What materials are sustainable and healthy?

Which common materials are unhealthy and not sustainable? As we learn more about the environment we are learning more about the do's and don'ts of materials, energy consumption and resource depletion.

What are healthy and sustainable design materials and how can we identify them? Where is it most important for us to use these materials and how do we know that we are doing the right thing? Why are the decisions and choices we make important to our personal wellness and to the sustainability of our lives?

The most important materials for our own personal health involve what we surround ourselves with. Another important consideration includes how much time we spend in contact with these specific surroundings and the activities that we are involved in.

Some Examples of Living with Healthy Materials

So let's go to your bedroom together and have a little look around. We all spend several hours of each day asleep and in a vulnerable state. Now close your eyes and imagine breathing for all your sleep filled hours, every day, month and year. Is this air that you are taking in each night healthy or harmful air? This makes where you sleep, and the materials surrounding you in the bedroom, a key place to start analyzing and possibly remediating your home through healthy design choices.

Fresh clean air taken in during sleep promotes better rest and rejuvenation and creates better health. Polluted air can lead to all manners of chronic ailments, the most prevalent and growing related ailment being asthma. So how do you get to be able to sleep with clean air? Must we all move to Loreto or another pristine wilderness environment? Obviously the ambient air quality outside your home determines part of what we eventually breathe and choosing to live in a clean air environment is a wise choice.

However, no matter how clean the ambient air is, if we have no ventilation in a room with petrochemical based flooring such as carpet, laid over an off-gassing underlay, on plywood floors made with formaldehyde based solvents and glues, then we will not be breathing in very healthy air, all night long. It may sound scary, and it is, but even more frightening is the fact that this is a description of a very typical contemporary carpeted bedroom. And these are the potentially harmful materials in the floor only. These materials off-gas VOC's (volatile organic compounds) which tend to 'drift up' from the floor system, then inhaled while you sleep.

Healthy and sustainable bedroom flooring options include natural stone and ceramic tile, which we are using at Loreto, because there are no VOC's in these materials. Hard surface flooring in bedrooms also reduces dust and bacteria build-up which can occur with carpet. Other healthy bedroom floor choices include forestry certified hardwood floors from renewable sources and rapidly renewable sources such as bamboo with an 'eco' finish. 'Marmoleum' is a sustainable, resilient alternative to vinyl flooring, made from ground cork, mineral pigments and natural linseed oil. An option for people who like the warmth of carpet for bedroom floors in cooler climates is natural fiber carpet and area rugs made from wool, or sisal or even woven seagrass on a felt underpad or without underlay. Carpet in bedrooms should be combined with filtered ventilation and regular cleaning.

Fabrics

Fabrics can have a dramatic visual effect in design schemes and also in the health of interiors. Fabrics also can make up a large portion of the materials found in interiors. Color, material, texture and quality when properly balanced, give ambiance and mood to a space. Natural fabrics tend to be healthier in terms of off-gassing VOC's. Some natural fabrics can be more susceptible to molds and mildew in damp locations however. Healthy material guidelines stress natural fabrics in spaces such as bedrooms where we spend a great amount of time breathing in what should be healthy air, possibly with our noses buried in fabric. On a sun-porch where mildew may be a greater concern than indoors, but where ventilation is natural and constant, man made fabrics resistant to microbial effects may be acceptable. However a product such as woven sea-grass for sunroom seating is natural, sustainable and healthy.

New cars smell, and some people like that smell, primarily because of their association with all things new, but that smell can be a warning that we are in-taking VOC's and may be breathing in things which would be better for us to avoid. That same 'new car' smell is found in some new carpet and furnishings. A rule of thumb for VOC's is that less smell is usually safer. Fabrics and products that smell like new cars are probably giving off Volatile Organic Compounds usually referred to as VOC's. These large organic molecules may be difficult to eliminate from our systems once they are taken in or ingested and some are quite toxic to the human system.

Beds, bedding, mattresses and all the fabrics and finishes in bedrooms, particularly children's bedrooms are a prime area for healthy design decisions. Asleep we breathe into our lungs all night, either safe fresh air, or in a 'sick' house we may be breathing, VOC's, dust, allergens and pollutants.

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