Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
As a test or something, he came around spraying without telling me. I was in my office when I felt my sinuses starting to swell and my chest started tightening. When I walked out into the common room and saw him smiling at me with a “see, told you it’s your imagination” grin, my coworkers had to drag me outside because I was ready to kill him.
Look, man, I’d freaking love not to have asthma and other allergy stuff. I don’t like taking handfuls of antihistamines. I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass. I just don’t, like, enjoying dying.
Look, man, shut up.
> Just do x, y, z
Ok then you take the story.
> Oh but I don't know frontend.
But you know the estimate is wrong?
I hate the word "just"
This is one of those things that someone pointed out to me, I agreed with them and have since tried to avoid saying "just do ...", "why not just ...", etc.
However, that means I now really notice it from others. sigh
That was like 15 years ago and I've at least mentioned that rule to every team I've been a part of ever since. It usually works.
This in particular bothers me because I end up having this discussion with family members all the time who are convinced that "chemicals" are bad for you, and they only eat food without "chemicals".
If you can suggest a pithy replacement terminology for "what we really mean" here, I'm sure we'll all adopt it whole-heartedly. Until then, people are going to use the same (easily deciphered) shorthand. Tilting at this particular windmill doesn't actually improve anything or protect anybody.
Also, ‘things are bad for other reasons’ isn’t an argument for trying to eliminate this particular reason.
You're conflating the colloquial usage of the word chemical with the naturalistic fallacy. These are two different things, however they interrelated because of our collective failure to embrace the precautionary principle when it comes to novel synthetic compounds. The result is that newer compounds tend to be correlated with less safety testing, simply because less time has been available for testing, testing which isn't typically required before engaging in mass exposure of the public.
There's also a connection between corporate self-interest in covering up safety risks (well documented in history, and presumably also occurring today as well) because synthetic compounds can be patented while natural compounds cannot.
In short the connection is real, but it's more subtle than your simple definition-based logic is giving credit for.
It's one. Volatile organic compound. VOC.
It doesn't take too long to tally up the O's, actually. But since this is such a math-oriented crowd, you can be sure someone will come along to do the counting for you.
Which is fine until the shorthand breaks containment, the nuance is lost, and the masses generalize it far beyond what was originally intended.
Having said all that, arguing these terms are bad just tells people they are wrong without giving clear direction to improve. The question that matters is what should be said instead? I think pollution is closer to a good word but when it is used the right meaning should be emphasized. The argument is not that chemicals are bad, the argument is that compounds not native to an environment have untested effects and therefore should be carefully studied especially if they are rapidly becoming abundant. Articles like this skip right to 'pollution = bad' instead of 'pollution = we should try to understand the effects quickly to make informed decisions'
There are a lot of these people. It's the same kind of people who buy their dogs "Taste of the Wild" grain free high-protein dog food because it sounds natural and therefore better than WSAVA-approved dog food, against the advice of any seasoned veterinarian.
It is more about just synthesized at lab not „novel untested”.
Like you can have bread from four, water, yeast that no one would call „chemicals” - even though yeast nowadays is highly engineered.
I want to mostly breathe nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and a bit of water for comfortable humidity. I don't need anything more.
Of our five senses, smell is the most well attuned for detecting something that'll hurt us internally (ie poison cancer).
live among people, they said. it'll be nice, they said.
At my previous job we had a guy who'd always come and instantly open the windows. I know that I'm the minority with my preference to keep them shut, so I just suffered in silence, except for these first 30 minutes before he showed up, those were a blessing. He lived outside of the city and commuted, and one time he really needed to sleep inside the city, and I had a spare bed, so I let him sleep at my place. He walked in and instantly said "Can we open the window?", to which I replied "NO, WE CANNOT". I cannot describe how satisfying that felt.
The scope of the research is determined by the researchers conducting the research, not what you think it should be, especially since you do not understand the basics of the scientific method - or that research is highly iterative and derivative. A great deal of research sets out only to establish whether it is worth pursuing further research on a particular hypothesis.
