60 Minutes - Lumber Liquidators - Formaldehyde

[Steve Clarkson]

Just watched an interesting episode of 60 Minutes about Lumber Liquidators.......basically the company is accused of buying their laminate flooring from factories in China that purposely mislabel the product as being compliant with the California standards for formaldehyde when in reality it emits the toxic gas in excess of 100 times the CA standard.

Apparently, Formaldehyde is a common ingredient in the glue that is used when manufacturing the laminate flooring (FYI - Formaldehyde is also a known off gas of delrin).

I wonder if anyone has developed a Formaldehyde detector that I could attach to my laser to see how much is really coming off that wood I'm cutting.......

[Rich Harman]

I wonder if anyone has developed a Formaldehyde detector that I could attach to my laser to see how much is really coming off that wood I'm cutting.......

Google "Formaldehyde sensor", lots of hits.

[Don Corbeil]

That was a very unfavorable piece on Lumber Liquidators.

[Bill George]

Also illustrating that UL and the rest of the labeled products from China, is just that... a label. No standards met, just the label.

[AL Ursich]

China Drywall.... another interesting topic....

"we don't need no stinkin rules..."

[Mike Null]

I got the feeling that LL was complicit in this matter so I wouldn't lay it all on the Chinese.

On the other hand when we were sourcing microwave ovens out of Korea we found that we could not trust the Koreans to stick to the specs. Our competitors had found the same and placed an engineer on scene. We ended up sourcing ours through our competitor just to be sure we were getting what we paid for.

[Steve Clarkson]

I agree that the Chinese can't be trusted.......which makes me wonder how safe some of the things we are cutting are.....even if the label says it is "safe".

I also didn't realize that Formaldehyde was a key ingredient in cheap glue.