The challenge with any article like this is that the correlated impact on health outcomes is always implied in the article but is rarely studied as part of the research cited. Just because a is bad and b has a property similar to a that doesn't imply b has the same harmful impacts as a. I really wish articles would limit big headlines like this unless the research cited was directly comparing mortality and health outcomes directly. 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. A slightly better title could have been 'Scented products cause unexpected levels of indoor air pollution'. I'd even argue 'Scented products cause concerning levels of indoor air pollution' is a reasonable title since it is worth our concern and further study.
Not much to add here other than as someone with terrible allergies and asthma, the constant need for plugin air fresheners, scented candles, scented laundry detergent, and scented lotions, perfumes, febreeze, and scented deodorant drives me crazy. I don't think normal folks realize how they're breathing in straight chemicals all day.
Oh man. A previous employer had someone come around and spray for bugs monthly. I told them to let me know when it was going to be so I could stay away for an afternoon. The exterminator insisted it was perfectly safe and wouldn’t bother me. Yeah, well, immune stuff runs in the family — my older sister had lupus — and it did, in fact, bother me.
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.
There's few things that makes me dislike someone quicker than when they dismiss the suffering of others, or use their own circumstances to dismiss others inability to "just don't X".
Or trivializes other people's work. Like when a lead developer or a manager wants to chime in and say the story point estimate is too much and it should be smaller.
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
I generally try to avoid the word just. However, I'll still occasionally use it during a code review, when I see a large amount of code that can be replaced by something much simpler and smaller.
An ex-coworker introduced the rule that every time someone said "You just..." he increased his estimation by 1 level (standard fibonacci planning poker).
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.
I hate all that stuff too, but I have to nit-pick the last sentence. Everything you breathe is chemicals. Everything that is good for you and bad for you is chemicals.
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".
Of course this is technically correct (almost a cliche really), but I think we all realize that "chemicals" in this context means "novel untested synthetic chemicals." That's a mouthful, so we use shorthand.
Let's not be overly dramatic. Charlatans are already lying, and they can easily switch verbiage.
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.
That’s the thing. The reason why there’s no concise term is because it’s not really a meaningful concept. Does hemlock contain chemicals? Is botulin a chemical? They’re both 100% natural. The colloquial sense is totally meaningless, so by insisting on the scientific definition, you’re stopping marketers from saying nothing while looking like they’re saying something.
Also, ‘things are bad for other reasons’ isn’t an argument for trying to eliminate this particular reason.
When I said "tested" I clearly meant "tested for safety," which addresses those concerns.
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.
> volatile organic compounds or voooooc (can't remember the exact number of o in this acronym)
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.
Science communication is a challenge and this particular discussion is a key part of that challenge. The goal is to be able to get a child to understand the issue at hand while not harming their ability to continue to learn further. The words 'chemical' when referring to 'bad' and 'natural' when referring to 'good', I think, have been abused because of exactly your points. These words have been used to get a quick win on understanding a point, usually about some form of pollution, but generally lead to long term harm in deeper understanding later.
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'
I'd say that it needs a qualifier in general. I'm not against the word "chemicals", but unqualified, it means little more than the word "stuff". It really just needs an adjective, or to be about how many chemicals you're breathing in all day, rather than it being "straight chemicals", which implies that there is another way of existing, without breathing chemicals.
No, it just means harmful chemicals. We're talking about perfumes. Plenty of this stuff has been well-tested and it's toxic, a lot of it is probably toxic if you inhale it in aerosolized/partially burnt form.
Of course, but many people don't. I wouldn't bother if it was just pedantry. It's a discussion I've had many times and it's actually hard to make some people understand that "chemicals" doesn't just mean "synthetic dangerous things made in a lab", or that some labels have ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and unrecognizable that are still safe and natural.
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.
I had a leaky air freshener attached to wall, it dripped on top of baseboard, the chemicals did a better job removing the paint on the baseboard that regular paint removers…
same here. my downstairs neighbour burns garlic for every meal, and then burns some kind of incense to get rid of the smell of garlic. both of them somehow come up through the floor and make me retch, so I have to open the window - at which point she goes outside for a smoke and most of it seems to come in through that window.
live among people, they said. it'll be nice, they said.
