Remodeling And Formaldehyde Glues
by Josephine Laing
When Frank and I first moved into our home, we were all set to remodel. We were going to tear into the kitchen and combine it with the service porch. The old carpet needed to be replaced with some nice clean tile. We planned to pull out the cabinets from the bathrooms and put in something a little more up to date. Then I broke my back and had to sell my business and our income was cut nearly in half. So, we decided to table that remodeling idea and instead grew quite nostalgically fond of the large yellow and orange daisy pattern wall paper from the sixties that graced our kitchen walls.
Then some years later, during the Twentieth Earth Day Celebration in 1990, I attended a talk about formaldehyde glues. It was given by an immunotoxicologist, Jack Thrasher, Ph.D. He had written a book with his partner, a medical doctor, Alan Broughton, M.D. about the toxicity of these glues called, The Poisoning Of Our Homes And Workplaces. As I remember it, he shared with us one of the inspirations for his book and speaking tour. Apparently, a train car carrying a load of formaldehyde glue derailed somewhere up in Alaska, spilling all of the glue. Since the clean up was going to be messy and costly, the corporations involved decided to just let it lay and left it there. Within just a few years, the small town down-wind from the spill developed a thymus cancer bloom, meaning a significant number of the residents there developed thymus cancer.
The thymus gland is one of the main organ of our Immune Systems. It creates the "T-Cells." (T stands for Thymus.) Our T-cells move around the body looking for viruses, bacteria, toxins and other junk to capture and eat up or haul away. Now, I understand that with healthy people, our immune system routinely processes and removes all sorts of dead and dying or misshapen cells including something like sixty million cancer cells a day. So, if you've got cancer of the thymus, not only do you have cancer, but you've just severely compromised or lost the main glandular organ that is responsible for routinely eliminating the rogue cells in the first place.
Unfortunately, we typically don't hear of news like the sad repercussions of that train crash on mainstream media. This is because when governments have agendas or when corporations merge under large umbrella organizations, anything that adversely affects the profits of one, adversely affects the profits of all. Or if some thing doesn't fit with the preordained societal agenda, it too must be omitted. And if your news company includes it, they're not invited back into the bull pen. So, our American news organizations often choose to not report on news that may either adversely affect their own bottom lines or their access to national news sources. So, sadly, too often our news is actually censored and we don't hear about these kinds of events.
A good source to learn about news of this nature comes from Sonoma State University and the wonderful program they have there, headed by Peter Phillips, called Project Censored. Sonoma's sociology students collect and publish the top twenty-five censored national news stories every year. I first learned of this from our local New Times who used to publish a brief synopsis of these top stories. The topics are selected by the students according to how news worthy they are and how censored they were. Their annually published book called Censored is available through the university and makes for a most interesting, informative and enlightening read.
How does all of this relate to remodeling? Well, you guessed it, the glue.
You know that wonderful new car smell, the one we associate with brand new things, that new computer smell? Yep, that's formaldehyde glue, and it's toxic, and air borne. And we, the general public, are purposefully kept in the dark about that. Enter sick building syndrome. And, in our own homes, there's plywood, or even worse, chipboard, all of your new cabinetry, floor boards, walls, even the materials your bed is made with ample amounts of formaldehyde glues.
Now, I know it's satisfying, even cathartic to tear into old cabinets and walls and rip them out for something new. But the truth is, the new furnishings are not like the ones from yesteryear which were made from solid wood carefully fitted and joined together with dowels and non-toxic white wood glue. And, unless these old interiors are moldy and cannot be cleaned with a biodegradable non-chlorine bleach or hydrogen peroxide, they are by far the much less toxic choice for you and your family. Because you see, formaldehyde glues out-gas-for-the-life-of-the-glue. Sorry to say, as long as that new cabinet is in your home, it will be slowly poisoning you. Of course, the out-gassing is much worse when it's fresh and new, that's when the highest concentrations of formaldehyde molecules are being released into the air. But even twenty years later, it is still diffusing slowly and steadily into your living space. And if you're a conscientious homeowner, and have nice air-tight windows and doors, along with plenty of insulation in your home to conserve energy from heating and cooling, then the air inside your home becomes progressively more and more toxic.
