Toxic Building Materials in Residential Construction

toxic building materials
Toxic Building Materials in Residential Construction A reporter from Angie’s List Magazine just asked for my opinion on toxic building materials in residential construction… and while writing my response I realized there was some valuable information to share. Hopefully Angie’s List Magazine will decide to run the piece. Here is my response to some great
Read more
No Comments

Tips for Building Healthy Home – Minimize VOCs

tips for building a healthy home
Tips for Building Healthy Home – Part 1: Minimize VOCs Minimize Exposure to Formaldehyde Formaldehyde is one of the most common industrial chemicals and is widely used as a component of building products, upholstery, carpeting, etc. and classified as a human carcinogen. Formaldehyde’s other health impacts include respiratory problems; eye, nose, and throat irritation; allergic
Read more
No Comments

Healthy Building Science Green Festival

Healthy Building Science Green Festival
Healthy Building Science Green Festival – San Francisco The Healthy Building Science Green Festival  booth two weekends ago was a total hit! After the Green Festival we all took a big breathe and dove right into festivities and events for GreenBuild 2012… now we await the air quality results. It’s been an amazing 10 days. The
Read more
No Comments

Toxins in Household Goods – Where can consumers turn?

toxins in household goods
Toxins in Household Goods are the current norm. With the growing buzz concerning toxins in building materials and a push for more transparency, where can consumers turn? The answer:  Not enough places. Several factors contribute to this lack of information on toxins in household goods. One lies in the sheer number of ingredients involved. Significant
Read more
No Comments

Healthy Building Materials – How green can you go?

Healthy Building Materials
At Healthy Building Science we provide three primary services revolving around healthy building materials. 1) Bulk material testing. We cover this briefly in another blog post. 2) Building material research. Sometimes our clients are particularly interested in toxicity or resource conservation. Some clients concerned about climate change are asking for carbon footprint analysis in order
Read more
No Comments

Sick Building Materials Smell Bad – What if it’s too late and the building stinks?

Sick building
Sick Building Materials Smell Bad- What if it’s too late and the building stinks? At least once a week we get the following call… “We were so careful to only allow healthy materials in our project. But we just moved in and it stinks! We’re worried the building materials smell bad. Can you come test
Read more
No Comments

Green Building Logos can be scary…

green building logos
Some Green Building Logos Are Scary… Green Building logos are full of leaves and trees.  Use Google Images (“green building logo”) and that’s just about all you’ll see. It’s overdone. We struggled with these logo concepts when coming up with our new logo. How do you quickly illustrate nature-loving and “green” without a leaf or plant?
Read more
No Comments

Free and Easy Ways to Protect Your Family Today

easy ways to protect your family
This modified excerpt of free and easy ways to protect your family is from a Building Biology brochure created in conjunction with Melody Chan Graves. We go the extra mile to protect the safety and health of those we love. But many of us don’t realize that there is a world of silent killers and disease-causing agents
Read more
No Comments

Green and Sustainable Building Resources – 2011

green building resources
Green Building Resources – 2011 These green building resources offer free educational materials about Green Building, Healthy Building, and Sustainable Building. These are really all different names for the same thing: “High-Performance Building” Healthy Building Science supports and has relied on these green building resources ourselves, so we are happy to share them with you!
Read more
No Comments

Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Resources – 2011

EMF Resources
EMF Resources Electromagnetic fields and radio frequency radiation are increasingly becoming hot-botton issues. A five-day seminar from the Institute for Building Biology & Ecology (IBE) is where Alex first learned about the health affects from EMF, and how to measure and mitigate EMF in buildings. EMF resources are becoming increasingly common, but good sites are diamonds in
Read more
No Comments