PBDE Ban Passes, 41-8; Like Us, Senate Finds Seattle Times Unconvincing

As Sightline's Daily Score blog reports, Washington is going to become one of the toughest places in the world to inhale PBDEs, the fire retardant currently being given off by your consumer electronics and accumulating in your fatty tissue. Sez Clark Williams-Derry,

The "penta" and "octa" formulations of PBDEs haven't been manufactured in North America for a while, but "deca" is still fairly common -- so this is genuinely big news. I doubt that electronics manufacturers will have much trouble complying with the law, though. Judging from some of the news alerts that land in my inbox, plenty of companies have happily gone PBDE-free.

The Senate passed the bill on Tuesday by a 41-8 margin, despite the Seattle Times editorial claiming a case "hadn't been made" for action. No word on how the Seattle Times editorial board Frank Blethen feels about most of the legislative body pretending he doesn't exist.

This morning, Rep. Ross Hunter (D-48), the bill's primary sponsor, was feeling upbeat after chalking up a W after three years of work. We asked why he'd called this the toughest bill he's ever worked on, and Hunter laughed. "Don't ever sponsor bills with polysyllabic words in the title."

The first hurdle was educating legislators on what PBDEs were, and the argument for limiting their use. Limiting exposure to PBDEs is a key point for Hunter, because the bill exempts, for instance, Boeing airplanes. Hunter's focus was on the 80/20 rule -- limiting kids' primary household exposure to PBDEs (in TVs, mattresses, and other furniture). He wasn't going to go after Boeing for using one form of PBDEs to make escape slides for its planes.

"The bill was a good piece of policy last year," claimed Hunter, but it stalled out when legislators were swayed by bromine industry PR (thanks for the astroturf, Burson-Marsteller!) about the ban affecting fire safety. Hunter spent much of this year deflating the "fire safety" spin so that it couldn't be used in hit pieces. When the bromine industry did a statewide direct mail piece one weekend (featuring a kid playing with matches at home, surrounded by gas cans), Hunter had a response piece delivered to legislators by Monday.

41-8. That's a good score from where we're sitting. We may need to come up with a nickname for Hunter. That's our Seattlest theme for the day, looks like.