So, let's say you've just remodeled and have ripped out those old cabinets and drawers from the fifties. Perhaps it was just going to take too much time and expense to rebuild them with ball bearing tracts or maybe it was because you wanted more space or a different floor plan. I totally understand. But here's the downside that you may want to take a few simple steps to help correct. The new linoleum or tile flooring was stuck down with...... The new carpet was put down on top of a pad made out of thousands of little chunks of foam all stuck together with..... The new cabinets are beautiful, but made out of solid press board, every speck of which is pressed together with..... The new granite counter tops are all held firmly in place with..... Many of the new walls are made of chip board which is small hunks of wood all stuck together with..... The new carpet was threaded onto a mesh backing with every synthetic thread held in place with..... You guessed it....., formaldehyde glues. Add in some toxic out-gassing high VOCs (volatile organic compounds) paint on the cabinets and walls and YIKES! That's some serious indoor air pollution. We are truly poisoning our homes and workplaces.
But fear not. There are some mitigating measures that you can do. You can let the breeze blow through. You can sleep with the windows open. You can regularly do some herbal liver cleansing. (It's our livers, after-all, that first process most of the chemicals that enter into our bodies.) You can remodel the baby's room a year or more before the baby is due. (Their tender not yet fully formed immune systems are most vulnerable.) You can have lots of indoor houseplants. (The cholorphytum or "spider plant" is supposed to be especially good at cleaning indoor air.) You can buy and use antique or vintage, pre-1960's, furniture to minimize the quantity of formaldehyde glue surfaces in your home. (I've even seen beautiful old dressers being decoratively used instead of so many new cabinets being built into the homes.) You can get natural fiber area rugs for your floors. (We like the "Royal Intercontinental Inc. 100% wool hand-woven rugs as they are guaranteed to be child-labor free.) You can thickly coat the new built-in cabinetry with low "VOCs" paint, inside and out.
Or, you can use my favorite, which I recall from Jack's talk, fish pee. You know, ammonia. Some of the little mom and pop stores still carry it and most of the drug stores do, along with their cleaning supplies.
Apparently, the fumes from ammonia are especially chemically reactive. And fortunately, the molecules of ammonia when allowed to float around freely in the air space of an enclosed room for twenty-four hours will combine chemically with the formaldehyde glue surfaces that are exposed in your home and form a hard skin on top of the glue that significantly reduces the out-gassing of the formaldehyde.
Of course you have to protect your lungs when you put out the ammonia. It's strong, it's the same stuff as is in smelling salts, after all. So, at the very least hold your breath and move quickly or better yet, get and use a respirator. (With modern chemicals, solvents and paints, I feel a good respirator should be included in every household tool room. They are inexpensive, easy to keep clean and save lungs. It's far better to keep poisons out of the body then it is to try and remove them once they are in.) And you definitely want to remove all house plants, pets and people including yourself for the duration of the time during which the ammonia molecules are doing their job.
We did this when we had to put down a new floor about ten years ago. Our then thirty year old carpet and even older carpet pad molded when our house flooded while we were in Yosemite one winter. A gutter failed and in poured the rain for days. We came home to a muddy, moldy mire. That carpet was so old that it was alive. We just told it to "Get Out!" and it hump-felled it's way right out the door. We cleaned the concrete beneath it as well as we could and then started researching.
Luckily, we found a company that made a solid wood engineered floor that could "Float" right on top of the concrete. It was made with the hard wood on top and only one glue layer between it and a softer wood on the bottom. The top was varnished and both the varnish and the glue were dried thoroughly in the factory. Both types of wood were harvested from fast-growing, farm-grown trees. We took everything out of the house, moved into the tent in the backyard and put the new floor down.
