Why BFRs and PVC Should Be Phased Out Of Electronic Devices, Part 1: BFRs

BFRs - What are they?

The term brominated flame retardants (BFRs) refers a wide range of brominated chemicals added to materials to both inhibit their ignition and slow their rate of combustion. Commonly used examples include polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) and tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA), as well as brominated polymeric and oligomeric materials.

What's the problem?

Several BFRs, including certain PBDEs and HBCD, have known toxic properties, are highly resistant to degradation in the environment and are able to bioaccumulate (build up in animals and humans). Some are now widespread environmental pollutants, with higher levels generally being found in the atmosphere and rivers close to urban and industrialised areas. As well as being released from facilities producing goods such as electronics, these compounds can be released from such products during use, leading to their presence in household dust and resulting in increased human exposure. And when these products reach the end of their useful lives, some disposal or recycling operations (e.g incineration, smelting and open burning) can release the bromine in other hazardous forms, including as hydrogen bromide and brominated dioxins.

BFRs - Questions, myths, misunderstandings

There are several misconceptions surrounding BFR's often quoted in relation to our work. Here's the answer to two common ones:

BFRs are vital for fire safety. There are no alternatives.
Alternatives which provide the degree of fire safety required under law without using organic compounds of bromine of chlorine do already exist, including some direct chemical substitutes, as well as use of alternative materials and even product redesign in order to reduce or eliminate the need for flame-retardant additives. Indeed, a number of electronics companies have already phased out brominated flame retardants in a range of key applications.

Several major companies are already using alternatives or alternative designs. Different casing materials used in the Sony Vaio and Apple Macbook Air have reduced the need for BFR's.

Greenpeace is against bromine - but that's part of seawater!
Greenpeace does not campaign against bromine (or any other element that is part of the natural make-up of our planet), but against the unsustainable ways in which bromine has been used to manufacture organobromine compounds which, in turn, have caused such widespread environmental pollution. Many of the man-made chemicals recognised around the globe as being the most polluting are compounds of the so-called 'halogens', including bromine, chlorine and fluorine.

It is, however, a common mistake to confuse the chemical elements (e.g. bromine) that make up a chemical compound with the compound itself. The presence of a particular element in a compound (e.g. lead, mercury, chlorine, bromine) can confer particular toxic properties to that compound, but this is far from the whole story. The environmental and toxicological properties of a compound are governed not only by the elements it contains, but also by their arrangement, and both factors are important in determining the ways in which the compound may react in the environment, including in animals and plants. This is equally true for brominated flame retardants.

During high temperature processes used in some recycling or disposal operations, however, the chemical structures of BFRs can be partially or completely destroyed, creating free reactive forms of bromine which can recombine with other elements in the waste gases to form other highly toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative by-products, including brominated dioxins.

Source: Greenpeace

Tomorrow, Part 2: PVC