Get The Facts - Indoor Air Quality & Toxic Building Materials

choices with unfortunately little information on externalities or life-cycle costs or specific information on which of the choices before us are healthier or safer. So my advice to you if you plan to renovate or build healthy on your own, is to be vigilant about checking and corroborating manufacturer claims and use the resources I am about to give to choose the healthiest, most durable, most affordable natural material options that fit you and your lifestyle. I can tell you first hand that making these choices requires a lot of homework and usually fraught with some very hard tradeoffs, especially if one broadens my healthy home perspective beyond you and your home to also include the health of our planet. I have found a decision making framework that beautifully guides one through this process, sourced from a group I have known for years. The group goes by the name BuildingGreen out of Brattleboro, Vermont and their framework for selecting better, healthier, and more environmentally-responsible building products is known as “The 12 Product Rules,” and I link to them here: To show you how difficult some of the tradeoffs can be, take the case of simple drywall, otherwise known as gypsum board. Gypsum, if you did not know, is a natural product mined from the earth or it can be synthetically made from treated waste gathered at coal-fired power plants. Which is the better source for gypsum? Mining it naturally seems like an obvious choice, but mining gypsum has its own environmental concerns. On the other hand, manufacturing it synthetically actually creates recycled content that diverts wastes from landfills. But that too has its own problems as the process to manufacture it can introduce mercury into the environment. Hence it is not clear which approach is better. TRADE-OFFS

My approach is to use a different wallboard that avoids using gypsum altogether.

BUILDING MATERIAL RESOURCES

There are various sources of information you can tap into if you want to learn about the chemicals used in modern America and the increasing list of healthier building materials that avoid using them. Sources that provide information on toxic chemicals and the relative health of various building materials include: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the Healthy Building Network (HBN) and its cousin HomeFree. Other groups include the mindful MATERIALS Collaborative and private groups and subscription services like BuildingGreen, Pharos, and a European concern called Friendly