This is the final installment of a 3-part series about indoor air quality.
Read Part 1, about indoor air quality in schools, here.
Read Part 2, about indoor air quality at home, here.
“With great market power comes great responsibility,” says Mike Schade, director of the Mind the Store program at Toxic-Free Future, a nonprofit in environmental health research and advocacy. Schade has spent years pressuring large retailers to stop selling toxic products and refocus on designing less harmful products instead. “It’s their fundamental responsibility to ensure the products they sell are safe and healthy for consumers, and that they’re not exposing us to harmful products,” he adds.
Indoor air quality is top of mind for parents and caregivers across the globe. U.S. consumers spend 90% of their time indoors at their homes and schools, as well as workplaces, gyms, or places of worship, according to EPA. Poor indoor air quality negatively impacts human health and well-being, and home products and inadequate ventilation—along with the hotter temperatures and higher humidity seen under climate change—also increase the concentration of air pollutants. The World Health Organization estimates 3.8 million people die from illnesses that could be attributed to polluted indoor air—especially from cookstoves and fuel in developing nations—every year.
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Making safer products
Much of the focus at homes and schools is on ways to improve indoor air quality through things like improved ventilation and decreased humidity. These are critical, but advocates like Schade, organizations like Green Science Policy Institute, and design research labs like the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design maintain the problem must also be tackled at its source. Doing so means making products that don’t create indoor air pollution in the first place.
Mind the Store, launched in 2013, focuses on safeguarding the public from exposure to toxic chemicals and plastics commonly found in everyday products. Schade targets retailers like Amazon, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart. Most consumers assume that what’s for sale at these large and well-known retailers—and at stores in general—is inherently safe, that the government assures product safety. But that’s not the case.
“EPA has done a poor job regulating toxic chemicals in consumer products and the built environment,” says Schade. “That’s changing in recent years, but there are more than 85,000 chemicals on the market right now, and EPA has been moving very slowly.”
In the U.S., Schade has specifically worked to ban harmful chemicals that pollute air and dust inside homes, like flame retardants historically added to furniture—armchairs, couches, and mattresses, for example—and electronics, including television sets. The pollutants within flame retardants are not chemically bound to the plastics or other materials they’re traditionally found in, which means they can more easily separate and become airborne, and ultimately cling to household dust that people are exposed to when they breathe, touch, or ingest it.
Green Science Policy Institute, which promotes safer use of chemicals and chemical policies that protect public health, has also done extensive work on flame retardants in furniture and electronics, as well as on chemicals of concern in building materials that can enter indoor air.
Big wins and work still ahead
Schade’s work has found success: Ashley Furniture and Macy’s, two of the nation’s biggest retailers, have voluntarily committed to ban toxic flame retardants. Last year, Best Buy agreed to ban chemicals in television sets. Washington state banned the toxic materials in casings for electronic devices.
“We don’t need to add toxic flame retardants to protect us from fires, and in fact, they make it more toxic and dangerous for firefighters and other first responders,” says Schade.
Mind the Store has also pushed to ban phthalates historically found in flooring or building products, as well as cleaning and personal care products. Airborne phthalates have been measured in indoor environments. In 2015, Home Depot committed to ban phthalates in vinyl flooring, and Shade has used this success and others to push more businesses.
Toxic-Free Future now also distributes a tool that consumers can use: report cards that evaluate the chemical policies, or lack thereof, at major retailers. The next edition will emphasize the need for retailers to not only ban chemicals but also use safe materials in their place. That’s where research done on safer materials at the Healthy Design Lab comes in. The lab offers healthier design strategy guidance on everything from early childhood education materials to indoor paint to textiles to cabinets.
“We not only need retailers to ban dangerous chemicals and materials like phthalates and toxic flame retardants,” says Schade, “but we need to make sure when they restrict one chemical they find a substitute that’s truly safe.”
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