Other uses are upholstered furniture, automobile interior textiles, car cushions and insulation blocks in trucks, packaging material, video cassette recorder housing, and electric and electronic equipment.

Because HBCD has 16 possible stereo-isomers with different biological activities, the substance poses a difficult problem for manufacture and regulation.

HBCD has been found widely present in biological samples from remote areas and supporting pieces of evidence for its classification as Persistent, Bioaccumulative, and Toxic (PBT) and undergoes long-range environmental transportation.

[10] The HBCD commercial mixture is composed of three main diastereomers denoted as alpha (α-HBCD), beta (β-HBCD), and gamma (γ-HBCD) with traces of others.

A series of four published in vivo mice studies were conducted between several federal and academic institutions to characterize the toxicokinetic profiles of individual HBCD stereoisomers.

[12] In contrast, α-HBCD is more biologically persistent, resistant to metabolism, bioaccumulates in lipid-rich tissues after a 10-day repeated exposure study, and has a longer biological half-life of up to 21 days; only α-HBCD was detected in the liver, brain, fat and feces with no stereoisomerization to γ-HBCD or β-HBCD and low trace levels of four different hydroxylated metabolites were identified.

[16] A long-term environmental monitoring program run by the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology demonstrates a general trend that HBCD concentrations are decreasing over time.