(CN) — Flame retardant chemicals in furniture, vehicles and other everyday items contaminate more than 150 animal species worldwide.
Creating a map that combined hundreds of published scientific studies, Green Science Policy Institute scientists showed how flame retardants threaten killer whales, chimpanzees and other endangered species.
Among the polluting chemicals at issue are chlorinated paraffins, which the team reports are commonly used in consumer products and cause liver, thyroid and kidney cancers in laboratory animals. They shrunk the livers of black-spotted frogs living near electronic-waste facilities in China, and can be transferred to their eggs.
Despite a ban in the 1970s, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) affect survival rates of lower killer whale calfs survival rates and weaken their immune systems. The team reports that orca pods in Greenland, the Strait of Gibraltar and Hawaii suffer due to the accumulation of flame retardants, and noted how one study calculated that PCB contamination could cut the world’s killer whale populations in half over the next century.
On land, a protected Ugandan National Park's chimpanzees suffered from high levels of flame retardants.
Project lead Lydia Jahl and Professor Miriam Diamond of the University of Toronto explained via email how flame retardants became widespread pollutants.
“Flame retardants are often not bound to the product they are in and because they are semi-volatile, these chemicals continually evaporate over time from the product to which they were added,” the scientists said. “They can then travel through the air and then partition into dust, water, soil and other materials. Because many flame retardants are persistent, they can undergo long-range transport by traveling through air and water to oceans. Many flame retardants can also move through food webs to expose animals like orca whales far from where the flame retardants were originally used. Flame retardants are also released into the environment during chemical and product manufacturing and at product’s end-of-life.”
Arlene Blum, executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute, said in an email that halting further contamination requires looking at flammability standards, and namely, what they lack.
“Many are based on inadequate fire testing, they can be influenced by those who stand to profit financially, they do not take into account environmental and health impacts, and many have not been updated in decades to consider modern materials and the decrease in smoking,” Blum wrote. “Others are based on unrealistic scenarios, like how the old California furniture flammability test was designed to test against small open flames, rather than the smoldering fires that most commonly cause furniture fires (this standard was updated and improved in 2013, protecting against smoldering fires without the use of flame retardants). We can improve flammability standards by requiring unbiased testing to demonstrate their effectiveness and lack of chemical harm before allowing the standards to be put in place.”
Jahl has suggestions on how to protect endangered species in everyday life.
“The chemicals we use, the products we buy and the way we deal with waste have profound effects on the environment and the wildlife that live there,” Jahl wrote. “Scientists are trying hard to learn more about chemical pollution, product safety and safer alternatives to harmful chemicals, but the public can help too by doing things like buying products from companies with strict sustainability guidelines, voting for politicians who support environmental regulation and disposing of electronics safely.”
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