> I really wish articles would limit big headlines like this unless the research cited was directly comparing mortality and health outcomes directly.
That wasn't the scope of the research.
> If the study this article was based on came to the conclusion that 'average household aerosol use has a similar associated mortality risk as average city car pollution' then the title could have been warranted but instead we got a bit of click-bait.
Proving health risks was not the scope of the research, and nothing in the title of the article, the PR release from Purdue, or the paper's title, even remotely implies what you seem to think it does. If I say the shed is green, you think that means seafoam green, and you're profoundly disappointed to discover the shed is british racing green, the only person to blame is you.
The purpose of the paper was to demonstrate that wax "melts", which many consider "safer" than aromatic candles, produce similar levels of the similar particles as scented candles. They studied the counts, compositions, and the formation process of the particles. In the abstract they state that their results show the need for more study of the effect of the particles on health.
The point of the title and coverage in the news story is to give the layperson something they can relate to, not to be extremely accurate, pedantic, and understate things.
Should we as a species stop nice smelling things entirely.
Intuitively I'd guess the scented candle is worse than the flowers. I doubt soot and vaporized wax are good for you.
We already had the same conversation about the automatic perfume spray machines; we had them over the dinner table, on hallways etc. Not so great when you are a tall person, and all of a sudden you get sprayed in your face because you happen to be standing in-front of the machine.
If someone's not cleaning that, I also have some bad news for them about their washing machine.
I need microparticles in my nose so that it can detect things. Some of the things it detects are pleasant. If one of those pleasant things should stop producing microparticles for health reasons, make that argument instead?
This is true of anything that smells. Food, flowers, the forest, breath, body odor, rain on dry ground, your car...
Many ingredients used in modern perfumery (scenting your detergent is still perfumery) are novel compounds, like galaxolide, but traditionally and still often enough they are naturally-occurring chemicals, although still synthesized in a factory from petrochemicals a lot of the time.
Article seems to be about a chemical reaction of terpenes with ozone, and the result is particles. Terpenes are a specific but large class of aromachemical, both natural and artificial. There are many others.
Even products marketed as unscented tend to be scented, to mask off odors from their functional ingredients.
Just adding some context.
The marketing ploy of an attractive woman breathing in those delicious scents counts for much more to the majority of the population.
Regulators need to crack down on this deception, it's the only proven way.
And I'm like that as well. I have a a Febreeze oil thing stuck in a smart outlet so it works only a bit before I wake up and in the evening and my room smells like strawberries at the moment. I also shower with the scented stuff whenever I don't have to use the medicinal stuff, etc.
I know the scent probably isn't healthy but I also don't believe it's bad enough to where I should stop enjoying it. Especially considering people who vape aren't dying all over the place. You've got people huffing scents out of X00 Watt sticks for years before it fucks them up in some way in comparison to which my exposure is probably invisible on the graph.
By smelling a gas?
I thought most orderants were around 0.5 to 1nm in diameter.
We can't even slow down the consumerism. Everyone's job around the world is someway tied into this rampant production of cheap plastic goods to replace cheap plastic goods from yesterweek. You try and nip it in the bud everyone is liable to lose their job and everything might very well collapse because of how we chose to stack this deck of cards on this planet.
We used to burn leaded gasoline in our cars, coal pucks to heat our homes, smoke directly into our lungs on purpose, god knows what else.
I do agree with the broader point though.
Its a shame homes arent built like that anymore. Looking at how houses like this work really shows how we have created solutions to our own problems in modern home building.
Where I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan average temperatures average between 32C and -6C. As for extremes, I have personally experienced there highs around 37C and lows down to -28C (still went to work in 3ft of snow).
So I will take my modern home with its ability to be well insulated and heated and cooled.
Yes, people lived there long before those modern conveniences, and they were cold and hot. They kept warm in the winter by keeping fires going inside their dwellings at all times. I even spent a week in autumn living in a recreation of one as a kid. Unsutprisingly, it was cold and everything smelled of smoke by the end of the week. Think of how much smoke and particulate we breathed in to stay warm (and there wasn’t even snow on the ground yet). I didn’t even mind it.
