Mattress Forum

I notice that TempurPedic skirts the question of what exactly is offgassing in their mattresses when consumers complain about the smell. 

Do you know what that is that is offgassing?

I have been having an eye-watering problem for about 4 months and it's definitely coming from the bedroom, as it only happens when I lay down in there, and it happens almost immediately. I THINK it's dust mites, but not sure. I wonder if it could be my memory foam pillow or ?? latex or ??

I do have my pillow in an allergy-proof dust mite proof cover, but I assume if it was from memory foam off-gassing, it would go through the cover, no?

Vulcanization process usually involves addition of sulfur to cross link rubber polymers.   I think they also treat raw latex with ammonia to prevent polymerization during shipping.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanization

That said, I would purchase natural or even synthetic latex over PU foam.  

I personally don't have concerns with the prossesing of latex. The vulcanization chemicals used don't gas off, absorb into your skin or cause cancer. There's no comparison to the damaging long term bioaccumulative effects of BDBE's common in polyurethane foams. 

Nice to know - after you dump that PU foam mattress in the land fill, you and future generations will all be consuming water, fish, hamburger, cheese, etc, contaminated with BDBE's.

Latex rubber is naturally fire retardant & does not require addition of "chemical additives" to pass flamability regulations.

Unfortunately no I do not.  But I do have a pretty good idea of what these chemicals are. Various VOC's and PBDE's.  Its the same kind of chemicals that Oeko-Tex and Eco Institute test for.  But basically in the industry with these types of products companies must volunteer them to be tested and pay for the certification.  If they don't have certification its for a variety of different reasons.

1. Perhaps they know ahead of time that their product has no chance to pass these tests so don't subject them to the scrutiny anyway.

2. They paid for testing and did not pass.

3. They are making products that are not made to appeal to the still (surprisingly) small number of people that want to be free of these chemicals.

Even if a company recieves certification it is up to them if they wish to publicize the exact results of the testing. Eco institute has a very strict standard on these materials, basically if you put a piece of foam in an air tight chamber for a week and they test the air quality, they allow for total VOC content to be in the range of just a few milligrams.  In the detailed list they will show over 100 different chemicals they test for and the individual tolerance levels for most of these is measured in the micro gram scale per cubic meter of volume (the approximate size of an average queen mattress). 

Diane

Yeah I spent the night on my parents Tempur in their guest room and my eyes also watered up quite a bit, throat also got dry and irritable.  The wierd thing for me is that I have never considered myself hyper sensitive to these kinds of things.

I had just assumed it was dust mites, but now I am suspecting the memory foam pillow. I have been having EXTREMELY watery eyes in my bedroom for several months, but since I am allergic to dust mites and we do not have allergy covers around our mattresses for various reasons, I figured dust mites were the culprits. They may still be, but first I'm going to try switching to another pillow. Even though I do have a dust-mite proof pillow cover, I bet those fumes could get through it. Also my wife is using a layer of Ostock fake Venus memory foam in her bed right next to mine, so that could be it, too, but I'm more inclined to suspect my pillow.

The weird thing is, this happened a few months ago and I thought I had an eye infection or eye allergy so I have tried about 5 different kinds of eye drops with no success. I cleaned the room very thorougly a couple months ago and that did not help either.

Well, I'll let you know if changing my pillow helps.

What kind of pillow is less likely to affect my allergies? Just a regular dacron type?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyurethane

Polyurethane foam (including foam rubber) is often made by adding small amounts of volatile materials, so-called blowing agents, to the reaction mixture. These simple volatile chemicals yield important performance characteristics, primarily thermal insulation.

By the late 1990s, the use of blowing agents such as carbon dioxide, pentane, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane (HFC-134a) and 1,1,1,3,3-pentafluoropropane (HFC-245fa) became more widespread in North America and the EU, although chlorinated blowing agents remained in use in many developing countries.[3]

To answer the question more fully,  offgassing could include: volitile blowing agents which are used whip the plastic into a foam, left over catalyst, surfactants, and small amounts of unreacted monomers.

So....Why are we hearing complaints of people with watery eyes and/or stuffy nose ???

The Small amounts of unreacted toluene diisocyanate (monomer), which share some properties with known lachrymators (tear gas). But this would also be much less volitle than common lachrymators.

I noticed based on other posts that you are probably not in the mattress industry...are you a chemist or something?