Health Consequences of Engineered Products
We’re in the middle of a green revolution. Houses are built with an eye towards minimal energy uses, with solar panels and spray foam insulation and major advances in both cost and construction speed. What about the energy used to create those products, though? What about the implications of living in one of these homes?
Back in 2012, the United States forced manufacturers to remove plastics containing BPA from water bottles and other food packaging. We came to recognize that this compound, found in innumerous products, wasn’t as safe as we thought it was. Since then we’ve started to pay more attention to the way our food is stored, trying to remove harmful chemicals. After all, we eat several times a day and these chemicals can build up. Do you know what we do a lot more than eat, though? Breathe.
Between sleep, meals, leisure, and chores, you’ll spend more time in your home than you will any other single location. Even if that’s only half your day, it still means you take around 10,000 breaths in your home. The air we breathe carries oxygen to our lungs, but it is also just as able to carry compounds from the materials in our home.
LEED is a 3rd party certification recognizing how green a home is. These certifications have strict requirements, and the amount of energy required to live in the home is part of the standard. However, the way most buildings achieve this status is through the use of a lot of engineered building material. Home wraps, vapor barriers, and super insulation create very efficient homes. But they also create living spaces literally surrounded by plastics and other artificial materials.
We’ve worked on homes that were built with so much attention to insulation, they didn’t create enough airflow and the homes literally molded from the inside out. You can get away with that when your home isn’t made of natural materials, and you might not even know it. The house might be ok with it, but what about our bodies?
Spray foam insulation is more space-efficient than other insulation materials, which is why it’s used so often. This space efficiency means smaller builds, creating less-expensive homes that are faster to construct. LEED certification measures all of these things, but it doesn’t care at all about the way you build a home. You could bring every single nail from a thousand miles away (heck, one at a time) and still have a LEED-certified building. You could set up your own coal-fired power station to run the electricity during the build, and LEED is still an option.
And the finished product could be a toxic nightmare full of off-gassing products, yet still achieve the highest standard because of its energy efficiency on a day to day basis after construction.
I’m not writing this to be alarmist. After all, toxic chemicals exist in everything from our clothing to our mattress. Most of us don’t realize that, though, and that’s the problem. Awareness is the first step to change and, I’d like to see more people come to learn the impact of these seemingly-small choices. Any step in the right direction is a good one. Maybe the next time you replace your carpets you consider 100% woo or hardwood floors. Just as replacing the plastic in our water bottles with BPA-free options didn’t suddenly change the world, changing your floor won’t remove all the toxicity from your life. But it is a step in the right direction, and it’s worth considering.