I’ll give the final word though to those living in even colder and more extreme climates, and any intrepid people living above the Arctic Circle.
Stone is an incredibly efficient thermal material which is why animals and humans have lived in caves for thousands of years.
Most stone makes for a pretty bad insulator. But the ground, in aggregate, is a great insulator and has very very large thermal mass. So you can go in a hole that’s more than a few feet underground, and the temperature is fairly constant.
This is because it seldom rains. So when it does rain the soil is very hard and doesn't absorb much of it. So it comes down the hills and causes landslides and shifting soils in the alluvial valleys that much of californian civilization is built into (since channelized due to said wandering waters destroying early californian civilization multiple times until this was learned and tamed by the u.s. army). And then, of course the earth quakes, which destroyed an early brick structured version of san fransisco almost in its entirety in 1906.
Not to mention available american and canadian lumber connected by railhead to the entire continent. most of such reserves in europe were claimed for sunken ships over the previous centuries. So now you live in a 300 year old stone house probably with a basement instead of a timber building on post and piers because you have no cheap timber to this degree here and you have no earthquake risks or much shifting soil. Could you build a house like yours in the U.S.? Of course, if you pay a premium for it.
The problem is that people want "cheap" houses, cheap houses coupled with modern regulations = sealed boxes. The average joe doesn't give a shit about building quality, it's all about getting something big and as cheap as possible.
This costs power and materials. Old houses dont require that. On a global scale, that increases power and manufacturing on a huge scale. Why are we throwing power and more modern materials at a problem that was solved in Roman times?
This would also reduce cost, helping the 'cheap' houses issue.
Really?
A high quality modern balanced ventilator can ventilate an average sized house using 20-40W. That can supply over 100cfm and avoid around 90% of the conditioning that those 100cfm would otherwise require.
A good approximation is that 1 cfm at a 1 degree F temperature difference transfers 1.08 BTU/hr (sigh) or 0.317W of “sensible heat”. So, in a mild Mediterranean climate in the winter, heating by 30 degrees F, that 100cfm needs 0.317 times 3000 = 951W of sensible heat added.
So you can burn 951W of fuel. Or you can use 20-40W to get the same amount of fresh air but only need 95W to heat it. Or live in a climate with warm days and cool nights and require less thermal mass and therefore less material to moderate the temperature and avoid the need for active heating or cooling.
Without an HRV, either you don’t heat the building, or you ventilate less, or you use considerably more resources for temperature control.
Oh, and the device itself is two fans, a heat exchanger (fancy piece of plastic, generally), and some electronics and a box. Not exactly resource-intensive to build. And it can usually completely replace your bathroom fans if configured to do so, making it even less resource intensive.
In climates that require dehumidification or winter humidification, it’s more extreme because an ERV can exchange humidity (“recover latent heat”) too.
Yes
> ventilate an average sized house using 20-40W
Lets take your conservative estimate of 20w
Quote from Googling: "As of July 1, 2023, there were 145,344,636 housing units in the United States"
145,344,636 x 20w = 2906892720W or 2906.89272MW.
Another quick google says that the average Nuclear power plant outputs 977 MW.
So thats 3 whole nuclear power plants required just to power the hrvs in American homes, using your conservative estimate.
That is without the power required to manufacture, transport, and install 145 million hrvs.
However you phrase it and whatever you say to justify it, thats a huge amount of power required to replace something which nature is quite capable of doing itself.
EDIT: I have just also considered the waste as well. The average HRV has a lifespan of 15 years, so that would be 145 million hrv pumps thrown out and new ones built every 15 years. Thats a massive amount of constant power being used, and mountains of unecessary waste, as well as the power to process that waste etc etc...
Put another way, of course you can naturally ventilate a house to get the same air change rate that an HRV/ERV will get you. But (a) if you live somewhere with poor outdoor air quality, you have no opportunity to mitigate it with natural ventilation and (b) natural ventilation at high rates requires far more active heating and cooling in climates that need heating and cooling.
