Bevil Wood­ing

To­day's guest colum­nist and in the up­com­ing se­ries on Clean­ing up The mess is ar­chi­tect DAVID FO­JO, who holds a mas­ter's de­gree in en­vi­ron­men­tal de­sign from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. Fo­jo claims that in­door air pol­lu­tion, a silent killer, is rat­ed as be­tween sev­en times and 70 times worse than out­door air pol­lu­tion.

Be­sides the very high ex­po­sure lev­els to EMFs that we are sub­ject­ed to, we are al­so in­de­cent­ly ex­posed to many oth­er tox­ins in our in­door en­vi­ron­ment, es­pe­cial­ly in our air and wa­ter and vi­su­al­ly. With the "ad­vances" of mo­dem build­ing tech­nol­o­gy, healthy fresh air in our homes has un­for­tu­nate­ly be­come a rar­i­ty. Dozens of ma­jor stud­ies have been done on the qual­i­ty of air in mod­ern homes by fair­ly re­li­able or­gan­i­sa­tions such as the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion and the En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. De­pend­ing on which study you read, in­door air pol­lu­tion is rat­ed as be­tween sev­en times and 70 times worse than out­door air pol­lu­tion, which as you know is bad enough to be­gin with.

The qual­i­ty of the air we breathe is as im­por­tant to our health as the qual­i­ty of the food we eat. The av­er­age per­son con­sumes ap­prox­i­mate­ly three pounds of food dai­ly, and breathes in ap­prox­i­mate­ly 33 pounds of air. It is good that peo­ple these days are be­com­ing more aware that they should have fresh, pure food but they should be equal­ly con­cerned with hav­ing fresh, pure air to breathe. In­door air pol­lu­tion is caused by two things, the cre­ation of tox­ic gas­es and par­ti­cles with­in the build­ing, and not tak­ing in enough fresh air from out­side to re­place air that has be­come tox­ic or stale. Many syn­thet­ic ma­te­ri­als such as paints, wall­pa­pers, up­hol­stery, drapes, chip­board and es­pe­cial­ly car­pet­ing, give off tox­ic gas­es. Formalde­hyde is one of the most com­mon fumes en­coun­tered since 50 per cent of all cloth ma­te­r­i­al is treat­ed with it, as well as nu­mer­ous oth­er build­ing ma­te­ri­als.

At last count, there were al­most 100,000 syn­thet­ic chem­i­cals man­u­fac­tured world­wide, many of them used in the pro­duc­tion of build­ing ma­te­ri­als. These chem­i­cals tend to out-gas in­to the in­door en­vi­ron­ment, most­ly dur­ing the first year of in­stal­la­tion, and grad­u­al­ly ta­per­ing off over sev­er­al years. Some car­pet­ing has been found to out-gas slight­ly even af­ter 20 years. Mold and mildew can al­so present health prob­lems in the hu­mid trop­ics, in poor­ly ven­ti­lat­ed homes and in air con­di­tion­ing ducts. You may have read of the many build­ings closed and law­suits as a re­sult of mold and mildew in­fes­ta­tions, which have caused or ex­ac­er­bat­ed asth­ma, al­ler­gic re­ac­tions, dizzi­ness and oth­er symp­toms. Al­so im­pli­cat­ed in caus­ing health prob­lems is the syn­thet­ic dust found in most homes.

Gone are the days of "healthy" dust com­posed of or­gan­ic ma­te­ri­als like earth and par­ti­cles of de­cay­ing leaves that ac­tu­al­ly sup­plied us with mi­cro-nu­tri­ents. These days house dust is com­prised to a large ex­tent of minute par­ti­cles of syn­thet­ic, non-di­gestible cloth ma­te­r­i­al like ray­on and poly­ester. Look at your dust in the sun some­time, and you may no­tice it is mul­ti-coloured, an­oth­er in­ter­est­ing and vi­su­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing "ben­e­fit" of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. These syn­thet­ics stay in the lungs for as long as five to 10 years. As­bestos, which is a proven dead­ly car­cino­gen, stays in the lungs for 20 to 30 years. Even the bal­ance be­tween neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive ions in the air of the mod­ern home has been ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by the use of syn­thet­ic ma­te­ri­als.

Syn­thet­ic ma­te­ri­als at­tract and hold longer, much larg­er sta­t­ic charges than nat­ur­al ma­te­ri­als like cot­ton. The sta­t­ic charge held by syn­thet­ic ma­te­ri­als can be 10,000 volts per me­tre or more. Be­sides af­fect­ing the phys­i­ol­o­gy of those near these ma­te­ri­als this de-ion­izes the air by "suck­ing up" all of the ben­e­fi­cial neg­a­tive ions around, and most of the pos­i­tive ions as well. There is con­sid­er­able ev­i­dence that this makes the air less life-sup­port­ing. All of the above air pol­lu­tants build up in build­ings be­cause of the lack of fresh air sup­plied by most air-con­di­tion­ing sys­tems. The vast ma­jor­i­ty of res­i­den­tial AC sys­tems sup­ply no fresh air at all, and when com­bined with mod­ern well-sealed win­dows can cre­ate in­door air that could al­most be bet­ter de­scribed as chem­i­cal fog, with­out too much ex­ag­ger­a­tion.

To be con­tin­ued...