The Burn Test

What's left of my very favorite old spatula.

That isn't exactly ash, it's little scorched bits of plastic that flew into all the cobwebs in my kitchen (there were a lot) and revealed the hideous truth about my kitchen's hidden filth.


Back when I was in design school and was baking birds that I wouldn't eat, crushing on the hawk nosed Florentine who equated me with the millions of ancient Italian Angelina's on his home planet, and was smoking at least two packs of cigarettes in a day I had the pleasure of taking a textiles class.  In the class we had to build a swatch book of all the types of fabrics we would be expected to be familiar with in the industry such as: bucle, raw silk, double knit, poplin, pique, etc.  For this project we had to march ourselves down the street to one of the most revered fabric wonderlands in the United States: Britex Fabrics. 

Trying to coax the salespeople at Britex to slice you off a minute sliver of $60 per/yard worsted is like trying to convince a miser to give you a pot of gold.  The main issue was that the staff at Britex had, many years earlier, cottoned on to the fact that fashion design students are just as poor as other students and if you see them coming you can almost bet your life that they are not going to purchase any $60 a yard worsted and are almost certainly coming to get swatches from you.  As a student you approached Britex with your thick skin in place because not only could the staff identify your student-ness before you got through the door (even if you cleverly left your tell tale "FIDM" student bag at home) but they were prepared to make you feel like a tiny little scab.

The teacher of the textile class must have known about the war between the Britex staff and the fashion design students and made this assignment just for a bit of malicious fun.  We could have gone to the many discount fabric stores in the city but it could take months to find a little bolt of real cotton voile.  So we engaged in the quiet war.

Another part of this class, and the part that I was thinking about yesterday when I set my kitchen on fire, was learning how to figure out the fiber content in fabrics whose origin and make aren't labeled.  You can sometimes tell by the feel of it- raw silk is hard to imitate well but better than touching the fabrics, the surest way to know what a fabric is made of is to burn some of it.

The burn test can tell you quite a lot if you study it closely.  I can't tell you the particulars because it's been twenty years and my textbook is long gone.  The main point is that if you light a match to the edge of a piece of fabric and it curls or melts in any way the fiber is at least partly synthetic.  I remember being impressed with the unnatural quality to a piece of fabric being able to MELT.  Silk, cotton, and wool all burn cleanly.  If you're an expert you can figure out which is which by how quickly they burn and how hot they burn and how they smell.

The teacher brought in little jars of polyester for us to touch.  Polyester is an incredibly creepy product.  It's plastic, basically, that is turned into fibers and woven.  Before being turned into fabric it's nothing more than colorful hard plastic chips.  To this day I regret missing out on the polyester exhibit at some museum downtown. 

Even though I was already wore mostly natural fibers, I had to ask myself why anyone who liked themselves even a little bit would wear something so inhospitable to skin.  To this day every time I see labels with polyester or nylon in them I see in my mind the "fibers" melting into human skin.

It is easy to think of plastic as an inert harmless product.  It's everywhere.  Even people who routinely choose glass, or wood, or metal when they have a choice are still surrounded by it.  But plastic is a dangerous and toxic material to have in this world and nothing will convince you of this faster than setting a chunk of it on fire in your home.  Where all your stuff is.  Where you are supposedly safely breathing clean air while you sleep.  Burn it and you will be treated the most insanely noxious smell and little bits of burnt plastic will coat everything you own.  Black acrid smoke will touch you and you will want to vomit.  Wood fires are benign- the smoke might sting your eyes and it will certainly leave it's calling card on your clothes but most people agree that the scent is pleasant and natural and reminds them of the woods and home and warmth and fun. 

I spent most of my afternoon trying to clean my kitchen free of the obviously heinous black particles of charred plastic.  I opened every single door and window in my house.  I immediately thought of needing to move because once you smell something that bad you will never feel clean again.  The thought of my child entering such a toxic atmosphere made me hurt a little in my gut. 

Plastic is not inert and it becomes dangerous and a serious pollutant when burned.  I was remembering how we were choosing new kitchen tiles for our kitchen in Santa Rosa and the contractor we were working with was discussing our choices.  I always loved that industrial vinyl tile that school cafeterias use.  (Vinyl composite).  They come in colorful choices and fit a vintage kitchen superbly well.  The other choice that could give the same colorful vintage feel is Marmoleum, which is made of natural (linseed oil, cork, tree resin, and limestone) so we wanted to use the natural choice.  The only problem was that it was 4 times as expensive as the vinyl composite.  We couldn't afford the Marmoleum which was an even more painful realization when the contractor mentioned that a downside to vinyl composite is that if it catches on fire it is highly toxic and a serious pollutant.

We were redoing our floors after having to move out of our house after our attic burnt in a fire.  So we gave this some serious thought.  If you've never had your house catch on fire you might not think so hard about it.  In the end we chose the vinyl because it was the best choice we could afford.

It did bother me that I chose to install something in my own house that could potentially make the air in my town more polluted if it should ever burn.  Houses often burn.  How often do we choose to use things that burn more cleanly and are healthier to live with in our homes?  Next time I will wait until I can afford the Marmoleum.

I'm thinking about this a lot right now.  I have wanted to get glass food storage containers for my fridge for a few years but the initial cost is so much higher than it is for plastic.  Most of the glass storage containers have plastic lids and once the lids are shot they aren't so great.  What's the solution?