Governments have a duty to protect their citizens. While they won’t go as far as telling us what we can and cannot put in our homes, we do expect them to ensure that the buildings we live in are safe from fire.
The final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry confirms that this was not the case in 2017 when 72 people lost their lives to a fire that engulfed their home in west London.
In 2006, the government permitted the use of combustible insulation foams on high-rise buildings. It was a cheap way to save energy.
But the presence of combustible insulation and cladding panels on the outside of buildings completely circumvents compartmentation. It allows fire to spread from flat to flat around the outside of a building. As fire spreads up and across the walls, it successively ignites the contents of individual flats while filling each flat with toxic smoke.
Inhalation of toxic smoke is one of the primary causes of fire-related deaths. In his introductory statement to the final publication of the Grenfell Tower inquiry report, chairman Martin Moore-Bick said that “all those who died in the building were overcome by toxic gases”.
When certain types of plastics burn, they release hydrogen cyanide as well as carbon monoxide. As the fire grows, it becomes limited by the air supply, and the amount of both toxicants increases by a factor of ten to 50. Some flame retardants, added to the product in order to pass the regulatory test, slow ignition but result in much more toxic, thicker, blacker smoke, even when there is plenty of air. When these products burn without enough air, the toxicity is even greater.