One nice side effect was that after taking everything out, we were very choosey about what we let back in. Frank said it was like giving the house a high colonic. And before we moved anything back inside, we set out glass baking dishes and low ceramic bowls, approximately one big lasagna sized pan for every small sized room with several dishes being placed in each of the bigger rooms. We filled them with ammonia using our respirators to do so. The large evaporative surface area in the non-chemically reactive glass and ceramic dishes allowed for the greatest release of ammonia molecules into the air. We shut the place up tight for twenty-for hours and let the dried glue in the floor form it's chemical combination "skin" with the ammonia molecules. It worked. We didn't smell any of that glue when we moved back in. And we were even able to save a lot of the ammonia for use again later.
I often wonder about that popular slogan, "Better Living Through Chemistry." I'm not always so sure it's true. So, when I see my friends move into some of these older 1950's homes with their raised foundations and solid hard wood floors, their lath and plaster walls and beautiful twelve inch wide solid board wood cabinetry and their old ceramic kitchen and bath tiles all artistically and individually and non-toxically mortared into place, I try to encourage them to appreciate the beauty of these older places just the way they are. And to be grateful for the non-toxic, low to no chemical way that homes of yesteryear were built.
I'm sure that you've heard the saying, "When we change our thinking we can change our lives" and in this case by simply changing our frame of reference and the way we think about things, we can have the possibility of saving ourselves not only from a huge immunotoxic load but also from all the trouble and expense of lots of remodeling in our older homes. Think of the possibilities. With all of that extra time and money we can really celebrate the artistic way in which these homes were lovingly built to hold generations of families, protecting us, keeping us warm and shaded while sharing our lives with us, for possibly a hundred years or more.
Oh, and by the way, we did finally put down some low VOCs paint over those big yellow daisies on our kitchen wall. They were nice for a while. But then they had to go.
© 2011 Josephine Laing
When Frank and I first moved into our home, we were all set to remodel. We were going to tear into the kitchen and combine it with the service porch. The old carpet needed to be replaced with some nice clean tile. We planned to pull out the cabinets from the bathrooms and put in something a little more up to date. Then I broke my back and had to sell my business and our income was cut nearly in half. So, we decided to table that remodeling idea and instead grew quite nostalgically fond of the large yellow and orange daisy pattern wall paper from the sixties that graced our kitchen walls.
Then some years later, during the Twentieth Earth Day Celebration in 1990, I attended a talk about formaldehyde glues. It was given by an immunotoxicologist, Jack Thrasher, Ph.D. He had written a book with his partner, a medical doctor, Alan Broughton, M.D. about the toxicity of these glues called, The Poisoning Of Our Homes And Workplaces. As I remember it, he shared with us one of the inspirations for his book and speaking tour. Apparently, a train car carrying a load of formaldehyde glue derailed somewhere up in Alaska, spilling all of the glue. Since the clean up was going to be messy and costly, the corporations involved decided to just let it lay and left it there. Within just a few years, the small town down-wind from the spill developed a thymus cancer bloom, meaning a significant number of the residents there developed thymus cancer.
The thymus gland is one of the main organ of our Immune Systems. It creates the "T-Cells." (T stands for Thymus.) Our T-cells move around the body looking for viruses, bacteria, toxins and other junk to capture and eat up or haul away. Now, I understand that with healthy people, our immune system routinely processes and removes all sorts of dead and dying or misshapen cells including something like sixty million cancer cells a day. So, if you've got cancer of the thymus, not only do you have cancer, but you've just severely compromised or lost the main glandular organ that is responsible for routinely eliminating the rogue cells in the first place.
