Valerie Pacino
Valerie Pacino hails from a small town in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. After graduating from UC Irvine with a degree in history, she moved to Busan, South Korea, taught English to kindergarteners, housewives, and business executives, and wrote a wildly popular ESL curriculum. Valerie moved to Seattle in 2008 and earned a Master of Public Health degree at the University of Washington. For the last few years, she has worked on climate justice, resilience, and community engagement at the City of Seattle. In her free time, Valerie enjoys reading mystery novels, pulverizing the competition in her fantasy hockey league, and exploring Cascadia with her husband, dog, and new baby.
SwatchJunkies
SwatchJunkies
Yes, Your Couch Is Probably Toxic
For the first time in four decades, non-toxic, fire-safe couches are widely available throughout North America. In response to tireless ...
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To the Victors Go the Sofas
Beginning in January 2014, non-toxic couches will be widely available for the first time in decades. A tireless campaign waged by firefighters and parents, researchers and scientists, public health and public consumer advocates came to fruition last month when California reversed its outdated, scientifically discredited flammability standard---a standard that places pounds of toxic chemicals in most North American homes.
For 38 years, California has exported to the rest of the continent a flammability standard so feckless, dangerous, and pervasive that it boggles the mind to consider how it was enacted in the first place.
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Non-Toxic Couches? Looks Like We’re Sitting Pretty!
A new couch could start to seem like a pretty good investment, provided that California moves forward with a proposed new fire safety rule for household furniture.
For years, firefighters, scientists, businesses, consumers, and public health advocates have gone toe-to-toe with big chemical companies over California’s outdated, scientifically discredited furniture flammability standard. Until recently, Big Chem had the upper hand: the current standard is good for their business (though harmful to consumers and firefighters). But the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown may have turned the tide. Earlier this month, California’s Bureau of Home Furnishings proposed a revised, non-toxic alternative standard based on sound fire science.
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Replacing an Unsafe Fire-safety Test for Couches
Editor’s note: This post is a compilation of a series of posts on toxic couches, taken from Sightline’s latest report ...
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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
The Chicago Tribune is “Playing with Fire.” In a weeklong series on flame retardants, a team of journalists eviscerates Big ...
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Have Toxic Couches Finally Met Their Match?
Eureka! The California legislature will this spring consider a bill to modernize the 12-second rule, the state’s obscure furniture flammability ...
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Toxic Money
Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. Big Chem knows that politics can be business by other means. ...
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Putting the Chemical Witness on the Hot Seat
You might think adding slow-to-burn compounds to upholstered furnishings, the largest single fuel load in many homes, would be a worthy precaution, a defense against house fires, and a lifesaver for thousands of people. It’s an understandable assumption, an intuitive one. Though Dr. Heimbach never questions or even explicitly mentions this assumption, it lurks beneath the surface of what he argued in Sacramento. So I checked the science.
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