Even just the power needed to operate a large enough standalone air purifier in a naturally ventilated house will be far larger than the power needed to run a filtered ventilation system that will outperform that standalone filter (in a well sealed house or a positive pressure system).
As I write this, I’m running an ERV that is consuming 25W to supply HEPA filtered air at very slight positive pressure. The same ventilation rate, from unfiltered natural ventilation, would remove 500W of heat, and I’d probably need at least 100W of air purifiers running to get anywhere near the level of filtration that those 25W include at no additional cost.
You seem to be trying to tell me that the 25W would scale to a lot of power if everyone did this but that the 500W I would use otherwise would have no impact because the Romans didn’t worry about it. I’m unconvinced.
(This is a system where I replaced the mediocre and undersized filter from the manufacturer with a monstrous 24"x24"x12" nominal HEPA filter, a 24"x24" MERV 8 prefilter, and a carbon filter mat from McMaster-Carr. I expect the HEPA filter to last for several years, the extremely inexpensive prefilter to last for a year or so, and the carbon filter to need replacement more frequently if outdoor odors from wildfires become an issue. Why HEPA instead of a 99.9% filter with somewhat lower resistance? Because it’s much easier to buy a real HEPA filter and the added resistance is negligible. No additional power is consumed by any of this: it all has less resistance to airflow than even a brand new factory filter. The only real downside is that it’s physically large.)
I however will stick with my house which uses zero external grid power to heat or ventilate it, and I can be happy in the knowledge I am not putting any drain on the national power grid for my comfort.
Also when we have power outages, which is quite often, it makes no difference to my home whatsoever.
Its OK, we can agree to disagree. You are not alone in thinking electricity is an infinite resource. Lets just keep on building houses that require more and more power to run and see where that gets us!
You don't need a power grid to run what basically amounts to a bathroom fan. And guess what? Even if you're completely out of electricity you can still open the windows.
The bottom line is that at best you save 70%+ of heating/cooling energy and at worst you're just back to square one temporarily
Huh? I'm literally explaining, with actual measured numbers, how the ventilation system uses less power. I do care about it!
BTW the US is a super bad example, they all have piss poor insulation and rely on extremely wasteful heaters and ACs virtually 24/7. When I lived in Florida I was cold when it was 15c outside because the windows weren't even air tight, now in Germany I can get by without turning on the heaters until it's 0c outside
HRV don't have a lifespan of 15 years, the fan maybe, if you do 0 maintenance. HRV aren't like heat pumps or ACs, they're mostly passive, it's literally just a fan and an exchange surface, no compressor, no chemicals, &c.
It's a drop in the bucket when it comes to houses. Also, build a "Roman" house and Sweden and tell me how it goes lmao
There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
Having grown up and lived primarily in (uncomfortably!) drafty old houses, I've noticed the phenomenon ever since I was little kid because they have a distinctive stuffiness and smell of furniture/carpet/plywood even if nothing inside is actually new. I think many people are just used to it/consider it a normal smell of a house because so much of the housing stock is in this category.
This stuff is amazing: not only is it safe (no airflow in contact with fiberglass) and fairly well insulated, but it has excellent acoustic insertion loss. If you take 100 feet of rigid galvanized steel duct and talk into one end, someone at the other end will hear you loud and clear. If you take that same duct and install duct liner (and incredibly annoying process) like a fancy commercial installer, you won’t hear much at the other end. If you use 100' of flex duct, you will hear basically nothing. This stuff mostly outperforms even the most expensive commercial acoustic solutions!
Here’s a spec sheet from a random brand:
https://www.flexmasterusa.com/Portals/2/Downloads/Flex/6B.pd...
Wow, 12 feet of 6" duct attenuates 250Hz sound by 43dB! That will make that frequency close to inaudible even if the equipment end of the duct is quite loud as HVAC gear goes. Use wider duct or a longer run (or both) to get it even quieter and to make a bigger dent in the lowest frequencies.
