Mattress Ruling Lights Fire Under Nonwovens Manufacturers: Flame Retardant Requirements Create Opportunities in Bedding.

In mid-February, the Consumer Products Safety Commission passed a ruling for which the bedding industry had been preparing for nearly a decade. The commission voted 3-0 to approve a federal open-flame standard for all bed sets sold in the U.S.

The standards follow similar legislation already imposed in Califormia and take effect July 1, 2007. The decision was met with applause by mattress industry interest groups. "We commend CPSC for their commitment to this critical initiative.

After July 2007, the same national fire safety criteria will apply to mattresses sold in the US., regardless of where they are made," said Dick Doyle, president of the International Sleep Products Association. "Mattress manufacturers are gearing up or already producing mattresses to meet this life-saving standard, and ISPA will continue to provide resources to help them comply.

" The new open flame standard is largely based on regulations adopted early last year in California. Both the CPSC and California requirements are based on scientific research conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as substantial input from mattress manufacturers, their suppliers and the fire safety community. The CPSC states that its standard will substantially reduce the number of deaths and injuries resulting from mattress fires.

The new standard applies to mattresses manufactured domestically as well as imported and renovated mattresses. The rule makes clear that mattress importers have significant compliance obligations. Importers will be required to maintain in the U.

S. test records and other documentation that foreign manufacturers must prepare showing compliance with the new standard. In addition to consistent application of the standards to domestically produced and imported mattresses, key areas addressed include clarifications of the mattress testing requirements, an explicit requirement that renovated mattresses meet the open-flame standard and elimination of the sample retention requirement.

ISPA will continue to work with the CPSC to assure a fair and consistent level of enforcement of the new standard as it becomes effective, according to the association. The new regulation, known as 1633, will require that every mattress set sold in the U.S.

or imported to sell in the U.S. must comply to a 30-minute flame-resistance test similar to one already required of mattresses sold in California.

The regulation takes effect July 1, 2007. Bob Sabalaskey is vice president of manufacturing and project engineering for Lilly Consulting Group, a Saint Charles, IL consultancy formed to help mattress manufacturers comply with the regulation. He said the big difference between the California legislation, which many major manufacturers are already equipped to test, and the federal requirements is the record keeping requirements.

"As far as passing the test, the government standard is no more difficult than California," he said. "In fact, passing the test is probably easier because people have been perfecting it for two years knowing that this regulation was coming. The flame retardant properties of those components are better and the prices are coming down.

The change is in the record keeping and quality assurance requirements. The federal standard requires the record keeping and it requires a prototype that is certified. You don't have to burn each bed but you have to group products into some type of category where you can burn one representative from that category.

" To meet the regulation, each prototype has to be burned three times at a cost of about $700 each time, making the price of certifying a prototype $2100. During the certification test, two burners--one at top and one at the side of the mattress foundation--are lit for 50 seconds before being shut off while the top burners are on for 70 seconds. To qualify, the mattress must not release beyond 200 kilowatts of heat for the next 30 minutes.

According to industry experts, a bed without any flame retardants would have a maximum heat release of 1000 kilowats within three to four minutes before it goes up in flames. The 30 minute rule, the CPSC feels. allows ample time to free the room before the mattress goes up in flames.

"The goal is to minimize the type of flame or the overall kilowatts being released at the start to give people time to get out of the room," Mr. Sebalaskey said. Nonwovens Come Forward For the nonwovens industry, applause over this legislation goes beyond its ability to save human lives.

The flexibility of nonwoven materials allows them to take on flame resistant properties more easily than other competing materials such as wovens or foam. Already, many of the industry's leaders have introduced products boasting antiflammability products aimed at the mattress market. "You are going to see a lot more nonwovens manufacturers making barrier fabrics that go just below the mattress surface that would prevent open flame and heat of open flame to melt and combust the materials inside the mattress," said Steven Ogle, sales director of Leggett & Platt.

Leggett had already been supplying product into the dormitory and prision markets, which have faced similar standards for some time. Servicing the residential market now means larger opportunities but also greater challenges. "The goal in fire resistant standards is to preserve the feel of the fabric while offering protection," Mr.

Ogel said. "This can be achieved with needlepunched densified products, thermally bonded highloft and even spray bonded highloft. Any of those types of bonding methods can be incorporated into a flame retardant barrier.

" The goal for any nonwovens manufacturer, Mr. Ogel added, is to make a product that can withstand the intense open flame, resist thermal transfer and flame exposure without losing tensile strength and prevent the ignition of internal components at a decent price point. Executives at Precision Custom Coatings, the Totowa, NJ-based nonwovens producer, said that targeting mattresses now makes good sense with the new ruling.

"Our data show that there are 29 million mattresses sold in the U.S., of that fireblocker material will be six yards per mattress," said chairman and COO Peter Longo.

"This means there are potentially 180 million yards of material per year going into this market. That is a tremendous opportunity." PCC is able to make and treat flame retardant nonwovens in-house to provide mattress manufacturers with a one-stop shop for their bedding needs.

