ISO standard helps prevent fires caused by dropped cigarettes

A moment of distraction or feeling sleepy, and your lighted cigarette comes into contact with your bed or armchair and starts a fire…

To limit the serious risk posed by the inadvertent dropping of a lighted cigarette onto flammable materials such as mattresses or upholstered furniture, ISO has published a performance standard that provides manufacturers and regulators with a common test to identify cigarettes that are less likely to cause fires.

The ISO 12863:2010, Standard test method for assessing the ignition propensity of cigarettes, is applicable to factory-made cigarettes that burn along the length of a tobacco column. The ISO standard is based, with permission from ASTM International, on ASTM International E 2187, Standard Test Method for Measuring the Ignition Strength of Cigarettes.

Cigarettes are at the source of many fatal fires. Burning cigarettes can heat some common textiles and furnishing materials sufficiently strongly to cause smoldering and perhaps eventually flaming combustion. Every year, thousands of people around the world die or are seriously injured as a result, not to mention the considerable material damage. Limiting cigarettes’ ability to ignite furnishings is an important way of reducing fire hazards. The good news is that cigarettes can be designed to lessen the chance of causing a fire when dropped or forgotten. Fire incidence data from New York State (in the U.S.) suggest that cigarettes compliant with their regulation may cut deaths from cigarette-initiated fires by as much as half.

ISO 12863 has also been published as a European Standard (EN ISO 12863) under the Vienna Agreement.

ISO 12863 was developed jointly by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 92, Fire safety, subcommittee SC 1, Fire initiation and growth and ISO/TC 126, Tobacco and tobacco products. More than 100 standards have been developed by ISO to address fire safety issues.

Article & Image Credits: ISOorg