into the public's fear of fire, industry created a phony consumer group that distorted science and helped organize an association of top fire officials to advocate greater use of flame retardants in furniture and electronics.
 
Promoted as lifesavers, flame retardants added to furniture cushions actually provide no meaningful protection from fires, according to federal researchers and independent scientists. Some of the most widely used chemicals are linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility.
 
James Jones, the EPA's top chemical safety official, told senators that flame retardants illustrate several weaknesses in the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1976 law that gives the government little power to assess or limit dangers from flame retardants and scores of other chemicals. The law allows chemical companies to put their products on the market without proving they are safe and makes it almost impossible to ban chemicals after health effects are documented.
 
The Obama administration has called repeatedly for an overhaul of the law, but legislation sponsored by Democratic Sens. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Dick Durbin of Illinois has been mired in anti-regulatory politics.
 
Jones said the EPA will use its limited authority under the existing law to target several flame retardants, including one chemical mixture that the agency promoted as safe nearly a decade ago and is now widely sold under the brand name Firemaster 550.
 
The EPA also will adopt a new strategy by the end of the year focusing on a larger group of flame retardants that pose "the greatest potential concerns," Jones said in prepared remarks to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, an influential spending panel chaired by Durbin.
 
"The American public has the right to expect that the chemicals manufactured, imported and used in this country are safe," Jones said. "The time to fix this badly outdated law is now."
 
Inez Tenenbaum, the safety commission's chairman, asked senators to back an amendment to the Flammable Fabrics Act that would streamline the watchdog agency's authority to adopt new rules for upholstered furniture. In 2008, Congress granted the panel similar leeway to outlaw lead and other toxic substances in baby cribs and toys — hazards revealed by another Tribune investigation.
 
Federal regulators have been wrestling for years with the issue of how to fireproof furniture. The safety commission now thinks the best solution is to require upholstery to resist smoldering cigarettes, which federal statistics show are by far the chief cause of furniture fires.
 
Andy Counts, chief executive of the American Home Furnishings Alliance, said voluntary standards adopted by the furniture industry ensure that most sofas and easy chairs sold today are covered with fabrics that comply with the commission's proposed standard without using flame retardants.
 
One problem, Tenenbaum said, is that federal law requires a lengthy process to adopt new consumer protection rules, making it difficult to respond quickly to emerging science about flame retardants. The commission also has taken years to come up with testing protocols for furniture, which is sold in many shapes and sizes.
 
Another factor is a flammability standard that California adopted in 1975 and that most furniture manufacturers follow for goods sold nationwide. In response to the Tribune investigation, Gov. Jerry Brown announced last month that his state will revamp that standard, known as Technical Bulletin 117, a move that could make the federal safety commission's proposal unnecessary.
 
"If California addresses the issue, it could finally resolve this problem," Tenenbaum said in an interview after the hearing. "Don't wait for us, because our process is so onerous."
 
Last week 26 senators, including Durbin, Lautenberg and, for the first time, three Republicans, called for a congressional overhaul of the chemical safety law. But the group stopped short of bipartisan support for Lautenberg's proposed Safe Chemicals Act, which would give the EPA more authority to regulate chemicals and require manufacturers to prove their products are safe before putting them on the market.
 
"If this isn't a call to arms … I don't know what is," Durbin said, citing the Tribune investigation.
 
The American Chemistry Council, the chief trade group for the chemical industry, says it supports the idea of a new law but opposes Lautenberg's bill. The group has rejected calls from Democratic senators to suggest changes.
 
Jones, of the EPA, said that if the proposed overhaul had been in place, the agency likely would not have allowed certain flame retardants to be sold. He singled out Firemaster 550, a flame retardant highlighted by the Tribune as a chemical that took independent scientists years to identify and raise concerns about.
 
The EPA in 2003 hailed the flame retardant as safe even though records show that scientists within the agency were deeply skeptical. After peer-reviewed studies showed that the chemical has spread across the globe and routinely turns up in household dust ingested by children, the agency now plans to conduct a "high priority" review of potential hazards next year.
 
On Tuesday the agency said that initiative also would include other brominated flame retardants, a group of chemicals that some independent scientists have said should face tougher scrutiny because they tend to spread easily and widely, persist in the environment and build up in the food chain.
 
"Since brominated flame retardants are substitutes for each other, we are going to look at all of them," Jones said after the hearing, citing Firemaster 550 as an example of the EPA "missing an issue" with a chemical. "We don't want to shift the risk around among chemicals that might pose similar problems."
 
Chemtura, the Philadelphia-based company that makes Firemaster 550, says the flame retardant is safe and continues to cite the EPA's 2003 endorsement as proof. Last month the company said it would work with the EPA to "realize the ultimate benefits of Firemaster 550."
July 25, 2012

Senators allege industry misused science, gave misleading testimony

By Michael Hawthorne

WASHINGTON — The world's leading manufacturers of flame retardants faced scathing criticism Tuesday from U.S. senators angered by what they called the industry's misuse of science, misleading testimony and creation of a phony consumer group that stoked the public's fear of house fires.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, pointedly asked one chemical company official: "Don't you owe people an apology?"

