Then there’s green paint, but we’re not talking about paint the color of green peas. We’re talking about green paint that doesn’t give off fumes that smell funny and could make you sick depending on how many other unhealthy chemicals there are in your home.

Healthy Choices for Home Products

You may not realize there are also healthy choices for many of the home products you buy. The EPA considers indoor air quality one of the top health risks in the US. That’s right, the air in your house isn’t healthy because of the products in the house … products used to build your home and products you bring into your home like furniture.

The primary cause of indoor air pollution in our homes are paints, varnishes, cleaning, disinfecting, cosmetic, degreasing, and hobby products that contain Volatile Organic Compounds or VOCs. Exposure to VOCs can cause eye irritation, respiratory problems, nausea and dizziness while long term exposure has been linked to more serious diseases to the liver, kidney, and central nervous system (EPA Introduction to Indoor Air Quality).

Much of the focus on VOCs relates to paint. VOCs were a key component of oil based paint which drove the industry to move to latex based paints, although they too contact lower levels of VOC. Now the green (remember peas) revolution is bringing more focus to healthy paints and home products.

Here is a short list to show you the range of products available with a focus on healthy homes. A great resource for more research is GreenSeal, providing a third party review of company claims to put your mind at ease.

• Healthy paints – you now have several choices including low odor/VOC paints, zero VOC paint and newer, non-toxic or natural paints.
• Building products – are coming on the market rapidly, focusing on energy efficiency and sustainability to lessen the impact on the environment … or consider a log cabin, solar and rain barrels that are more natural.
• Cleaning products – require checking labels but don’t rely on the name or unsupported claims. Consider natural air fresheners, lots of green plants and avoid aerosol products.
• Beauty and health products - mean buying natural soaps, cosmetics, etc for their impact on air quality and don’t forget that what you put on your skin, get’s absorbed into your system.
• Consider organic bedding and other textiles that are natural and contain little or no chemicals.
• Buy sustainable furniture and avoid furniture manufactured with particle board and pressed wood, which contain lots of VOCs.
• Focus on products like flooring where quantity/size is significant. Bamboo flooring is sustainable and other flooring products like vinyl, use recycled content and are VOC free.

Remember when you buy paints and other home products, research your options and find healthy “green” products. Pick any color and enjoy your healthy home!

We take our indoor air quality for granted. We don’t really see indoor air the way we see smog outdoors, so we simply assume the air inside our homes is clean. The reality is the air inside our homes is seldom as clean than the air right outside our front door.

As building codes change to focus on greater energy efficiency, we are reducing the exchange of air flow from inside our home with fresh air from outside our homes. With the drop in air exchange, we need to learn more about the unhealthy things polluting our indoor air. We also need to learn what we can/should do to keep our indoor air cleaner and healthier, i.e. changing furnace filters regularly. Hopefully we’re starting to pay attention to indoor air quality as asthma and other respiratory problems rise.

Healthy Homes, Healthy You

… A Series of Articles by Madeline Flagg, Purely Green Environmental

At rest we take 15 breaths per minute. Each breath is 500 ml, which over the course of a single day equals 10,000 liters or a room approximately 8 by 7 feet. Do you know what is in the air you and your loved ones breathe? Do you realize that some of today’s debilitating ailments come from the air we breathe?

The 1970’s energy crisis brought energy efficient homes. Efficiency came from reducing the loss of warm/cool air from our homes. At the same time it created a virtual soup of indoor pollutants, now trapped inside our homes. These pollutants are compromising our health with a mixture of  germs, odors, particulates, and non-odorous combustion gases like carbon dioxide and radon.

What is Healthy Air?

Most people think air is primarily oxygen. In fact, air on earth is made up of several gases – 78% nitrogen, only 21% oxygen, less than 1% argon, just 0.03% carbon dioxide (CO2) and minute amounts of other gases plus water vapor. Good quality air contains these gases and NO germs. What many of us imagine is the fresh air we see on a beautiful sunny day, and don’t realize how many pollutants our industrial factories put into the air because we can’t see them.

Pollutants that Contaminate the Air We Breathe

Unfortunately we are all subjected to the pollutants disbursed into the atmosphere. These include:

• Soot - a combination of fine solids and aerosols suspended in the air we breathe. This type of pollution comes from factories, auto exhaust, dust storms, construction and agriculture. Our bodies are able to filter out particulates bigger than 10 microns but anything smaller than 10 microns (a human hair is 100 microns) gets inhaled causing damage to our lungs, and some pollutants can even reach our bloodstream. Studies show that people living in hazy cities (versus clean air environments) are more likely to die from lung cancer, heart attacks and respiratory failure.
• Smog - is a kind of air pollution created in the warmer months, by the action of sunlight on a mixture of hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen. Smog occurs in many cities, varying in it’s chemical makeup. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses an Air Quality index to explain air pollution levels. 8 hour average ozone concentrations of 85 to 104 ppbv are considered “unhealthy to sensitive groups”  including senior citizens, children and people with heart and lung conditions like asthma.
  
  Air Now, a cross agency US Government Web Site

Keeping Our Air Clean

Nature has many ways of dealing with the pollutants. Governments around the world play a tremendous role in controlling the release of pollutants into the atmosphere, i.e. the U.S. Clean Air Act. There are also many non-profit groups focusing on ways to promote clean air and search for solutions to global warming such as Clean Air Cool Planet.

Air pollution doesn’t stop when you walk indoors. In fact the problem worsens because we spend 90% of our time indoors and indoor air is 2 to 10 times more polluted than outdoor air. The EPA is focusing on indoor air quality, with a heavy emphasis on our schools where 20% of the US population spend their days and 1 in 5 schools have unsatisfactory indoor air quality.