Standards for the fire hazard of clothing: The Australian experience

Abstract

The Australian Children's Nightwear Standards have been accepted as the basis of legislation in all States of Australia and by the Commonwealth Government. The standards are based on the philosophy that garment design as well as combustion characteristics of the material is an important consideration in assessing the fire hazard of nightwear. Using this approach a classification system has been devised which places children's nightwear into three categories of potential fire hazard. If a garment cannot be classified then it cannot be legally sold in Australia.The combustion characteristics tested are ease of ignition, rate of flame propagation and surface burn properties. For classification all materials used for children's nightwear must pass the latter test. The design of the standard test methods, criteria for classification and the concepts of safe design were developed by collecting data from burns accidents and burnt clothing from accident victims from the burns research unit of a large children's hospital and by the study of the burning behaviour of clothing on a manikin. The combustion criteria are not so stringent as to require the use of inherently flame resist materials or the use of flame retardant finishes. This approach in combination with the safe design criteria enable commercially available textiles to meet the legislative requirements for children's nightwear. This means that the nightwear standards are inexpensive to attain and do not require a sophisticated textile technology. A consumer labelling system has been designed to describe the three categories but as yet there is no evidence to suggest that this has had any effect in reducing the number of burns accidentsconsumers apparently regarding safe nightwear as a low priority. An inconsistent aspect of the classification system is the incorporation into the standards in 1977 of criteria to prevent the classification of cotton flannelette nightdresses and the incorporation of arbitrary requirements for other nightdresses containing cotton. These inconsistencies have been caused fundamentally by a problem which continues to bedevil the writing of good standards in Australia-that is, the lack of nationwide statistics on bums accidents.