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 Researchers found potentially carcinogenic levels of toxic chemicals
in the remodeled homes before and after residents moved in. All of
the 30 eco-friendly homes in the study had risky indoor air
concentrations for at least one chemical.
“Even in green buildings, building materials contain chemicals that
we’re concerned about from a health perspective,” said lead author
Robin Dodson, a researcher at Silent Spring Institute in Newton,
Massachusetts.
“We should not only think about the efficiency of the building but
the health of the building,” she said in a phone interview.
The hazards seemed to come both from materials used to renovate the
housing units as well as from occupants’ furnishings and
personal-care products, the study found.
“Synthetic chemicals are ubiquitous in modern life,” said co-author
Gary Adamkiewicz, an environmental health professor at Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
“They’re in new housing, old housing, green housing, conventional
housing and high- and low-income housing,” he said by email.
As reported in Environment International, Dodson, Adamkiewicz and
colleagues collected air and dust samples from 10 renovated units
before occupancy and from 27 units one to nine months after
residents moved in between July 2013 and January 2014.
By testing the homes before and after they were occupied,
investigators were able to trace the presence of nearly 100
chemicals with known or suspected health concerns to the renovation,
the residents or a combination.
Both before and after occupancy, all the tested units had indoor air
concentrations of formaldehyde that exceeded the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s cancer-based screening level.
The researchers expected formaldehyde, which has been associated
with allergy and asthma, might leach out of building materials, and
they found evidence that it did. But because formaldehyde emissions
remained high after occupancy, the research team suspected that
residents also brought formaldehyde in personal-care products.
Researchers also believe that flame retardants, which are suspected
of causing cancer and diminishing male fertility, had been added to
the building insulation.
To their surprise, they found chemicals used in sunscreen, nail
polish and perfumes being emitted from building materials, possibly
because they had been added to paint or floor finishes, Dodson said.
Residents appear to have brought into the renovated homes a number
of health-disturbing chemicals, including antimicrobials, flame
retardants, plastics and fragrances.
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Flame retardant BDE-47, which appeared after residents moved in, has
been banned since 2005. Dodson assumes residents carried the
compound into their homes, possibly in second-hand furniture.
Consumers could improve household air quality by using products free
of fragrance and other seemingly innocuous but harmful ingredients,
Dodson said. But the onus should not be on consumers, she said.
“Why are manufacturers even allowed to use these chemicals in their
products?” she said.
Green building standards should be broadened to prohibit use of
hazardous chemicals, she said.
Tom Lent, policy director of the nonprofit Healthy Building Network
in Berkeley, California, said the study provides important clues
about which hazardous chemicals are being released from building
materials so that green buildings can be constructed to be both
energy-efficient and healthy.
“There does not need to be a conflict,” Lent, who was not involved
with the study, said in an email.
But the conflict between energy-efficient building and the need to
reduce toxic indoor air emissions has existed for 15 years, Asa
Bradman said by email. Bradman, associate director of the Center for
Environmental Research and Children’s Health at the University of
California, Berkeley, was not involved with the study.
Adamkiewicz recently completed another study that suggests green
buildings can be healthy, or at least healthier, he said.
He studied families who moved from old, conventional housing to new,
green public housing units in Boston. The new buildings were
designed to save energy and reduce exposures to indoor pollutants.
In the green units, adults wheezed and coughed less and suffered
fewer headaches, he found, and children missed fewer school days and
had fewer asthma attacks and hospitalizations.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2wZx8zN Environment International, online
September 12, 2017.
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