Your couch is poisoning you
Have you been sleeping on the couch to avoid your toxic mattress? Well, stop that. Because your couch is probably poisoning you right now. Unless you’re at work, in which case right when you get home.
That’s the takeaway from a new study in which scientists found flame-retardant chemicals linked to cancer in 85 percent of the couches they tested. New couches were actually worse, with 93 percent testing toxic. Almost a quarter of sofas tested positive for a chemical banned from kids’ clothes in the 1970s, but still allowed in mattresses and car seats. Mother Jones reports:
“Pretty much everyone in the country with a couch or a chair with foam have as much as a pound of a chemical like DDT or PCB in their home,” Dr. Arlene Blum, the executive director of the Green Science Policy Institute and a coauthor of the paper, told Mother Jones. “Most people think the government protects them, and that if something’s in their couch it must be safe.”
Ha-ha, but you know better than to trust the government. Solutions may include home-crafted bean bags, carved benches, and tall stacks of biodegradable yoga mats.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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