How Dangerous Is Your Couch?

Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by 001sky on Saturday September 08, 2012 @05:45PM (#4494110)

Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture).

--From the NYT article. There is alot of failure avoidance, it seems.

Edit: And also from the Wiki. you site:

The report further acknowledges that trade secrets are preventing effective testing. Sometimes the EPA does not even know what chemical the TSCA application refers to, and cannot report any problems because "health and safety data are of limited value if the chemical the data pertain to is unknown."[6]

This is going on with Fracking chemicals, at the moment.

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Re:How Dangerous Is Your Couch? by _delirium on Saturday September 08, 2012 @05:58PM (#4494139)

The latter part is a major thing that really should be fixed, I agree. In many of these cases, it seems fairly clear that the invocation of trade secrets is pretextual (the goal is not actually to protect a valuable secret from competitors), and the real motive is preventing third-party investigations into chemical safety.

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