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| Agency looks into alternatives for flame retardants - but are they safer? |
The goal of both analyses is to provide information about potential health and environmental hazards the chemicals and possible substitutes pose, the agency said.
The assessments should help companies that are looking for alternatives make choices and reduce their risk of having to repeat the process because an initially selected alternative doesn't work, the EPA said.
The documents also may help states or other regulators examining information a company has submitted in its own alternatives analysis. Some states, such as California, are requiring these types of analyses.
The EPA's Design for the Environment program assembled diverse parties who brought different information, expertise and perspectives to each analysis.
DecaBDE
For decaBDE, these participants included chemical, aerospace, automotive, electronics and textile manufacturers; the International Association of Fire Chiefs; environmental health organizations; recycling companies; and state and local government officials.
The decaBDE analysis provided information for 29 chemicals and chemical mixtures.
“Chemicals were selected for evaluation based on their potential as substitutes for decaBDE, not because they are expected to be safer than decaBDE,” the EPA said.
The 901-page analysis provided detailed information that showed trade-offs.
For example, decaBDE scored low for genotoxicity, moderate for carcinogenicity, high for developmental toxicity and very high for persistence.
Companies making flame-retardant products want chemicals that don't degrade so that the protection continues throughout a product's lifetime, the EPA said. Persistence in the environment, however, can pose a concern.
Some of the alternatives were readily biodegradable but toxic to the aquatic environment, the EPA said.
Bisphenol A
A minor use of bisphenol A is to help make paper receipts such as grocery receipts without carbon paper. The analysis said, however, that this particular use could result in higher exposure than some other BPA applications would.
The partnership that examined alternatives to bisphenol A in thermal paper included paper manufacturers, companies making equipment for thermal paper, chemical manufacturers, retailers, trade associations, scientific experts, environmental health organizations and international governmental organizations.
The 519-page analysis of bisphenol A examined 19 possible alternatives.
“No clearly safer alternatives to BPA were identified in this report—most alternatives have moderate or high hazard designations for human health or aquatic toxicity endpoints,” the analysis said.
The partnership found that three of the 20 chemicals (BPA and the 19 alternatives) scored low or very low in their potential to persist in the environment, and 11 had high or very high persistence values.
Two had a high potential to bioaccumulate.
U.S. manufacturers of decaBDE are phasing that chemical out of production under a voluntary agreement the EPA announced in 2009.
By contrast, bisphenol A remains a high production volume chemical, produced at an estimated volume of 2.4 billion pounds in 2007, the EPA's analysis said. It had an estimated value of almost $2 billion in 2010, the agency said.
However, in 2010 the EPA issued an action plan for bisphenol A. That plan said bisphenol A is a reproductive, developmental and systemic toxicant in animal studies and is weakly estrogenic.
The decaBDE and bisphenol A analyses are available here.
Source: Bloomberg News
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