The hearing, prompted by a Tribune investigative series, quickly turned into a forum for tough questions about the industry's talking points on science and its political tactics.

"I don't trust these companies to tell the truth about their chemicals," said Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives who testified about her battles with an industry front group during debates about banning certain flame retardants in her state. "I don't think the American public or U.S. senators should either."

But a top official from one of the companies steadfastly repeated the industry's position that flame retardants are saving lives and are not harmful. The official also defended industry-funded efforts to influence policy in Washington and before state legislatures.

"As a scientist and also as a father, I think in terms of looking at the risk of fires versus other risks in society. We can't forget the risk of fires," said Marshall Moore, director of technology, advocacy and marketing for Philadelphia-based Chemtura Corp.

The Tribune series, published in May, revealed how the tobacco and chemical industries engaged in a deceptive, decades-long campaign to promote the use of flame-retardant chemicals in household furniture, electronics, baby products and other goods.

Those efforts have helped load American homes with pounds of toxic chemicals linked to cancer, neurological deficits, developmental problems and impaired fertility. A typical American baby is born with the highest recorded concentrations of flame retardants among infants in the world.

Tuesday's hearing featured several sharply worded exchanges between senators and representatives of Chemtura, Albemarle Corp. and ICL Industrial Products, which combined control 40 percent of the world market for flame retardants. Boxer and other Democrats, including Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, hammered the companies for creating a front group dubbed the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute.

Majority Democrats on the Senate panel said the Tribune series revived legislation that for the first time since 1976 would overhaul the way toxic chemicals are regulated in the U.S.

Current law allows chemical companies to put their products on the market without proving they are safe and makes it difficult to ban chemicals after health effects are documented. A committee vote, scheduled for Wednesday, would be the farthest that proposed reforms have advanced in Congress.

But the chemical industry opposes the legislation, and Republicans on the committee have signaled they will not support it, even after the sponsoring lawmakers made changes intended to assuage opponents.

"Most of the thousands of chemicals that are used every day are safe," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who has sponsored versions of the measure since 2005. "This bill will separate those safe chemicals from the ones that are not."

Republicans said that calling for a vote now disrupts behind-the-scenes negotiations on a new version of the bill. Industry lobbyists have suggested some changes in those meetings but have stopped short of going through the bill line by line as Democrats urged them to do.

Echoing the Republican senators, the American Chemistry Council, the industry's leading trade group, said Tuesday it "continues to support bipartisan reform … so that the law will protect health and safety while ensuring U.S. manufacturers can innovate and compete globally."

Moore, the Chemtura official, said a sharp decline in furniture fires since 1980 "coincided" with the increased use of flame retardants in furniture foam.

But government experts say declining smoking rates and increased use of smoke detectors have played major roles in reducing fire deaths and damage. And recent studies by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Underwriters Laboratories found that flame retardant chemicals in furniture cushions provide no meaningful protection from fires.

During his testimony, Moore cited a government study from the 1980s as proof that flame retardants save lives. But as the Tribune previously reported, the study's lead author, Vytenis Babrauskas, says the industry has misrepresented his findings and that the amount of flame retardants used in household furniture doesn't work.

"Don't you think it's time the chemical industry stopped grossly distorting the study's findings?" Boxer said.

"With all due respect, Senator, we did not distort the findings of that study," Moore replied.

"The author says you did," Boxer shot back. "Who is a better source?"

Moore and Republican lawmakers cited another study that they said underscores the effectivenessof flame-retardant chemicals. Babrauskas, a former government fire expert, told the Tribune this week that he considers that unpublished study "propaganda."

Moreover, there is new evidence that the part of the research cited by industry lobbyists involved specially made furniture that is not found in American homes.

Heather Stapleton, a Duke University chemist, said after the hearing that she tested samples of the foam and cover fabric that she described as identical to the types used in the research. She determined that the foam contained levels of a flame retardant that were twice as high as the amount typically found in residential furniture.

She said she also found that the cover was treated with a different flame retardant. Residential furniture typically is not covered with fabric treated with flame-retardant chemicals, according to furniture industry officials.

To the jury:

For years, manufacturers have packed toxic flame retardants into the foam cushions of upholstered furniture found in homes across America. Companies did this even though research shows that the chemicals — linked to cancer, developmental problems and impaired fertility — don’t slow fires and are migrating into the bodies of adults and children.

That began to change in 2012 when the Chicago Tribune’s investigative series “Playing With Fire” exposed how the chemical and tobacco industries waged a deceptive, decades-long campaign to promote the use of flame-retardant furniture and downplay the hazards.