So you stick you fancy fan somewhere that you won’t directly hear it (in mechanical space with a fiber-insulated wall between you and it) and you connect it to the living space with ducting that contains at least a decent length of insulated flexible duct. And you keep the grilles and ducts large enough to keep face velocities low so that the ducts and grilles themselves don’t make much noise, and you have a fantastic system.
Or you use extremely expensive specialized semi-rigid ventilation duct or rigid galvanized steel or uninsulated flexible aluminum, and you’re sad because your duct is a speaking tube.
You're right about building materials, but that's true regardless of the air tightness: engineered woods, all kind of glues, all kind of foams, paints, sealants, hard to tell how nasty they are but they for sure aren't beneficial.
Glues are getting better over time. Slightly nasty polyurethanes [0] and quite nasty solvent- and bitumen-based products are gradually being replaced with STPE, and STPE seems to be considered quite safe. It doesn’t even have a prop 65 warning!
[0] Polyurethane may well be harmless when fully cured, but the uncured isocyanates are most definitely nasty. Fortunately, they’re so reactive that they will aggressively react with water (even just moisture in the air) or almost any alcohol and produce much safer products.
You're really left with two good solutions, one is centralized airflow with appropriate HEPA filtering which many can't afford, or to move to a location with default clean air, again a difficult proposition depending on work etc.
Edit: Back of the envelope math puts it around 60-70kg per day, conservatively.
Can I just stop being right?
2,000 gallons/day * 4.6 grams/gallon = 20.3 lbs.
2,000 gallons/day is about 300ml in/out per breathing cycle. My estimate is that you breathe in/out at least one liter, recall that total lung capacity is about 6 liters so about 20% of that seems like a reasonable estimate.
I chose to do 2-3 liters * 1.225 grams/liter * 22k times = ~50-80kg. That's a bit high now that I think about it, but no way is as low as 9kg.
Edit: Chat says a healthy adult averages 500ml per breathing cycle (honestly surprised is that low), so, final estimate ~13-14kg if that is true.
(I like metric units but you can do the conversion to burgers per squared eagle and compare)
Some other things I do are regular vacuuming and dusting; you might be surprised how effective this can be in freshening the air naturally. Dust can trap odors and make a room smell stale if not removed often.
It also helps to clean soft surfaces frequently, because fabric traps odors.
Abundant houseplants help naturally purify the air. Activated charcoal in discreet places absorbs odors without adding any scent.
Unscented products like vinegar or baking soda work well for carpet and upholstery (the vinegar smell dissipates quickly).
apparently the effect is grossly overstated. You'd need to cram the place (in all dimensions) so tightly with plants there'd be no room for humans or furniture of any kind for any appreciable difference.
Even though no, it's not as simple as they put it, plants do remove particles from the air, humidify it, and emit plenty of stuff on their own (what may or may not be good). You don't need a lot of them to have a large impact.
and 2) there have been studies on this done by NASA, et al, and the general consensus was you need a lot of plants
The actual issue is plants consume oxygen at night without grow lamps. You can make a meaningful difference in indoor CO2 levels during the day with plants in a large home, but they end up making things worse at night.
Thus plants are likely better in an office environment than in the home.
One frustrating aspect to the study is that it was hard to determine whether they are comparing like for like per unit time. They say the “operation of a gas stove” and “running a generator” — but for how long? It doesn’t seem like they tested each of these things under similar conditions in their lab but rather relied on other studies for that data. Figure 2(b) right does seem to measure this but they haven’t labeled the chart with clear labels and the description is a bit ambiguous.
After reading the study, I think the issue is that the claim it is making is slightly different than the one in the headline. They are measuring VOC and ~PM2.5 pollutants, but gas engines (and gas stoves presumably as well) produce other pollutants like CO, which is what kills you of you run a gas generator indoors.
That's the proximate cause.
> They are measuring VOC and ~PM2.5 pollutants
Which aren't good for your lungs long term.
> the claim in the post headline with common sense.
If you can smell it, it's because little particles of it are in the air, so your scented products necessarily put PM of some size into your home. In other words you are polluting your home merely to produce an olfactory sensation. The lack of common sense in the market for these products has always baffled me.