Hang in there. It took me 9 different units at 7 different properties in 3 different states to find the one that was just right for me, but it was out there - don't give up :)
I am thankful my workplace has a no scent policy. Unfortunately I have to go into clients homes all day so sometimes run into heavily scented homes. If we report it our boss will inform the client they need to remove it or not use it prior to our visits or open a window. I am thankful that I am naturally not a smelly person (confirmed by girlfriends) and I shower with non scented soap and I don't ever wear deodorant. Sadly I have teens. They over spray perfumes and colognes to the point that I can't even be near them at times. I hope the unscented trend picks up and spreads to more places. Thinking about the topic of scents were you around when you could basically smoke anywhere? I remember the days walking in a mall smoking and people would just drop the smoke and step on it then walk away. Banning smoking from public places where I live was the greatest thing.
One of the reasons I still mask. An N95, while not perfect (an N100 with a carbon layer would be the real ticket), blocks a lot of the common scents. Things like those dangly air fresheners every ride share driver has about 5 of.
I am the opposite. My nose has barely any sensitivity, so I love intense smells, because they actually make me smell something. Also, fuck the people who keep windows open 24/7 even during winter. They make everyone cold just because the air isn't perfectly fresh.
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.
I found that gap annoying, when they finally did address it it was such a hand wavey thing that doesn't actually say it's bad for you. We know particles are being produced, because smell doesn't come from nowhere, so in some regards the whole bit of research could be read as "thing that produces particles, produces particles. Surprise!"
If it's studies you want with quantifiable impacts, I'd recommend you read (part of) this investigation (because it's so long)[0]. A couple of the top recommendations are to extinguish candles with a lid and to ban incense.
> The challenge with any article like this is that the correlated impact on health outcomes is always implied in the article but is rarely studied as part of the research cited.
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.
I fully support research like this, because it's always good to get proper data about phenomena. However, I can't help feeling that the results are unsurprising: how could you smell the scented candles if they weren't producing nanoparticles? Surely the existence or abundance of these nanoparticles was never in question?
This was my initial thought too. Like if I grow a bunch of nice smelling flowers, and crack open a window during the spring. Am I worse or better off than purchasing a scented candle.
Should we as a species stop nice smelling things entirely.
No, but I wouldn't complain if we stopped scenting every damn cleaning and hygiene product. Please, no scented hand soap, or laundry detergent, or especially dish detergent. I'm not gonna complain if people want scented conditioner, but you probably don't need scented shampoo if you're going to condition anyways.
Intuitively I'd guess the scented candle is worse than the flowers. I doubt soot and vaporized wax are good for you.
I just had this discussion with my wife yesterday as she bought a scented product for the dishwasher so it does not smell bad. That stuff has ruined several travel mugs etc as i can not get rid of the smell. When i drink coffee, i want to smell coffee, not some lemon whatever. And it always ends up with me being the bad guy for not being reasonable.
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.
Yeah, they have filters that get nasty without regular cleaning. Physically clean that out, bleach the hell out of it, and run a self-clean cycle or two if the washer has one.
If someone's not cleaning that, I also have some bad news for them about their washing machine.
Sure but, the core of the issue here is demonising "microparticles" entering your nose without any specifics.
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?
Both exist tbh. My more medicinal shampoos smell of nothing or bad (assuming because of the active contents and not to smell more medicinal). Sensitive shampoo/detergents seem to be very lightly scented. Kinda just enough to where you can check if your kid washed their hands by smelling them but it doesn't release a citrus bomb around the sink.
Lots of products smell bad if they're truly unscented. "Unscented" is an effect that is often achieved with... scent. So, still putting stuff in the air for you to smell, but to counter other odors so it smells neutral to you.
When we were little my dad used to check our hands before eating by smelling them, that's why I mentioned it. In retrospective it seems like a great feature since he didn't have to watch us do it and could with time start doing only occasional checks to see if we'll start slipping until we got the habit.
The sub-species that I belong to does stop smelling those nice things entirely as my nose clogs up, eyes water, and convulsions known to many as "sneezing" take over my body.
You don't smell particles, you smell volatile compounds, mostly organic, aka VOCs. These are in their gas phase.
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.
You can smell genuine, non-particulate gaseous molecules just fine. The issue is that there’s a large class of compounds that will form actual particles, and this phenomenon can be responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of smog.
I think it's more so that people don't believe it's bad unless they start drinking parfume.
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.
Read the abstract of the paper. They were demonstrating that combustionless scented products generate very similar levels and types (in chemical composition, size, etc) to scented candles, which they considered noteworthy because many assume the combustion-less products are safer for you (they do not claim to be studying, nor do they make any claims, about health impacts.)
