Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he has taken to ensure that flame retardant chemicals from end-life sofas and mattresses are prevented from polluting (a) the air, (b) rivers and (c) oceans.

The Stockholm Convention bans or restricts the use of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that are toxic, persist in the environment, bio-accumulate in humans and animals, and have long-ranging properties. The Convention has banned some chemicals that have historically been used as flame retardants in sofas and mattresses and the UK supported this action. Those bans are in force in the UK.

To prevent POPs entering the environment, the waste industry has a legal requirement to destroy POPs where they are present in waste articles above a threshold limit. We have recently completed a study to better understand the use of two of the most commonly used flame retardants in soft furnishings before they were banned, decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE) and hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD). We will now use this information as a basis on which to work with the waste industry to review management of soft furnishings. This will ensure that articles most likely to contain POPs are destroyed at the end of their life, preventing pollution.