But the headline says “Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust”. This is not supported by the study. PM2.5 and VOCs are not the only forms of indoor air pollution. Combustion produces other deleterious byproducts that negatively impact human health.
Run a car in your garage for a day and run scented candle and tell me which is worse for you. That is what I mean by common sense.
I highly doubt that if you were in a room that had /only/ a high concentration of CO would you describe it as "polluted."
Additionally any gas which displaces oxygen is lethal in a confined space. Shall we expand "pollution" to include those as well? Is nitrogen a "pollutant?"
Here's some recommendations from our household, related to my previous battles with mold-related illness:
RabbitAir hepa-level air purifiers. Pricey, but worth it.
Dr. Bronner's soaps. We use them for showering, washing hands and dishes. No dishwasher here; our son has taken responsibility for it, in exchange for our fascilitating his chess-oriented lifestyle.
7th Generation laundry detergent. Unfortunately, we have to use a public laundramat, so we're getting some of the polluted stuff washing through the machines' detergent/softener resevoirs, but the poor have no choice.
We keep the windows closed during rush hour timeframes, and I keep watch on wind directions and know where the fresh air comes from.
We also try to get out into green space away from traffic and get a walk in or just let the teens knock the soccer ball around a bit.
I found her work years ago, when I had a suspicion of why I'd get headaches while folding laundry. A Web search turned up her papers, I stopped using dryer sheets and scented laundry detergent, and laundry-folding headaches stopped immediately.
Separately, it turned out a bunch of people and pets who had windows near the laundry room vents of my large condo building would get headaches and breathing problems from the exhaust. The complaints stopped down after most residents stopped using scented laundry products. Though IIUC, the dryer exhaust can still contain some nasties, just not as much as before.
Diesel exhaust is another one, but that’s not just a scent.
Surprisingly anything else motor related is fine. I’ve been soaked in brake cleaner and race fuel and it hasn’t been a problem.
I really get irked a lot by seeing (overly obvious) ai generated images being used for stock photos. One of the reasons my wife and I still subscribe to a couple of newspapers is that the photography helps bring to life the story being told. Why where these photos taken and how do they impact the story. You don't get that same visceral emotional reaction with low quality cartoon images.
Who would not want their print out to smell like fresh apple pie?
> Who would not want their print out to smell like fresh apple pie?
I know it's a joke, but surely flavoured printer toner would taste like fresh apple pie?
and yes I am one of those people who enjoyed the smell of freshly laser printed pages
Maybe offer unique toner scents to companies as part of their brand identity. Imagine all letters from Jack Wolfskin smelling like pine cones, or the acceptance letter from a surf school smelling like the ocean.
You can also get scented paper, but it seems mostly thicker paper meant as drawer liners.
What is a non-combustible candle? Searching for "flame-free candle" just gives results for fake LED ones. The rest of the article talks about "scented wax melts" are they the same?
The rule is: don't put it into your lungs or onto your skin if you wouldn't put it into your mouth.
Those people are just paying people to poison them, however slowly.
It's good to know, however, that non-chemical ones are available. Thanks.
Meaning that well whatever is in them might get inhaled. Or improperly burned...
I don't know what perfume makers are thinking, but this stuff makes my day unbearable at times.
I guess a chemical with super strength sillage works in the market...
I once lit up one of those scented candles and the sensor fire up to over 1200 PPM.
It had a wooden wick. I think that was one of the reasons.
behind one door and up one floor.
two air handlers blowing with air purifiers of four.
Found two filters sooty and the cpap tasted like campfire booty.
I'm pretty sure that's why, 100 years ago, there were so many blues folks with names like "Blind Lemon Jefferson" -- they had drunk bad hooch that got too much methanol instead of ethanol. Blindness is direct side effect of methanol poisoning.
Also because in a predominantly agricultural society, music was one of very few self-sustaining pursuits for a blind (or otherwise unsuited to farm work) person. Looking through the 'blind' names in [0] most were either born blind or had an alternate explanation (usually accidents) for their blindness.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_of_blues_mus...