How Much Formaldehyde Is in Your Car, Your Kitchen or Your Furniture? Here’s What Our Testing Found.
Invisible Danger: Formaldehyde, a colorless pungent gas, can cause cancer, breathing problems and reproductive harms.
Greatest Threat: Most of us face the highest risks in our homes, where formaldehyde is released by some types of furniture, gas stoves and other everyday products.
Our Testing: We found concerning levels of formaldehyde in furniture stores, inside a nail salon, in cars and at a dinner party.
https://www.propublica.org/article/formaldehyde-levels-in-your-home-car-furnitureOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
So basically, the safest choice is to buy used furniture that left most of its formaldehyde at the previous owner since the industry is far from regulating it and there is no way to avoid it without living in a cave, but theses have radon gas aplenty.
I think solid wood is the key, the problems are in the plywood and chipboard. For many things that will mean buying good quality used furniture.
Definitely, but solid wood isn't affordable since the early 00's. By that metric, IKEA is the only low formaldehyde content affordable fournitures since they are mostly honeycomb cardboard and covered in latex paint.
Activated carbon can remove such noxious fumes from the air. There are air purifiers that can do both fumes and particulate matter
Used furniture is real cheap, even good stuff. People want new everything.
Safest for formaldehyde, but not safest for pests.
Why would you want to make things safe for pests?
You don't have pet termites? They is so cuuuute!
I stopped breathing due to formaldehyde poisioning when I was a baby. The new house we moved into (because the old one burnt down) was too air tight and all the formaldehyde in the wood wasn't let out of the house. So I have a personal connection to there being too much formaldehyde in things and the danger.
This and micro plastics explains why life expectancy in the US has been dropping for decades.
Or, you know, shitty food, unhealthy lifestyles, a lack of healthcare, drugs and violence
Guys it's all of it.
Here's a chart that shows it, but I think they put the labels on backwards.
There was a huge scandal a few years back where cheap flooring from China was full of it. It was so bad Lunber Liquidators changed names to "LL Flooring" to avoid the association. They ended up filing for bankruptcy this year anyway.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lumber-liquidators-linked-to-health-and-safety-violations-2/
Ditto drywall if I remember correctly. Let's see how my Google-Fu is today:
https://nchh.org/information-and-evidence/learn-about-healthy-housing/ask-nchh/about-chinese-drywall/
There's not a fucking thing I can do about it unless I throw out whatever it's in and replace it, which would cost money, so maybe it's better I didn't know.
Well you could not buy any more of it.
Bold of you to think I could afford any of those things at this point.