En van het Fire Safety Science forum kreeg ik net deze informatie:
A number of studies now conclude that RIP cigarettes are of minimal effectiveness. These are also known as Fire Safe Cigarettes and have been legally mandated in all 50 United States, in Canada, and in some parts of Europe.
Two weeks ago, at the Fire & Materials Conference 2013 in San Francisco, CPSC presented a paper on this topic (Shivani Mehta et al., "Reduced Ignition Propensity Cigarettes: Is There a Change in Smoldering Ignition Hazard?") And their key finding was: "there is no statistically significant overall difference between RIP and non-RIP cigarettes propensity to cause smoldering of the tested mattress/pad substrates".
The State of California ran their own test series and Dr. Said Nurbakhsh concluded that: "Yes, CPSCs conclusions were not a surprise to us. We also had done a limited number of experiments with RIP cigarettes that are commercially available and we had made the same observations. Majority of those cigarettes did cause smoldering ignition of furniture mockups, certainly with smolder prone cover fabrics. Also, many RIP cigarettes burned their full length when laid down in an ash tray. It seems like the ASTM standard for testing RIP cigarette using filter papers does not adequately address the smoldering propensity of those cigarettes in real life."
And now, today, the California Conference of Arson Investigators just published a short article with a very similar conclusion, see below. It also bears emphasis that the article cites Seidenberg et al., who concluded that manufacturers, in fact, substantively overfulfill the requirement to have no more than a 25% failure rate and that commercial RIP cigarettes show less than a 10% failure rate, when tested by the ASTM test. This clearly shows the difference between complying with the ASTM test, versus behavior on realistic substrates.