> Many furniture manufacturers are no longer using flame retardants, thanks to an update to California's furniture flammability standard, TB117-2013. Most furniture that meets this standard will also include a label stating whether the product contains flame retardants.

Basically look at the tag if it was manufactured recently.

https://goop.com/wellness/detox/flame-retardants-furniture/

I'm really sorry for this off-topic reply, but... is that a useful article from Goop of all places? ...What? Huh.

I'm not surprised, there does seem to be a pretty big overlap between people using healing crystals if you know what I mean, and people avoiding actually harmful chemicals.

Same principle as "why vegans live healthier". It's not because their diet is actually healthier per-se, same as healing crystals do not work. But a vegan person, same as a person using healing crystals is likely to be a strongly biased sample of the population. They tend to be more aware of their lives, their bodies and the consequences of what they do to their bodies. And that, as a net effect, yields a healthier lifestyle on average.

But an unhealthy person will never get healthy by eating vegan, same as they won't get healthy by using healing crystals. It only works if you embrace the lifestyle and accept it mentally and become a "biased sample" yourself.

> Basically look at the tag if it was manufactured recently.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The update to the CA law is that manufacturers are no longer required to include flame retardants. They are still allowed to. I was surprised that even at a high-end furniture chain (Restoration Hardware), they were unable to tell me whether their furniture contained flame retardants or not.

In general: be prepared to pay significantly more for natural fibres and fillings.

If you're in the UK, it's harder than that. You either find one of a handful of small companies that are prepared to interpret the law more leniently, or you import from somewhere else in the EU.

These chemicals are also in carpets, and here you're in a worse bind, because the natural fibre alternatives are generally treated against insects and/or impossible to properly clean.

This website (which I'm not sure strikes the most helpful tone) has more on the UK situation: http://www.toxicsofa.com/

From research I did, the flame retardant in carpet is actually mainly in the padding. So I compromised on a wool underlayment and regular nylon carpet. The underlayment was not cheap but on the whole the cost was not that much higher.

The scorched-earth approach is to reject any furniture with polyurethane foams.

In other words, wood, wool, and tight weave cotton are your new friends.

Only if dyed organically.

In the SF Bay Area, we found a company selling natural latex mattresses, no flame retardants added. The showroom was on University Avenue in Palo Alto, so the price was high (at least $3K for a queen). But the factory was in Marin, so they could do custom sizes, and then we asked about replacing all our couch cushions, and we could special order those too. So we replaced all our mattresses and couch and chair cushions with natural latex. For covering and waterproofing, we also bought a natural wool mattress cover.

Sorry, I don’t remember the names of the businesses, but this was 10 years ago when the flame retardants were mandatory for synthetic materials. I don’t even know if they are still in business.

For chairs that had built in padding, we bought 1960s and 70s furniture from thrift stores with the hope this was before flame retardants were in use. We did all this after my partner and our female cat developed Hashimito’s, had years of low energy, and needed daily thyroid medication.

Cover the furniture, it's in the article

Furniture already comes with a covering, but the chemical manages to seep through (I'm assuming it's been applied to the foam itself). For a volatile chemical, adding yet another fabric covering may not help. Maybe a super thick quilt or a fabric that isn't porous would work?

Any furniture we buy we always leave it out in the sun as long as possible to off-gas (release toxins) then leave it in the garage for a few weeks to further loose that new 'furniture' smell of chemical.

Leather!