The ADA, SIDS and more
BY JULIE A. PALM
Flammability was on the front burner for the mattress industry, but it was not the only government regulation or product safety issue of the era.
The Americans with Disabilities Act went into effect in 1992. Its provisions were far-reaching, changing the way companies hire and accommodate workers and mandating that businesses be accessible to the disabled.
In addition, the mattress industry thought it would be dealing with sweeping federal ergonomics standards issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2000, but the law was rescinded in early 2001.
View this entire special section as it appears in the print magazine:
Read previous chapters in the 100-year history of ISPA:
The industry also found itself responding to product-safety scares hyped by the media but later found to be without merit. The 1990s began with sensationalized media reports about adverse health effects thought to arise from unidentified emissions coming from new mattresses.
The SPSC’s Indoor Air Quality Testing Task Force asked an outside group to test mattress samples, while analyses by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Monsanto and DuPont showed no evidence of a link, according to a November 1993 article in BedTimes.
The following year, BedTimes reported that the laboratory that “first implicated mattresses in health problems” had been discredited, and the matter quickly faded away. Not long after that dust-up about indoor air quality, British media claimed to find a link between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and crib mattresses—the result of infants breathing off-gasses released when mattresses containing an FR chemical called antimony oxide got wet.
Again, the reports were discredited and later studies found no link between the chemical and SIDS. In each case, ISPA kept the industry informed about the threats, responded forcefully to media reports and provided its member companies with public relations tools and tips for dealing with such scares.
