Get The Facts - Toxic Building materials

GET THE FACTS TOXIC BUILDING MATERIALS

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend a lot of time inside their homes—as much as 90% of their day. During COVID, that number is most assuredly higher, maybe much higher when you consider the lockdowns, the school closures, the home deliveries. In the aftermath, pundits of pop culture are calling home the new safe haven, but how safe are they really? Not so much when you do the research. The stark reality is that given the current inventory of approximately 86,000 chemicals listed as part of the 1979 and amended 1982 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), only a small subset of approximately 200 chemical substances have ever been tested for safety and only 9 have been completely banned from use (five of which were banned before the Act even took effect).

The architectural firm of Perkins & Will puts this in context in the following graphic:

Our homes are an unhealthy—some might even say toxic—stew of chemically-based building materials and finishes and electromagnetic pollution. I’ll discuss the latter in the next flip-page magazine; a discussion on chemicals in the home begins right here.

HOW WE MAKE MATERIAL CHOICES

Sometimes our choices for building materials are dictated by law or code. Two examples: