Killing You Softly - Part III

The Soy Foam Scam.

'Soy based' foam. It sounds like an eco-friendly dream.

"A leap forward in foam technology, conserving increasingly scarce oil resources while substituting more sustainable options," reads one product brochure. Companies and media releases claim that using soy in polyurethane foam production results in fewer greenhouse gas emissions, requires less energy, and could significantly reduce reliance on petroleum. Who wouldn't sleep sounder with such promising news? While these claims contain grains of truth, they are a far cry from the whole truth. So called 'soy foam' is hardly the dreamy green product that manufacturers and suppliers lead people to believe.

As with so many over hyped 'green' claims, it's the things they don't say that matter most.

Not only does the use of soy introduce a number of new concerns - pesticide use, genetically modified crops, and the appropriation of food stocks - companies are using soy as a pretense to continue on with business as usual: a product and manufacturing process that remains completely reliant on the same old bad actors - greenhouse gas spewing petroleum products and a witches brew of carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals.

Sins of omission and exaggeration are nothing new in advertising, but now we have to contend with a more sinister version of the Big Lie, greenwashing. Greenwashing is defined as the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service. Research conducted by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that in a cross section of 2,219 so called ‘green products’, 98% engaged in greenwashing. Consistent with this research, the polyurethane foam and furniture industries don’t disappoint.

For a product marketed as soy or bio-based, ‘soy foam’ contains very little soy. In fact, it is more accurate to call it ‘polyurethane based foam with a touch of soy added for marketing purposes’. For example, a product marketed as “20% soy based” may sound impressive, but what this typically means is that only 20 % of the polyol portion of the foam is derived from soy. Given that polyurethane foam is made by combining two main ingredients—a polyol and an isocyanate—in approximately equal parts, “20% soy based" translates to a mere 10% of the foam’s total volume. In this example the product remains 90% polyurethane foam and by any reasonable measure cannot legitimately be described as ‘based’ on soy.

According to Cargill, a multi-national producer of agricultural and industrial products, including BiOH polyol (the soy portion of soy foam), the soy based portion of so called ‘soy foam’ ranges from a mere 5% up to a theoretical 40% of polyurethane foam formulations. This means that while suppliers may claim that ‘bio foams’ are based on renewable materials such as soy, in reality a whopping 90 to 95%, and sometimes more of the product consists of the same old petro-chemical based brew of toxic chemicals. This is no ‘leap forward in foam technology'.

There really is no such thing as ‘soy based’ foam. It is grossly misleading to describe polyurethane foam with nominal amounts of bio-derived materials as being ‘soy based’. And it’s likely a violation of advertising standards and practices as well as trade law. Given that the overwhelming majority of so called ‘soy based’ foams contain only around 5% soy, the polyurethane foam and furniture industries are deliberatively misleading consumers.

Pretending to offer a ‘soy based’ foam allows these corporations to cloak themselves in a green blanket and masquerade as environmentally responsible corporations when in practice they are not. By highlighting small petroleum savings, they conveniently distract the public from the fact that this product’s manufacture and use continues to threaten human health and poses serious disposal problems. Aside from replacing a small portion of petroleum polyols, the production of polyurethane based foams with soy added continues to rely heavily on ‘the workhorse of the polyurethane foam industry', cancer causing toluene diisocyanate (TDI). So it remains ‘business as usual ‘ for polyurethane manufacturers.

Despite what polyurethane foam and furniture companies imply , soy foam is not biodegradable either. Buried in the footnotes on their website, Cargill quietly acknowledges that, “foams made with BiOH polyols are not more biodegradable than traditional petroleum-based cushioning". Those ever so carefully phrased words are an admission that all polyurethane foams, with or without soy added, simply cannot biodegrade. And so they will languish in our garbage dumps, leach into our water, and find their way into the soft tissue of young children, contaminating and compromising life long after their intended use.

The current marketing of polyurethane foam and furniture made with ‘soy foam’ is merely a page out the tobacco industry’s current ‘greenwashing’ play book. Like a subliminal message, the polyurethane foam and furniture industries are using the soothing words and images of the environmental movement to distract people from the known negative health and environmental impacts of polyurethane foam manufacture, use and disposal.

Cigarettes that are organic (pesticide-free), completely biodegradable, and manufactured using renewables, still cause cancer and countless deaths. Polyurethane foam made with small amounts of soy derived materials still exposes human beings to toxic, carcinogenic materials, still relies on oil production, and still poisons life.

While bio-based technologies may offer promise for creating greener, cradle-to-cradle materials, tonight the only people sitting pretty or sleeping well on polyurethane foam that contains soy are the senior executives and shareholders of the companies benefiting from its sale. As for the rest of humankind and all the living things over which we have stewardship, we’ve been soy scammed!
Len Laycock