Nanoparticle as a term has a specific technical definition that does not include a random gas made of organic small molecules, which include most molecules we perceive by smell.
I don't have any scented products in my house. Ventilation is key, especially in common areas like the living room. You should open the window occasionally even in the dead of winter to help circulate the air.
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).
> Abundant houseplants help naturally purify the air.
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.
The GP is not talking about removing CO2 from the air.
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.
That is correct. I was trying to make a basic statement. We should be careful not to make excessive claims about the benefits of houseplants, but generally speaking I think they are a benefit.
Given that the planet is not crammed in all dimensions so tightly there'd be no room for humans, and yet we have fresh air outside, I'm doubting your statement a bit.
1) humans aren’t the only thing consuming oxygen outside. Bugs, cows, fish, etc add up. Similarly there’s a lot of empty land and sea without significant plankton.
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.
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.
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.
Well it was great for hundreds of thousands of years, then it was really bad for a couple generations, now it is just less bad for potentially forever. Hardly an improvement when you look at things in scales of our species time on this planet vs since grandad's day.
Yeah, that's easy to underestimate. Where I live they've even declared a ban on open fires; a number of people have a fireplace / pit / thing in their back yard which is used for social events, but during certain weather conditions that smoke lingers. And because firewood is expensive people will use whatever they get their hands on. Also, people don't have proper stoves, and people don't know how to make a proper fire, so the result is... a lot of noxious smoke and poor air quality.
My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft.
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.
What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.
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.
Even then you don't get that sort of quality outside certain economic situations. The proverbial "old house" in california is a stick frame dwelling on a post and pier foundation over a crawlspace.
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.
Look at passive houses, almost fully airtight, 70%+ reduction in heating requirements, fresh air all day long thanks to hrv
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.
> 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?
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.
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...
You can multiply 20W by whatever you want, and if you multiply 1kW by the same number, you will get a number that is 50x as large.
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.)
You seem very proud of your home ventilation system, and very keen to tell us all about it. Im not surprised you dont really care about the power usage to achieve that. Its quite telling that your alternative that you suggest is more power hungry air purifiers.
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!
> Im not surprised you dont really care about the power usage to achieve that. Its quite telling that your alternative that you suggest is more power hungry air purifiers.
Huh? I'm literally explaining, with actual measured numbers, how the ventilation system uses less power. I do care about it!
Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building).
There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.
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.
Really depends where you live and who built the home. Most contractors in the Midwest still aren't sure about putting network cabling in and haven't heard of air exchangers. Seems like the drive is to save 50 cents wherever possible per PVC toilet flanges vs at least PVC and metal ones
Sealed houses in favor of climate control / energy usage has a big impact on people I'm sure. I'm lucky ish in that my house is well insulated but has central ventilation, but only 'suck' so it draws in fresh air from outside. In the same neighbourhood, they built houses with recirculation systems with a heat exchanger so that outside air was pulled in through that. But because the system was noisy (constant fan noises), people would turn the system on low or completely off, causing health issues due to buildup of CO2 and the like. That was uh, a bit of a problem for them and the builders.
The constant fan noise issue always seems a bit absurd to me. There’s an excellent mitigation available that also happens to be to extremely cheap: insulated flexible duct. The cheap mylar-fiberglass-mylar sandwich stuff that’s reinforced with a steel spiral, is sold in big boxes, and is favored by cheap contractors because it’s easy to transport and install.
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!
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.
Air tightness is fine, because when it's done anywhere close to the right way it comes with filtered heat recovery ventilation.
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.
It can be disheartening. I don't know that there's much strong evidence yet that air polluted with synthetic particles leads to bad health effects, but I do know that are lungs have been subjected to things in the last 100 years that they hadn't encountered in the previous 300 million.
Not an easy silver bullet. They'll filter out pm2.5 but most don't touch VOCs. Most that claim to remove VOCs don't have enough volume of activated carbon to justify that. And even if you buy one of the ultra expensive machines that do filter VOCs, you're still left with rapid carbon dioxide accumulation which probably acutely harms cognition even at sub 1000 ppm levels, forcing you to open the windows which is self defeating.
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.
A person breathes 20-22k times a day (although I agree that number will vary greatly among people).
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)
"A forest is a pristine environment..." Hmm, is that really so? The forest air is also full of pollen, fungal spores, viruses and bacteria, all kinds of volatile organic molecules and so on. The terpenes mentioned as problematic come from conifers after all.
