Bad air day? Stay outside

The air inside a home can be 20 times more polluted than outside, reports Guy Allenby
15apr06

THERE'S nothing quite like the sight of a colossal grey smudge of smog ringing the city to make us want to head for the hills (or a quiet beach) somewhere.

There's only one fundamental problem: move to the Blue Mountains, Mooloolooba or Byron Bay and you'll be taking the foul air with you.

And that's because the air inside the average Australian home is between three and 20 times more polluted than outside. Or as the World Health Organisation puts it: "a pollutant released indoors is 1000 more times likely to reach a person's lungs than a pollutant released outdoors."

Meanwhile, we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors and we continue to think of pollution being "out there" (and only really bad when we can see it in the air) when it is, in fact, far worse inside our schools, our workplaces and our homes.

Apparently, if you were to take the indoor air in a typical home in winter - at least one with gas heating and cooking - and expand that air outside you wouldn't be able to see a kilometre.

You couldn't see the Harbour Bridge from North Sydney in other words - and that's just the indoor pollution you can see.

What's worse though is that there are dangerous (and invisible) pollutants indoors that are contributing to what is an ongoing a multi-billion-dollar health crisis.

Figures from the CSIRO in 1998 said unhealthy indoor air quality costs the Australian community $12 billion annually in illness and lost productivity.

Since then there's been no new figures on the magnitude of the problem in this country, says Jo Immig, and although there has been "a little bit of movement in the area", indoor pollution remains an immense problem that is as yet to be tackled head-on.

Immig is an applied scientist and the co-ordinator of the National Toxics Network, a community-based network that works for pollution reduction and protection of environmental health.

She says the bulk of toxic emissions we are exposed to everyday indoors come from our buildings themselves.
More pointedly though the "critical times" for exposure are when we move into new homes or renovate "because you are introducing a big load of chemicals that are embodied in the new materials which off-gas into the indoor space", she says.

And the big culprits include soft furnishings, vinyl floors, cabinetry, floor varnishes and paints that all emit a dangerous cocktail of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Pressed wood kitchen cabinets, some furniture and flooring is packed with toxic glues and formaldehyde. Vinyl floors contain toxic glues, carpets and the glues they are fixed with can also give off volatile chemicals (they also soak up pesticides, solvents and lead dust). Hard floors meanwhile can be a problem if they're finished with polyurethane floor varnishes, which contain chemicals that have been linked to liver, heart and brain damage, birth defects and low birth weight.

As for water-based paints, it's now widely accepted by both scientists and consumers as less toxic than their oil-based equivalents, but their long-term effects still aren't clear.

That said the link between toxins and health problems are now well established and VOCs have been linked to everything from cancer to heart disease, chronic fatigue syndrome to arthritis, not to mention respiratory diseases and asthma and allergies.

But it's not all grim news.

The good news is that while not so long ago there weren't many widely available or competitively priced alternatives to the products that emit the dangerous VOCs, there are now often healthy alternatives readily available if you're prepared to hunt them down.

The problem however, says Immig, is that new problems continue to be discovered, the most worrying of these being brominated flame retardants (anti-fire agents) "which are in practically everything particularly electrical equipment -- computers, TVs".

These fire retardants aren't released into the air but "dislodge and have been found in high levels in dust samples. They are bio-accumulative and they have been found in breast milk samples, she adds.

A study, published by the Environment Protection Council of Australia and New Zealand last year, showed that brominated fire retardants in local women's breast milk was five times that in Europe and Japan.

Brominated fire retardants have been linked to the disruption of thyroid hormones, cancer and reproductive damage - and you can bet we're going to be hearing more about the implications of using them in the coming years, she says.
Products that contain a couple of types of brominated fire retardants have already been banned in European countries, while Australia continues to import them.

"We need to broaden our approach to pollution indoors," says Immig, adding that the problem is really one of both indoor air quality and contaminated dust in our homes. "The biggest problem is the mixture of chemicals we have inside. I think it's the cocktail effect that is the real problem."
 
                            
                                                      Pure Air Control Services
                                                          1-800-422-7873