As a result of the series, flame retardants became one of the top public health issues of the year. The U.S. Senate held two hearings, the Environmental Protection Agency began a broad investigation and an industry front group exposed by the newspaper folded. Most significantly, California announced it would scrap the rule responsible for flame retardants’ presence in most U.S. homes, meaning manufacturers may soon stop adding the chemicals to furniture and baby products.

The series encompasses more than a year of work by reporters Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne.

To reveal the surprising role of Big Tobacco in the buildup of toxic chemicals in American homes, Callahan sifted through the 13 million records cigarette companies made public after settling lawsuits. Internal memos and strategic plans showed how Big Tobacco planted an operative inside the National Association of State Fire Marshals and used that organization to promote flame-retardant furniture.

To expose how chemical makers distorted science, Roe painstakingly dissected their studies.

He tracked one study to the National Library of Sweden, had it translated and found that the industry’s sweeping claims about flame retardants were based on just eight TV fires in Stockholm.

Roe also proved that the “common” upholstery fabric used in one set of tests was actually a heavily flame-retardant material made for theater curtains.

To illustrate government’s failings, Hawthorne obtained previously undisclosed documents revealing how regulators allowed flame retardants onto the market without thoroughly assessing health risks.

Reporters attended obscure hearings on furniture rules to witness industry manipulation firsthand. In California, Callahan heard the chemical industry’s star witness, burn surgeon David Heimbach, tell lawmakers a gripping story about a baby girl fatally burned because of a lack of flame retardants. But when Roe reviewed 16 years of county medical examiner records, he discovered that the baby Heimbach described did not exist.

Using IRS records, corporate franchise tax reports and lobbying disclosure forms,  Callahan proved that the organization sponsoring Heimbach — the Citizens for Fire Safety Institute — was actually a front group for the largest makers of flame retardants. And when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said it had never tested crib mattresses for retardants, the Tribune did, finding that three popular brands contained significant amounts.

Among the series’ results:

Broad reform measures. California’s planned overhaul of its flammability standard is expected to take effect this summer, making flame retardants unnecessary in furniture and many baby products nationwide. The EPA began an investigation of chemicals highlighted in the series, and the CPSC said it would test babies’ exposure to flame retardants from crib mattresses.

Action by the U.S. Senate. Senators held two hearings, including one in which they assailed executives from the world’s largest manufacturers of flame retardants.

“Don’t you owe people an apology?” Sen. Barbara Boxer asked. A key Senate committee also voted to overhaul the nation’s chemical safety law – the first time since 1976 that comprehensive changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act advanced from committee.

Increased transparency. The chemical industry shut down Citizens for Fire Safety, and the University of Washington admonished Heimbach over his testimony. Industry changes. Facing a tougher regulatory climate, the two largest manufacturers of a common flame retardant linked to cancer vowed to end production of the chemical. After Tribune-sponsored lab testing, a national retailer halted sales of potentially hazardous crib mattresses.

The series inspired editorial writers and columnists at Bloomberg, The New York Times and other media outlets to call for action. “If you want a case study of everything that is wrong with money politics, this is it,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in the Times. Health advocates marched on Capitol Hill, while outraged readers thanked the Tribune. “You’ve done a tremendous justice for us all,” one wrote.

For digging deep to expose a pattern of deception and prompt change on a vital health issue, we proudly nominate Callahan, Roe and Hawthorne for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. 

Sincerely,

Gerould W. Kern

Editor

Winners

Prize Winner in Investigative Reporting in 2013:

David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab

For their reports on how Wal-Mart used widespread bribery to dominate the market in Mexico, resulting in changes in company practices. Investigative Reporting

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Investigative Reporting in 2013:

Alexandra Zayas

For her probe into unlicensed religious group-homes where children were beaten and locked in closet-size rooms for violating senseless rules, prompting action by state authorities

The Jury

Louise Kiernan(Chair )

associate professor, Medill School of Journalism

Kathleen L. Best

managing editor, content creation

Ziva Branstetter

enterprise editor

Sheila Coronel

director, Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism

Paul D'Ambrosio

director, news and investigation

Charles Ornstein

senior reporter

Walter Robinson

distinguished professor of journalism

Winners in Investigative Reporting

2012

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley

For their spotlighting of the New York Police Department's clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, resulting in congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering.
2011

Paige St. John

For her examination of weaknesses in the murky property-insurance system vital to Florida homeowners, providing handy data to assess insurer reliability and stirring regulatory action.
2010

Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman

For their resourceful reporting that exposed a rogue police narcotics squad, resulting in an FBI probe and the review of hundreds of criminal cases tainted by the scandal.
2009

David Barstow

For his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.
See All Investigative Reporting

2013 Prize Winners

Fiction

Adam Johnson

An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.
Drama

Ayad Akhtar

A moving play that depicts a successful corporate lawyer painfully forced to consider why he has for so long camouflaged his Pakistani Muslim heritage.
Poetry

Sharon Olds

A book of unflinching poems on the author's divorce that examine love, sorrow and the limits of self-knowledge.
Music

Caroline Shaw

A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).
See All 2013 Winners