Unfortunately, we typically don't hear of news like the sad repercussions of that train crash on mainstream media. This is because when governments have agendas or when corporations merge under large umbrella organizations, anything that adversely affects the profits of one, adversely affects the profits of all. Or if some thing doesn't fit with the preordained societal agenda, it too must be omitted. And if your news company includes it, they're not invited back into the bull pen. So, our American news organizations often choose to not report on news that may either adversely affect their own bottom lines or their access to national news sources. So, sadly, too often our news is actually censored and we don't hear about these kinds of events.
A good source to learn about news of this nature comes from Sonoma State University and the wonderful program they have there, headed by Peter Phillips, called Project Censored. Sonoma's sociology students collect and publish the top twenty-five censored national news stories every year. I first learned of this from our local New Times who used to publish a brief synopsis of these top stories. The topics are selected by the students according to how news worthy they are and how censored they were. Their annually published book called Censored is available through the university and makes for a most interesting, informative and enlightening read.
How does all of this relate to remodeling? Well, you guessed it, the glue.
You know that wonderful new car smell, the one we associate with brand new things, that new computer smell? Yep, that's formaldehyde glue, and it's toxic, and air borne. And we, the general public, are purposefully kept in the dark about that. Enter sick building syndrome. And, in our own homes, there's plywood, or even worse, chipboard, all of your new cabinetry, floor boards, walls, even the materials your bed is made with ample amounts of formaldehyde glues.
Now, I know it's satisfying, even cathartic to tear into old cabinets and walls and rip them out for something new. But the truth is, the new furnishings are not like the ones from yesteryear which were made from solid wood carefully fitted and joined together with dowels and non-toxic white wood glue. And, unless these old interiors are moldy and cannot be cleaned with a biodegradable non-chlorine bleach or hydrogen peroxide, they are by far the much less toxic choice for you and your family. Because you see, formaldehyde glues out-gas-for-the-life-of-the-glue. Sorry to say, as long as that new cabinet is in your home, it will be slowly poisoning you. Of course, the out-gassing is much worse when it's fresh and new, that's when the highest concentrations of formaldehyde molecules are being released into the air. But even twenty years later, it is still diffusing slowly and steadily into your living space. And if you're a conscientious homeowner, and have nice air-tight windows and doors, along with plenty of insulation in your home to conserve energy from heating and cooling, then the air inside your home becomes progressively more and more toxic.
So, let's say you've just remodeled and have ripped out those old cabinets and drawers from the fifties. Perhaps it was just going to take too much time and expense to rebuild them with ball bearing tracts or maybe it was because you wanted more space or a different floor plan. I totally understand. But here's the downside that you may want to take a few simple steps to help correct. The new linoleum or tile flooring was stuck down with...... The new carpet was put down on top of a pad made out of thousands of little chunks of foam all stuck together with..... The new cabinets are beautiful, but made out of solid press board, every speck of which is pressed together with..... The new granite counter tops are all held firmly in place with..... Many of the new walls are made of chip board which is small hunks of wood all stuck together with..... The new carpet was threaded onto a mesh backing with every synthetic thread held in place with..... You guessed it....., formaldehyde glues. Add in some toxic out-gassing high VOCs (volatile organic compounds) paint on the cabinets and walls and YIKES! That's some serious indoor air pollution. We are truly poisoning our homes and workplaces.
But fear not. There are some mitigating measures that you can do. You can let the breeze blow through. You can sleep with the windows open. You can regularly do some herbal liver cleansing. (It's our livers, after-all, that first process most of the chemicals that enter into our bodies.) You can remodel the baby's room a year or more before the baby is due. (Their tender not yet fully formed immune systems are most vulnerable.) You can have lots of indoor houseplants. (The cholorphytum or "spider plant" is supposed to be especially good at cleaning indoor air.) You can buy and use antique or vintage, pre-1960's, furniture to minimize the quantity of formaldehyde glue surfaces in your home. (I've even seen beautiful old dressers being decoratively used instead of so many new cabinets being built into the homes.) You can get natural fiber area rugs for your floors. (We like the "Royal Intercontinental Inc. 100% wool hand-woven rugs as they are guaranteed to be child-labor free.) You can thickly coat the new built-in cabinetry with low "VOCs" paint, inside and out.
