Blog Action Day

Today is the Blog Action Day. Here are my thoughts:
I am totally for any effort to help keeping our environment free from pollutants, for eco-friendly style of living. In my work as an interior designer it is one of my main obligations to ensure that the projects I am working on create safe and healthy environment for my customers.

We are living in world where factories, cars, buses and planes discharge pollutants every day, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency many people don't realize that the air inside a home may be two to five times more polluted than the air outside.
I am always trying to explain to my customers what are the best materials for achieving this.

There are a few simple things you can do to help safeguard your health and help environment:

• When remodeling or doing interior decorating, look for formaldehyde-free particleboard, non-treated carpeting, and low-VOC paints and adhesives.
• When using paint or chemical products, or bringing new furniture or any off-gassing materials into your home, allow the rooms to air out for at least a day before occupying them.
• When buying furniture look for ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 14001 (environmental) certified companies
• Many timbers are also treated with chemicals against biological attack and to increase durability. Choose untreated products wherever possible, and never burn treated wood.
• Where possible use sustainably grown solid wood or plywood, but if manufactured wood products such as MDF or particleboard are used, cover all surfaces and edges with laminates or seal them with low emitting paint or varnish to reduce emissions of formaldehyde. Look for those made with phenol formaldehyde rather than urea formaldehyde as they are less harmful.
  
  But I am not so enthusiastic for the so popular at the moment trend of creating a 'green design by utilising discarded waste'. Far away not many of the resulting products are really useful and much less they are esthetically pleasing - isn't this picture above ('tip top trash' via LifeSigns Network) depressing? Isn't it a waste of time to create something like this?

I think the better approach is to fight against producing useless and harmful products that we fill our homes with, breathe the toxic volatile emissions from and throw away very soon because of their bad quality.