What You Should Know about Exposure to Toxins
Children are uniquely vulnerable to environmental exposure. Their immature, developing organs are less able to cope with toxins in the environment than those of adults.
The air aintake of a resting infant is twice that of an adult. With all the best intentions, many parents buy new furnishings and decorations that release unhealthy fumes into the air. These fumes are especially unhealthy for babies and children.
Indoor air pollution is considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be one of the top three health concerns in the United States. Read more about indoor air pollution.
Public health experts warn that the industrial chemicals we come into contact with every day are accumulating in our bodies and endangering our health in ways we have yet to understand.
"We are the humans in a dangerous and unnatural experiment in the United States, and I think it's unconscionable," said Dr. Leo Trasande, assistant director of the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
According to Dr. Trasande, industrial toxins could be leading to more childhood disease and disorders. "We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today," he said. "Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can't be explained by changes in the human genome. So what has changed? All the chemicals we're being exposed to." Dr. Trasande says that children up to six years old are most at risk because their vital organs and immune system are still developing and because they depend more heavily on their environments than adults do. "Pound for pound, they eat more food, they drink more water, they breathe in more air," he said. "And so [children] carry a higher body burden than we do" (Cnn.com).
The most important aspect of nursery design is to reduce exposure to toxic chemicals as much as possible. Since newborns spend most of their life in the nursery-an average 16-17 hours a day, a non-toxic nursery is especially important
Many common products used to decorate the nursery, paint, finishes, carpet, mattresses, curtains and particleboard, contain Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde, toulene and benzene. Through a process called outgassing, or offgasing, VOCs are released into the air, causing harmful indoor air pollution.
Newborns, infants, and toddlers are particularly susceptible to many toxic compounds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children are exposed to higher concentrations of pollutants because their skin is more permeable to certain toxicants; they are exposed to pollutants on the floor as they learn to crawl and play; and they often explore new objects by putting them in their mouths." -Green Home Guide-National Geographic.
Many new cribs are made of plywood or other pressed wood products that emit formaldehyde and other VOCs from their adhesives, and older secondhand cribs could be coated with lead paint. And to meet stringent flame retardant regulations, mattresses typically are treated with PBDEs or other chlorinated or brominated organophosphates, many of which have been banned in Europe because of their health effects.
Over the last 30+ years, crib mattress materials have been replaced with cheap petroleum-based synthetics. Nearly all crib mattresses today contain polyurethane foam, vinyl (PVC), phthalates, chemical fire retardants, and an extensive list of added industrial chemicals. Recent studies have questioned the use of these materials. Read more about Mattresses.
PBDEs used in the U.S. in mattresses, textiles, electrical equipment and construction material are classified as semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs), which are slowly emitted from products and adhere to dust that is inhaled. Laboratory tests have shown that PBDEs can cause nervous system and brain development problems even at low concentrations with long-term exposure. Studies on the health effects of PBDEs are only just beginning, but many countries have heeded the warning signs they see in animal studies. Sweden banned PBDEs in 1998. The European Union banned most PBDEs in 2004.
Another class of chemicals that shows up in high levels in children are known as phthalates. These are plasticizers, the softening agents found in many plastic bottles, kitchenware, toys, medical devices, personal care products and cosmetics. In lab animals, phthalates have been associated with reproductive defects, obesity and early puberty. But like PBDEs, little is known about what they do to humans and specifically children. Read more about the dangers of plastics.
The Environmental Protection Agency does not require chemical manufacturers to conduct human toxicity studies before approving their chemicals for use in the market. A manufacturer simply has to submit paperwork on a chemical, all the data that exists on that chemical to date, and wait 90 days for approval.
Carpets and padding are likely to be made of synthetic materials and chemicals that can harm your baby, such as PBDEs and adhesives that outgas VOCs. Paints can contain high levels of VOCs and toxins and biocides that can get into the air or on the floor as the paint slowly wears down.
"Most people think that if an environment is free of odors from VOCs, it's chemical free, but many materials contain toxic SVOCs we can't smell," says Mary Cordaro, an environmental consultant and founder of H3 Environmental. "In the nursery, these include vinyl wallpaper and window treatments, foam carpet padding, upholstered items made with polyurethane foam and pesticide-treated wool carpeting. After these products stop outgassing VOCs, they continue to contaminate the nursery with SVOCs at higher and higher levels over time."
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Renewable, Abundant and Sustainable American Hardwoods
American hardwoods have entered their fourth century of providing beauty and authenticity, warmth and integrity, lasting aesthetic and functional value to interiors. For floors, furniture, mouldings, millwork, cabinetry and built-ins, they are quintessentially green materials in abundant and self-renewing supply.
American hardwoods are sustainable solutions for eco-effective design and building: Harvesting levels are far below the levels of growth: Nearly twice as much hardwood grows each year as is harvested in the U.S. For this reason, the volume of hardwoods in American forests today is 90 percent larger than it was 50 years ago.
Hardwood foresters follow professional best practices that mirror natural forces. Individual trees are selected for harvest, encouraging forests to renew and regenerate themselves naturally and prolifically.
In addition to providing wildlife habitat and filtering the water supply, trees produce oxygen, remove carbon dioxide and store carbon, reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
All hardwood forests in the continental United States are temperate-not tropical. They are home to the oaks, maples, cherry, ash, poplar and scores of other broad-leafed deciduous species, many of which grow nowhere else in the world. The term "hardwood" has no reference to the wood's actual hardness, which differs by species.
Unlike the area blanketed by the evergreen conifers (softwoods), most hardwood forestland is in the eastern half of the country. Hardwood forests cover 279 million acres: the equivalent of hardwood trees covering every square inch of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. This resource is neither scarce nor finite.
Collectively, across all hardwood trees in all American hardwood forests, there is nearly twice as much new wood growth as there is wood removed through harvesting. We are not running out of trees. The volume of hardwood in American forests is 352 billion cubic feet, and they are adding growth of 10.2 billion cubic feet a year. This compares to annual removal of 6 billion cubic feet.
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