Toxic Household Chemicals

Your house could be filled with one of these six common household toxins—Radon, Ozone, Toxic Dust, Lead, Formaldehyde, and Asbestos—and you might not even realize that they’re there. Fortunately, you don’t have to just sit back and worry. Why not take action and make your home a little cleaner and environmentally friendly.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR HEALTH: These common contaminants are extremely bad for your health, despite being so prevalent. Although these contaminants were at one point considered safe, scientific evidence has advanced enough to document serious side effects for each toxin.

BENEFITS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT: If concentrating chemicals into products is toxic to humans, there’s a good chance that its byproducts are affecting the environment as well. You can dispose of toxic products properly to minimize these harmful influences. And, through your purchasing decisions, you can support healthier and eco-friendly household products.

BENEFITS FOR YOUR WALLET: If you update your home to be more eco-friendly, that will undoubtedly raise the resale value of your home. Buyers like you will want to live in a sustainable, safe home without having to worry about their health or the health of their kids. You can just consider a clean, safe home as an investment in your future.

Cost: Low to High
If you have a new home and only a few things to test, then you’ll only have to pay for a few relatively cheap home testing kits. On the other hand, if you happen to have a lot of contaminants in your home and require a major renovation of your home, you’ll probably be spending a lot of money.

Time and Effort: Low to High
The time and effort you put into this depends on what you find. If you live in a relatively new house, your house should already be relatively free of toxins. On the other hand, if you live in a relatively old house, you might have to do extensive repairs.

Instructions:

1. Radon: Radon is the radioactive byproduct of uranium in the soil. Although it occurs naturally and usually dissipates in contact with open air, it can seep into your house and accumulate inside.¹ Radon gas disintegrates into radioactive particles, which, if inhaled, increases your risk for lung cancer. In fact, it’s the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States.
   • How to Check: One reason why radon is so dangerous is that you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it. Fortunately, you can buy relatively cheap radon testing kits in hardware stores. They take only a few minutes to set up and take sometimes between 2 and 90 days to register radon levels accurately. If it registers more than 4 pCi/L, do a second test to be sure. If it also registers more than 4 pCi/L the second time, you need to take steps to remove the radon.
   • Remove It: Radon can enter your home in many ways: cracks in the wall or floor, building joints, floor gaps, gaps around pipes, wall cavities, and the water supply. Hire a contractor trained to remove radon. Usually, this will mean installing a fan and a vent pipe system that vents the radon outdoors. This can also mean sealing cracks, gaps, any other sources where the radon would likely seep in.
   • Prevention: If you are moving into a new home, buy one of the many new homes on the market that is built to keep out radon. For older homes, ask whether the home has been recently tested for radon.²
2. Ozone: Ozone is naturally found in the Earth’s upper atmosphere,³ but some popular ionizing air cleaners generate ozone in your home. Sellers of these products claim that ozone generators can eliminate common indoor air pollution. According to the EPA, not only is ozone ineffective at this, but ozone is also hazardous to your health.⁴ It can cause asthma attacks, coughing, chest pain, lung damage, and increase your chances of dying from a respiratory illness.⁵
   • How to Check: Although ozone has a distinct odor to some, the EPA does not suggest checking the ozone levels by smell because not everyone can smell it. Instead of checking directly for the presence of ozone, it’s easier simply to eliminate the use of ozone generators, like ionizing air purifiers, in your home.⁶
   • Remove It: Minimize your use of indoor air purifiers, printers, and ink, which can also be an indoor source of ozone pollution. If you can’t eliminate their use, then keep the area around the products ventilated to outside air. To get rid of unavoidable ozone pollution, use other air filters or gas absorbing materials that can filter out air particles such as ozone.
   • Prevention: Do not buy an ozone generator. Instead, if you want to eliminate indoor air pollution, use alternative methods that have actually been proven to work, try opening your windows every now and again!⁷
3. Toxic Dust: Toxic dust is the result of harmful household chemicals contaminating naturally occurring dust. The toxic chemicals come from furniture, apparel, food, appliances, and electronics. A reason that the toxic dust is so hazardous is that the contaminants break down much slower once the toxic chemicals bind into the regular dust in your home. Flame retardants are especially a concern simply because they are ubiquitously found on household products.⁸
   • How to Check: You can test for the presence of flame retardant chemicals by renting an X-Ray Fluorescence detector. Bromine, the active ingredient in most flame retardants, will reflect light at X-ray wavelengths. Technically, if you’re willing to pay the cost and to cut out a 1 square inch sample of your household product, you could also get your product tested in a lab for chemical analysis. However, it is probably much easier and cheaper simply to look up research and testing that has already been performed on the products you own.⁹
   • Remove It: The way to remove toxic dust is the same way that you can remove normal dust. Just clean your house. Vacuum thoroughly and regularly with a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner. Use wet mops and wet cloths to clean flat surfaces and furniture. Caulk and seal cracks where dust accumulates.
   • Prevention: Have people take off their shoes outside the house to prevent them from tracking dust and dirt inside. Replace any products with foam manufactured in the last 30 years if the foam has become exposed or misshapen. Buy electronics from companies that guarantee a lack of PBDEs in their products.¹⁰
4. Lead: Lead is a metal that occurs naturally, but has long been known to be hazardous to our health. Lead can cause damage to or failure of the brain, kidney, blood cells, and central nervous system, as well as death. The most common sources of lead are your drinking water and in paint on the wall. Corroding pipes in your house can create a chemical reaction that contaminates your water with lead. Lead-based paint is not common in new buildings, but was a fairly popular paint source through the 1960s.
   • How to Check: A simple way to avoid lead from corroding pipes is to wait for the water to flow for 15 seconds before using it as drinking water. For a more permanent solution, do a chemical test on your home’s tap water. Call your local health or safety inspector to test your tap water or to test a sample of the lead paint on your house.¹¹
   • Remove It: If your tap water is contaminated with lead, you should probably get your pipes replaced with lead-free materials.¹² Some water filters are also able to filter out lead from your drinking water.¹³ If your paint happens to be lead-based, you may not be able to filter it out. Unfortunately, lead-based paint should probably not be replaced unless it is in bad condition or could be eaten by children. Instead, you can wallpaper over the paint or repaint any area of lead-based paint. For more on water filtration options for your home click here.
   • Prevention: Since most lead-based products are older, you can minimize your own contact with lead by living in houses with newer, non-lead based materials.¹⁴
5. Formaldehyde: Formaldehyde is a chemical used in construction materials, glue, paint, drapes, paper products, and wooden products. Exposure can cause asthma attacks, nausea, vomiting, headaches, and nosebleeds. Long-term exposure is also associated with a higher risk of cancer.
   • How to Check: Usually, the cheapest way to detect formaldehyde is simply to research a specific product and whether it was built or manufactured using formaldehyde. You can also buy home monitoring kits that take 24 hours to evaluate whether formaldehyde is present.
   • Remove It: If the source of the formaldehyde is something you can move out of the house like furniture, then this would be the simplest way of removing the source. However, if the materials of the building itself are the source of formaldehyde, it would probably require an expensive repair job to replace the specific parts with traces of formaldehyde.
   • Prevention: If you’re buying a new house or new appliances, make sure that you’re not buying something with a lot of formaldehyde being used. If a house is old and the seller doesn’t know whether formaldehyde was used or not, you can consult a building inspector to inspect the materials in the house.¹⁵
6. Asbestos: Asbestos is a naturally occurring material in rocks and soil. It is used as a fire retardant and as insulation for buildings, but this practice stopped when asbestos was discovered to be a carcinogen. However, it can still be found on pipes, floors, shingles, and roofs.¹⁶ When a building is being cleaned, repaired, or remodeled, flakes of asbestos fall out and become inhaled by people nearby.
   1. How to Check: Hire a professional with the training and experience to look for asbestos. You shouldn’t try to take a sample or do the repairs on your own, since you will likely not be as skilled in avoiding inhalation of asbestos flakes.
   2. Remove It: Because you do not want it to flake into the air, you will likely just want to keep the asbestos in place. If the asbestos is exposed to the air because repairs need to be done, you should hire a professional to do some asbestos removal.
   3. Prevention: Try to buy homes that were built within the last 20 years. These homes should not have asbestos products. If you want to do any remodeling in a house that might have asbestos, you should contact a contractor skilled in working with asbestos.¹⁷

We hope this guide helps you in making your home toxic-free!