Meanwhile, Freudenberg Nonwovens has partnered with bedding supplier Hickory Springs Converting to help it open doors in the bedding industry. Hickory Springs, a manufacturer and supplier of mattresses, is handling sales and distribution of Freudenberg's fire retardant bedding materials. "We are not a big supplier in the mattress industry so we thought it would be wise to align ourselves," Mr.

Frasch said. Hickory Springs is handling our sales and distribution because we are not a big supplier in the mattress industry." Manufacturers don't want a whole truckload of fire retardant materials at once.

It's expensive to ship separately so we share deliveries with Hickory Springs." While bedding is a brand new market for flame retardant nonwovens, it is not one without competition. Mr.

Frash said he counted between 15-20 companies showing material for the market at the recent ISPA show and knows of at least another 12 manufacturers who are considering targeting the market. "There's been a lot of competition for quite a long time," Mr. Frassch said.

"In the past two to three years, the designs have improved dramatically in being able to meet the test at an acceptable price point. The prices since we started five years ago have dropped in half, if not more." Western Nonwovens's Tom Taylor said that while the flammability standards have opened doors for new suppliers, only those that are capable of meeting the rigorous scientific and engineering requirements can survive in this market.

"Two years ago, there were 40-something people offering fire retardant solutions; but at this year's big show, there were only 26 companies offering these solutions," he said. "California separated the weak from the strong. Everyone thought it was easy but it's not that easy.

It's a learning process for everyone involved here. Those of us with direct experience know how hard it is to make a complete line of bedding comply. It's a learning experience that has to be dealt with head on.

" Developing tried and true solutions that consistently meet the standard is not an easy task, and Mr. Taylor cautions mattress manufacturers to begin working on compliance immediately. "The labs are going to be strained toward the end of this year," he said.

"And, because of the timeline, you really need to be able to present a compliant product in February." The appeal of nonwovens' in the bedding market is multi-fold. For one, they are transparent on the bed.

A manufacturer can apply nonwovens on the mattress top or in the side panels, and the bed still feels and looks the same as before. Secondly, nonwovens offer the same fill capacity as knots, wovens or foams, so the costs are not higher. Also, nonwovens are very easy to work with.

There are no extra steps added to the fill process. "We can make any bedding design in the world fire retardant, the problem is affordability," Mr. Taylor explained.

In fact, most of the efforts involving flame retardant technology in recent years have centered on driving costs down. During the several years since flammability became a hot topic for nonwovens producers looking to do business in the mattress market, prices of flame retardant nonwovens have fallen dramatically, according to experts, and are now less than half or even 30% of what they were five years ago. Some of this pricing downturn was caused by competition but largely manufacturers have become more intelligent over what needs to be done to achieve the standard.

"Original products were overengineered to make sure they were successful," Mr. Ogel said. "This has been remedied by a reduction in basis weights and a reduction in the amount of expensive thermal resistant fiber.

" Robert McKinnon, CEO of flame retardant fiber supplier Basofil agreed that the affordability factor has been resolved when it comes to flame retardants. "The cost of manufacturing these products has decreased significantly as we have learned more," he said. "In fact, one of the things we have determined is you can blend some great flame retardant fibers with commodity fibers and in the right blend ratios, you can achieve what is required.

" Now that the pricing levels are satisfactory, the next step is to help manufacturers reach compliance, and nonwovens manufacturers are confident their products will do the trick. Scott Tesser, president and CEO of PCC said that working with the many different ways of manufacturing a mattress will be one main challenge. "The challenge is that every mattress manufacturer produces their mattress in a different manner so you have to work with individual manufacturers to come up with a process they can use in their production and understand how they can add their product to the mattress," said Mr.

Tesser. Karen Bitz McIntyre Editor RELATED ARTICLE: The road to regulation: mattress ruling was decades in the making. The road to passing the antiflammability ruling was not a short one.

It began in the early 1970s when evidence suggested that a large number of household fires were started after unattended cigarettes ignited furniture. It was at this time that CPSC first issued a draft standard but action was stalled when a coalition of furniture manufacturers developed a voluntary standard to address the issue. This voluntary standard was deemed acceptable until 1993 when the National Association of State Fire Marshalls petitioned CPSC to develop national standards for upholstered furniture and specifically requested standards that addressed fires caused by smoldering cigarettes.

In 1996, CPSC issued a small open flame draft standard seeking to require upholstered furniture fabrics to be self extinguishing. This draft was criticized for forcing manufacturers to backcoat fabrics with FR chemicals that could cause long term health detriments to consumers in the long term and congress eventually suspended CPSC work on the standards until the National Academy of Sciences could evaluate environmental and health impacts of FR chemicals, measures that stalled the efforts until 2000. Meanwhile, in 2001, the California State Legislature passed a law requiring its Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation develop mattress flammability standards within two years, beginning work on a state-level mattress standard.

Fearing that other states would develop their own flammability standards, members of the furnishing market began thinking that national standards would be far easier to comply with than 50 different state-issued regulations. In 2003, a coalition of furniture and fabric interests approached CPSC supporting national flammability standards as long as they applied to ignitions caused by cigarettes or small open flames and could be met through the use of FR barrier materials.