Not just conifers. In Los Angeles, liquidambar trees are planted all over for autumn color, and it turns out that they’re an enormous contributor to smog formation.
To be fair, those are large particles, which are neither as dangerous nor as persistent as smaller particles. Unless you’re allergic to them, of course.
PM2.5 is the really nasty carcinogenic stuff, but pollen size overlaps substantially with other forms of soot and IIRC is a double digit percentage of poor urban air quality. It’s somewhere around fourth or fifth largest source.
There weren't many North American conifers on the African savannah when humans were evolving, and our ancestors' reproductive success was not generally affected by air quality. We haven't evolved immunity to things like volcanic gasses which have been around forever. Many plants deliberately evolved to produce toxins. A few of these we find delicious specifically because we did not co-evolve with those plants. Natural = safe is a bad heuristic.
I am having a hard time reconciling the claim in the post headline with common sense.
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.
It’s likely selective factors being measured but on some metric the top engines produce outputs cleaner than air going in so I don’t think it’s all that improbable
> 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.
You’re missing my point entirely. VOCs and PM2.5 are bad for you no doubt, which means this study is showing that these non combustible scented candles are producing measurable levels of dangerous indoor air pollution — we’re all in agreement there. That’s not at all what I meant by common sense and my comment was in no way intended to be a defense of scented products.
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'm supposing that when people say "pollution" they most readily mean the PM and the VOC.
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?"
Well said. I'm not the first to say it, but: common sense ain't so common.
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.
Random smells can trigger headaches for me too. When I was little it was Fanta or Crush, something about the orange. Now I found the Trader Joe’s blood orange tea has the same scent and immediately triggers something.
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.
Completely off topic to the actual article - but...
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.
I mean scented markers are a thing (or are they gone now because they’re “too toxic”?) so scented (or flavored) printer toner doesn’t seem too far fetched
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.
My air purifier was instantly showing red and running at max fan speed, it took me a while to realize that the incense i ignited is causing it to detect the extra particles in the air and spin up. Now the question is whether this is a limitation in air purifiers, their inability to distinguish inert and harmless particles from harmless ones, because all they do currently is just detect particles, not their nature.
When you get down to basics it is all about conservation of mass. Nearly all of the stuff in these products have to end somewhere. So if you have candle or air freshener and it "disappears" with use. It must go to air you breath and then well surfaces and so on.
Meaning that well whatever is in them might get inhaled. Or improperly burned...
The biggest and more recent phenomena is the (at least in Sydney, Australia), the popularity of ambroxan(?) laced perfume. You can't walk into a lunchroom or walk down the street without being literally assaulted by the stuff.
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...
> But have you thought about how you’re contributing to air pollution inside of where you live by using seemingly innocuous products like scented, non-combustible candles?
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?
I cannot wait for the day when people stop scenting their homes and offices with scented products. They smell like chemicals and cause migraines in some people. If you're doing this, please please stop.
As is explained in the research paper, they are marketed as (or considered by the public to be) safer than candles because they don't involve combustion. They show that the same amount/type of particles are nearly the same between the two.
And methanol is not good for anyone, in any measure.
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.
> I'm pretty sure that's why, 100 years ago, there were so many blues folks with names like "Blind Lemon Jefferson"
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.
I don't understand why you'd want anything in your house to release smells independently of delivering some essential function. I find it distracting at best, and headache-inducing at worst. Cosmetic products are particularly offensive. Let this study serve as a call to eliminate stinky products!
Generally the "pleasant" odor is meant to cover up some combination of "unpleasant" odors. It's nice when the area around a liter box doesn't smell like cat piss.
I agree wholeheartedly. The more unnatural the scent the more it impacts me. Cinnamon is tolerable but as we trend towards “beach day bonfire” it creates a feeling in my olfactory system similar to tasting something sickly sweet. I think it ties back to my brain smelling what I expect to be eating.
The challenge with any article like this is that the correlated impact on health outcomes is always implied in the article but is rarely studied as part of the research cited. Just because a is bad and b has a property similar to a that doesn't imply b has the same harmful impacts as a. I really wish articles would limit big headlines like this unless the research cited was directly comparing mortality and health outcomes directly. 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. A slightly better title could have been 'Scented products cause unexpected levels of indoor air pollution'. I'd even argue 'Scented products cause concerning levels of indoor air pollution' is a reasonable title since it is worth our concern and further study.
