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Development of a Flame Retardant and an Organohalogen Flame Retardant Chemical Inventory
Citation:
Bevington, C., A. Williams, C. Guider, N. Baker, B. Meyer, M. Babich, S. Robinson, A. Jones, AND K. Phillips. Development of a Flame Retardant and an Organohalogen Flame Retardant Chemical Inventory. Scientific Data. Springer Nature, New York, NY, 9:295, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01351-0
Impact/Purpose:
Flame retardants (FRs) have received greater attention over time due to their occurrence in environmental media and biological matrices [1] [2]. Certain FRs have been classified as persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic [3]. Up to the present, organizations have assessed and regulated FRs as single substances (e.g., decabromodiphenyl ether) and classes (e.g., Cyclic Aliphatic Bromides). [4-6]. FRs can be organized into groups or classes in different ways [7-9]. Common descriptions include organic vs. inorganic, halogenated vs. non-halogenated, and polymeric vs. non-polymeric [10]. Organohalogen flame retardants (OFRs) have received additional attention as a class, and can also be subcategorized, based on expected performance, chemical structure similarity, or biological similarity [9] The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is presently assessing OFRs. After granting a petition in 2015, which requested that CPSC ban all OFRs as a class in certain consumer product categories, CPSC sought advice from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) on best approach to implement a class-based assessment of OFRs. The efforts to compile this inventory are described here. In addition to an OFR inventory, a broader inventory of FRs with any classification has been assembled and included here. This broader list will benefit organizations that require characterization of chemical uses to scope their chemical hazard, exposure, or risk assessments. The accurate identification of chemicals is an important and necessary step that informs source characterization and scoping. The FR and OFR inventories described here expand on the 161 substances identified in the 2019 NASEM report and other recent compilations of FR and OFR chemistries [7, 55-56]. Chemical inventories, by nature, are dynamic and the uses and applications of chemical substances are also dynamic. As such, this inventory represents a snapshot in time and reflects the compilation of data sources that were used during curation. A curated and accurate chemical list that has been attributed to reliable sources is a valuable resource for future assessments of flame retardant classes.
Description:
There have been many attempts to compile comprehensive lists of flame retardants. However, this goal has proven challenging due to the heterogeneity of compounds that can be used as flame retardants coupled with changes in formulation chemistry over time. Flame retardants have been the focus of many recent existing hazard, exposure, and risk assessments. These assessments have been class-based or for individual chemical substances. Here, diverse sets of publicly available data sources from governmental organizations and the open literature were compiled to develop an inventory of chemicals used as flame retardants and organohalogen flame retardants. The chemical substances from these data sources were mapped to appropriate chemical identifiers via manual curation and deduplicated. Despite different data sources containing a large number of overlapping chemical substances, compiling information from multiple data sources was found to increase the breadth of potential flame retardant chemistries. The flame retardant and organohalogen flame retardant inventories were developed as a resource for scientists interested in better understanding properties of flame retardant and organohalogen flame retardant classes.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Development of a Flame Retardant and an Organohalogen Flame Retardant Chemical Inventory
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01351-0