Children’s Furniture: Quality and Safety

CHILDREN’S FURNITURE: QUALITY AND SAFETY

Industrias Químicas Iris offers quality and safety in the home. In fact, everything in our home must follow a regulated manufacturing standards to offer these two aspects. Of course, within the furniture, the one related to children, is a sector with very specific characteristics that provide the protection and resistance that our kids need. This is extensible to toy stores, school furniture, special centers, etc.

Children’s furniture must meet a series of efficiency and safety criteria, but we must also ensure that it is as practical as possible. We must bear in mind that children tend to experiment with their environment through their mouths in the first place: they try and bite everything they are able to “catch” with their little hands: toys, furniture, etc. …. it is of vital importance to protect them with a composition free of heavy metals, as well as a resistant and well-designed structure.

We find that this fragment of the furniture sector uses color, pigments, in a more remarkable way. Precisely these pigments provided heavy metals in addition to color. With the creation of pigment alternatives free of these negative agents, we achieved our objectives of a clean, resistant and excellent quality product.

Any of our ACRYLIC base coats and finishes will provide resistance, physical-chemical, safety, since they do not contain heavy metals and zero emissions of fragrances or odors that could cause harm to any user.

In this company we firmly follow the safety criteria updating parameters according to regulations such as the one we are dealing with in this case: UNE-EN 71-3.

UNE-EN 71-3

The standard specifies the test methods to verify compliance with the requirements for the migration of certain elements based on the categories of the materials that make up the toy:

• Category I: dry, brittle, powdered materials or with malleable material; e.g. chalk, plasticine.
• Category II: liquid or sticky materials; e.g. bubble solution, liquid paints, glue sticks, slime.
• Category III: scratched materials; e.g. plastics, paint coatings, textiles.

EN 71-3 The scope of the amended standard remains basically unchanged and reflects the scope of the directive in this respect: “These limit values shall not apply to toys or components of toys which, due to their accessibility, function, volume or mass, clearly exclude any hazard resulting from sucking, licking, swallowing or prolonged contact with the skin”. This applies therefore to parts of toys that are intended to be put in the mouth, to toy cosmetics and to writing tools such as pens and crayons as these are likely to lead to ingestion of toy materials regardless of the age of the child. (Fte.: Intertek)

Facts to note:

• Standards applied in the toy industry to ensure the safety of children. Ideal for manufacturers of children’s furniture.
• Simple process based on 1 coat of primer and 1 coat of topcoat.
• Polyurethane products (primer and topcoat) with great general features, competitive with the rest of the ranges in the market.
• High coverage, pigmentation and sag resistance.
• Range of different gloss finishes, with a wide range of satin and/or matt finishes to give the perfect touch to the piece.
• Possibility of adapting reagents according to the needs.
• Application with aerographic, airless, airmix and electrostatic spray guns. Also applicable to curtain coats.
• The system is anti-yellowing, therefore, it does not degrade its tone with exposure to sunlight.

Naturally, all these measures are applicable to children’s toys and other areas, so Industrias Químicas Iris products reach an infinite number of markets: with quality, with safety.

We take the safety of our children very seriously, compliance with regulations creates safe environments for which we take our self-demanding standards even further.