Or, you can use my favorite, which I recall from Jack's talk, fish pee. You know, ammonia. Some of the little mom and pop stores still carry it and most of the drug stores do, along with their cleaning supplies.
Apparently, the fumes from ammonia are especially chemically reactive. And fortunately, the molecules of ammonia when allowed to float around freely in the air space of an enclosed room for twenty-four hours will combine chemically with the formaldehyde glue surfaces that are exposed in your home and form a hard skin on top of the glue that significantly reduces the out-gassing of the formaldehyde.
Of course you have to protect your lungs when you put out the ammonia. It's strong, it's the same stuff as is in smelling salts, after all. So, at the very least hold your breath and move quickly or better yet, get and use a respirator. (With modern chemicals, solvents and paints, I feel a good respirator should be included in every household tool room. They are inexpensive, easy to keep clean and save lungs. It's far better to keep poisons out of the body then it is to try and remove them once they are in.) And you definitely want to remove all house plants, pets and people including yourself for the duration of the time during which the ammonia molecules are doing their job.
We did this when we had to put down a new floor about ten years ago. Our then thirty year old carpet and even older carpet pad molded when our house flooded while we were in Yosemite one winter. A gutter failed and in poured the rain for days. We came home to a muddy, moldy mire. That carpet was so old that it was alive. We just told it to "Get Out!" and it hump-felled it's way right out the door. We cleaned the concrete beneath it as well as we could and then started researching.
Luckily, we found a company that made a solid wood engineered floor that could "Float" right on top of the concrete. It was made with the hard wood on top and only one glue layer between it and a softer wood on the bottom. The top was varnished and both the varnish and the glue were dried thoroughly in the factory. Both types of wood were harvested from fast-growing, farm-grown trees. We took everything out of the house, moved into the tent in the backyard and put the new floor down.
One nice side effect was that after taking everything out, we were very choosey about what we let back in. Frank said it was like giving the house a high colonic. And before we moved anything back inside, we set out glass baking dishes and low ceramic bowls, approximately one big lasagna sized pan for every small sized room with several dishes being placed in each of the bigger rooms. We filled them with ammonia using our respirators to do so. The large evaporative surface area in the non-chemically reactive glass and ceramic dishes allowed for the greatest release of ammonia molecules into the air. We shut the place up tight for twenty-for hours and let the dried glue in the floor form it's chemical combination "skin" with the ammonia molecules. It worked. We didn't smell any of that glue when we moved back in. And we were even able to save a lot of the ammonia for use again later.
I often wonder about that popular slogan, "Better Living Through Chemistry." I'm not always so sure it's true. So, when I see my friends move into some of these older 1950's homes with their raised foundations and solid hard wood floors, their lath and plaster walls and beautiful twelve inch wide solid board wood cabinetry and their old ceramic kitchen and bath tiles all artistically and individually and non-toxically mortared into place, I try to encourage them to appreciate the beauty of these older places just the way they are. And to be grateful for the non-toxic, low to no chemical way that homes of yesteryear were built.
I'm sure that you've heard the saying, "When we change our thinking we can change our lives" and in this case by simply changing our frame of reference and the way we think about things, we can have the possibility of saving ourselves not only from a huge immunotoxic load but also from all the trouble and expense of lots of remodeling in our older homes. Think of the possibilities. With all of that extra time and money we can really celebrate the artistic way in which these homes were lovingly built to hold generations of families, protecting us, keeping us warm and shaded while sharing our lives with us, for possibly a hundred years or more.
Oh, and by the way, we did finally put down some low VOCs paint over those big yellow daisies on our kitchen wall. They were nice for a while. But then they had to go.
© 2011 Josephine Laing