Sierra Club Green Home

Many associate a sustainable home with solar panels, expensive floor renovations, various purchases of Energy Star appliances, and other costly investments. But greening your home doesn’t have to be costly and time consuming. Even though pricey investments, like going off the grid, can have great ecological and economics benefits, it’s important to accomplish the basics of going green first.

When it is hot you have more to worry about than a high air conditioning bill. The humidity in the air combined with the heat can be a disaster for your health and your home. When it is 100? outside you obviously want to spend time indoors, but with indoor air-quality lower than outside air-quality you need to look at investing in a dehumidifier to help.

You’d think a newborn baby would have a fresh start when it comes to toxic chemicals. But chemicals move across the placenta, so a baby emerges with some of the same pollution in its system as its mother. Tests of umbilical blood have detected chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects as well as those that are toxic to the brain and nervous system…

Yes we know, everything causes cancer, nothing is safe for our kids, a lot of paranoia, right?

Sometimes these concerns are for real. A chemical of significant importance to parents and scientists these days is Bisphenol-A (BPA). BPA is a common chemical used in plastics for increased flexibility and molding.

Was “home sweet home” ever more than wishful thinking? After all, back in the days of yore, people lived in homes that weren’t all that sweet, what with the smoky fire in the middle of house, bugs inhabiting straw pallets, and animals penned up close by. These days, with our scientific know-how and technological marvels, we must have healthy homes, right? Well, yes and no.

When it comes time to paint your walls, step number one is finding a product that won’t emit harmful chemicals in your home. That means paints with the lowest possible emissions of “volatile organic compounds,” or VOCs. Such paints are widely available, and you can learn all about them in our article, “Paints, adhesives, and other finishes.”

How to make your home a healthy place
Smog in urban areas often makes the news. But truth be told, air quality is often much worse inside our homes than outside. That’s because tens of thousands of chemicals, some synthetic and some found in nature, are used to make products commonly found in buildings. Many of these chemicals are benign, some are highly toxic, and most fall in that wide gray area in between.
When it comes to indoor air contamination, the biggest culprit in our homes is VOCs, a large class of chemicals that can evaporate, or offgas, from stuff that’s all around us, like particle board, carpet, paint, cleaning products, and materials treated with stain-resistant and wrinkle-resistant chemicals.

Be it basic Berber or retro shag, carpet feels good underfoot, absorbs sound, and can add color and style to a room. No wonder it covers nearly 70% of the floors in the United States.

But some indoor-air quality experts suggest thinking twice about blanketing your floors with wall-to-wall fibers. Some new carpets emit a host of noxious chemicals that you’ll be breathing for months and even years after they’re installed.