Who knew the U.S. government, while clearly advising the public of the dangers of smoking, has also solicited bids for a specially designed cigarette that’s not available for sale to the general public?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has commissioned and released a new supply of cigarettes used as an ignition source to measure the flammability of soft furnishings, such as mattresses and upholstered furniture.
You won’t find it on the shelves of a convenience store, but Standard Reference Material 1196a — or SRM 1196a — is now available from NIST, for companies that want to ensure their products meet government flammability safety standards.
But, why does the government need to make its own cigarettes?
“You want something that, when you run a test, every test performs the same way, day in, day out, week in, week out, year to year,” said Rick Davis, leader of the Flammability Reduction Group Engineering Laboratory of NIST, in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Commercial cigarettes don’t work well for testing for several reasons, Davis said.
“Cigarettes are designed for pleasure, for smoking,” Davis said. “Commercial cigarettes are much weaker in terms of ignition strength; as a result of state regulations, they are required to self-extinguish when they’re not being smoked.”
SRM 1196a’s predecessor, SRM 1196, came out in 2010. “We thought we had about 10 years worth of supply,” Davis said.
But companies have burned through most of NIST’s supply in only eight years, because of increased interest in meeting fire safety standards.
Davis said the government put out a request to duplicate the SRM 1196 but got no bids for four years. No cigarette companies were interested in producing this kind of cigarette, because of how different they are from the cigarettes they usually make.
“It seems trivial, but making a cigarette that doesn’t have a filter required a significant change to the equipment,” Davis said.
Why not just go back to the company that made SRM 1196? Davis said NIST did, but not surprisingly, the company wasn’t interested in stopping production of its core product.
“If you liked a 1965 car, and in 2000, you go to a manufacturer and say, ‘I want that 1965 car,’ they can’t make it anymore. They’ll tell you, ‘We don’t have those kinds of materials, the tools, and we don’t design things that way.'”
Public records from the Federal Procurement Data System shows the $528,600 contract was awarded to the Flatwater Solutions Company. A subsidiary, Ho-Chunk, owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, produced SRM 1196a.
“They look like a normal cigarette you would find in the ’70s and ’80s, nonfiltered, same diameter, white paper,” said Davis. “We store them in a freezer, in packs, in cartons, just like a normal cigarette would be.”
Companies can order the standard cigarettes from NIST. With 20 cigarettes per pack, and 10 packs in a carton, NIST sells two cartons per unit, for $400.
Davis said the shelf life of the cigarettes is long: “We know that 1196, after 11 years, is still performing the same.”
