Who's afraid of bromine?

Re:Who's afraid of bromine? by x0x0 on Saturday September 27, 2014 @02:13AM (#8376231)

This article is an industry puff piece. The author writes

   This highlights an unavoidable problem for the chemicals industry - much of 
   what they do is still a learning process, and it often takes many years for 
   the long-term risks inherent in a particular product to emerge. Yet it is 
   also important to get these risks in perspective. So far, there are no known 
   cases of brominated fire retardants actually causing anyone major health 
   problems - they are being banned because of the potential hazard they pose.

Well, yes -- you have to basically be an idiot to take a bioaccumulative lipophilic chemical that, after all, is unnecessary (we can still build flame-retardant materials without them, and somehow pepsi still makes pepsi) and use them without incredibly thorough health testing. We know some of these flame retardants disrupt thyroid hormones and may impair neurodevelopment. The risks outweigh the benefits, and I decline to be in the experiment pool.

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Re:Who's afraid of bromine? by tjradcliffe on Saturday September 27, 2014 @01:43PM (#8377653)

The difficulties with this position are at least two-fold.

First, you claim that the use of bominated fire retardants is "unnecessary" because we can build flame-retardant materials without them, but the problem they are solving is not "building flame retardant materials" but "building flame retardant materials under some very specific constraints of cost, longevity, storage, transport, manufacturability of the product they are used in, etc". People who have never actually manufactured anything are often given to under-estimating the number of constraints on the process and airly wave away the issues faced by the people tasked with doing so (a common name for such people is "senior managers").

How good are the alternative flame retardants? Do they cost more, increasing price pressure and causing people to not replace their old electronics with new for a longer period of time, therefore actually increasing overall population risk? How do you calculate all that?

Second, "the risks outweigh the benefits" leaves unanswered the question "to whom"? The distribution of risks and benefits is not uniform. Replacing one product with another may well shift the risks and benefits, but can you tell me that we won't be having this conversation again a few decades from now, as the unexpected consequences of what you currently believe to be safer (not "safe" but "safer") alternatives become clear?

What is obvious to you is clearly not obvious to others (many of whom also have interests in the matter that might cloud their judgement, although of course the same is true of NGOs, which are in general even less science-based than industry risk-analysts.) This is why in any regulatory question of this kind treating the decision as a no-brainer and your opponents as the root of all evil is likely to be counter-productive. A better approach is to acknowledge a) the legitimacy of their concerns, including their concern about making a profit and b) bring up concrete, specific and detailed ways that the industrial processes in question could be improved. It's easy to think of abstract improvements that won't work.

The debate regarding ozone processing in the pulp and paper industry is a good example of how abstract claims that ozone was a perfect substitute for chlorine if only those evil capitalist industry dunderheads would come to Jesus turned out to be less than entirely true: ozone does have potential and is being used, but in practice turns out so far to be a less-than-complete replacement for chlorine bleaching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleaching_of_wood_pulp#Ozone

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