Not much to add here other than as someone with terrible allergies and asthma, the constant need for plugin air fresheners, scented candles, scented laundry detergent, and scented lotions, perfumes, febreeze, and scented deodorant drives me crazy. I don't think normal folks realize how they're breathing in straight chemicals all day.
Oh man. A previous employer had someone come around and spray for bugs monthly. I told them to let me know when it was going to be so I could stay away for an afternoon. The exterminator insisted it was perfectly safe and wouldn’t bother me. Yeah, well, immune stuff runs in the family — my older sister had lupus — and it did, in fact, bother me.
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.
There's few things that makes me dislike someone quicker than when they dismiss the suffering of others, or use their own circumstances to dismiss others inability to "just don't X".
Look, man, shut up.
Or trivializes other people's work. Like when a lead developer or a manager wants to chime in and say the story point estimate is too much and it should be smaller.
> 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"
> 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
I generally try to avoid the word just. However, I'll still occasionally use it during a code review, when I see a large amount of code that can be replaced by something much simpler and smaller.
I am all for it if you are willing and able to sit down and follow through. Or at least show me the way. I can't read minds.
An ex-coworker introduced the rule that every time someone said "You just..." he increased his estimation by 1 level (standard fibonacci planning poker).
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.
Always disliked that word. Replace it with "simply", then we can debate how simple it is.
Simply just basically don't.
I hate all that stuff too, but I have to nit-pick the last sentence. Everything you breathe is chemicals. Everything that is good for you and bad for you is chemicals.
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".
Of course this is technically correct (almost a cliche really), but I think we all realize that "chemicals" in this context means "novel untested synthetic chemicals." That's a mouthful, so we use shorthand.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s still bad. It’s the kind of woolly definition that lets charlatans get away with blatant lies in advertising.
Let's not be overly dramatic. Charlatans are already lying, and they can easily switch verbiage.
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.
That’s the thing. The reason why there’s no concise term is because it’s not really a meaningful concept. Does hemlock contain chemicals? Is botulin a chemical? They’re both 100% natural. The colloquial sense is totally meaningless, so by insisting on the scientific definition, you’re stopping marketers from saying nothing while looking like they’re saying something.
Also, ‘things are bad for other reasons’ isn’t an argument for trying to eliminate this particular reason.
When I said "tested" I clearly meant "tested for safety," which addresses those concerns.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
I thought when they said chemicals, they meant volatile organic compounds or voooooc (can't remember the exact number of o in this acronym)
> volatile organic compounds or voooooc (can't remember the exact number of o in this acronym)
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.
I meant I don't remember if there are other words between volatile and compounds in that terms (:
> so we use shorthand
Which is fine until the shorthand breaks containment, the nuance is lost, and the masses generalize it far beyond what was originally intended.
Science communication is a challenge and this particular discussion is a key part of that challenge. The goal is to be able to get a child to understand the issue at hand while not harming their ability to continue to learn further. The words 'chemical' when referring to 'bad' and 'natural' when referring to 'good', I think, have been abused because of exactly your points. These words have been used to get a quick win on understanding a point, usually about some form of pollution, but generally lead to long term harm in deeper understanding later.
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'
I'd say that it needs a qualifier in general. I'm not against the word "chemicals", but unqualified, it means little more than the word "stuff". It really just needs an adjective, or to be about how many chemicals you're breathing in all day, rather than it being "straight chemicals", which implies that there is another way of existing, without breathing chemicals.
No, it just means harmful chemicals. We're talking about perfumes. Plenty of this stuff has been well-tested and it's toxic, a lot of it is probably toxic if you inhale it in aerosolized/partially burnt form.
Of course, but many people don't. I wouldn't bother if it was just pedantry. It's a discussion I've had many times and it's actually hard to make some people understand that "chemicals" doesn't just mean "synthetic dangerous things made in a lab", or that some labels have ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and unrecognizable that are still safe and natural.
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.
I would take it down a notch.
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.
Exactly. I assumed synthetic was understood.
I don't want to breathe natural pollen or natural smoke byproducts from natural wildfires or natural dandruff or fur/hair either.
I want to mostly breathe nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and a bit of water for comfortable humidity. I don't need anything more.
Chemical allergies are an area where I'm fine oversimplifying decisions and using a simple heuristic of "if my body says no, stay the heck away."
