Question from PT

I want to have cushion encasements made for my sofa out of organic cotton barrier cloth. Do you know if this will be effective to keep the toxic chemicals from escaping, ie., flame retardants? Is there a specific pore size or would all cotton barrier fabric be effective? Also, I want to encase my memory foam mattress in the Magnolia organic cotton barrier mattress cover, www.magnoliaorganics.com. Would this also be effective to keep toxins from escaping? I was originally going to use polyethelene sheeting but was not sure how this would work since cushions & matresses need air to circulate in and out of the cushions when someone sits down & gets up. I would much prefer the fabric if it would work.

Thank you,

PT

Debra’s Answer

This is a very good question!

Barrier cloth has been around for years and has been used by many people with MCS to “block chemical fumes.”

I personally, however, have been reluctant to recommend it for this purpose because it didn’t seem to me to really be a barrier.

Barrier cloth is a tightly woven fabric that has very small spaces between the threads. The spaces between the threads vary from 4-6 microns depending on the thickness of the threads and how tightly they are pulled together. The thread count is generally 240 threads per inch or more, but it’s not the thread count that is important, it’s the micron size of the space between them.

A “micron” is an abbreviated term for “micrometer”, or a millionth of a meter (1/1,000,000 meters). This is about .00004 inches. Typically dust is in the range of 3-100 microns, so that would easily be blocked by barrier cloth, but pesticides at 0.001 microns would go right through.

To thoroughly answer your question, I called www.janices.com, who has been selling barrier cloth to people with MCS for more than 20 years. And I asked “What do you say about your barrier cloth to make an accurate statement about it’s ability to block toxic chemicals?”