Of our five senses, smell is the most well attuned for detecting something that'll hurt us internally (ie poison cancer).
I had a leaky air freshener attached to wall, it dripped on top of baseboard, the chemicals did a better job removing the paint on the baseboard that regular paint removers…
same here. my downstairs neighbour burns garlic for every meal, and then burns some kind of incense to get rid of the smell of garlic. both of them somehow come up through the floor and make me retch, so I have to open the window - at which point she goes outside for a smoke and most of it seems to come in through that window.
live among people, they said. it'll be nice, they said.
Obviously this is your own fault for accepting the social contract, you should've declined back when you had the chance! /s
I'm moving soon, and I'll defect by not mentioning it to prospective tenants when they visit. I'd like my deposit back.
Joking aside, sorry you have to deal with this. I know how stressful nuisance neighbors can be. Best of luck on your upcoming move!
thanks! I'm overly sensitive, so I'm sure I'll find something to hate about the new place!
Hang in there. It took me 9 different units at 7 different properties in 3 different states to find the one that was just right for me, but it was out there - don't give up :)
I am thankful my workplace has a no scent policy. Unfortunately I have to go into clients homes all day so sometimes run into heavily scented homes. If we report it our boss will inform the client they need to remove it or not use it prior to our visits or open a window. I am thankful that I am naturally not a smelly person (confirmed by girlfriends) and I shower with non scented soap and I don't ever wear deodorant. Sadly I have teens. They over spray perfumes and colognes to the point that I can't even be near them at times. I hope the unscented trend picks up and spreads to more places. Thinking about the topic of scents were you around when you could basically smoke anywhere? I remember the days walking in a mall smoking and people would just drop the smoke and step on it then walk away. Banning smoking from public places where I live was the greatest thing.
One of the reasons I still mask. An N95, while not perfect (an N100 with a carbon layer would be the real ticket), blocks a lot of the common scents. Things like those dangly air fresheners every ride share driver has about 5 of.
You're right. Almost every Uber driver has one and I immediately worry about the sneezing, headaches, and wheezing.
Sad how masking has become such a bugbear[1] that this eminently sensible and practical solution is somehow controversial.
[1 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bugbear
I am the opposite. My nose has barely any sensitivity, so I love intense smells, because they actually make me smell something. Also, fuck the people who keep windows open 24/7 even during winter. They make everyone cold just because the air isn't perfectly fresh.
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.
Did you invite him on purpose?
I found that gap annoying, when they finally did address it it was such a hand wavey thing that doesn't actually say it's bad for you. We know particles are being produced, because smell doesn't come from nowhere, so in some regards the whole bit of research could be read as "thing that produces particles, produces particles. Surprise!"
If it's studies you want with quantifiable impacts, I'd recommend you read (part of) this investigation (because it's so long)[0]. A couple of the top recommendations are to extinguish candles with a lid and to ban incense.
[0] https://dynomight.net/air/
> The challenge with any article like this is that the correlated impact on health outcomes is always implied in the article but is rarely studied as part of the research cited.
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.
I fully support research like this, because it's always good to get proper data about phenomena. However, I can't help feeling that the results are unsurprising: how could you smell the scented candles if they weren't producing nanoparticles? Surely the existence or abundance of these nanoparticles was never in question?
This was my initial thought too. Like if I grow a bunch of nice smelling flowers, and crack open a window during the spring. Am I worse or better off than purchasing a scented candle.
Should we as a species stop nice smelling things entirely.
No, but I wouldn't complain if we stopped scenting every damn cleaning and hygiene product. Please, no scented hand soap, or laundry detergent, or especially dish detergent. I'm not gonna complain if people want scented conditioner, but you probably don't need scented shampoo if you're going to condition anyways.
Intuitively I'd guess the scented candle is worse than the flowers. I doubt soot and vaporized wax are good for you.
I just had this discussion with my wife yesterday as she bought a scented product for the dishwasher so it does not smell bad. That stuff has ruined several travel mugs etc as i can not get rid of the smell. When i drink coffee, i want to smell coffee, not some lemon whatever. And it always ends up with me being the bad guy for not being reasonable.
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 the dishwasher smells bad without using a scented product, that sounds like a problem with the dishwasher's maintenance.
Yup just needed some cleaning
Yeah, they have filters that get nasty without regular cleaning. Physically clean that out, bleach the hell out of it, and run a self-clean cycle or two if the washer has one.
If someone's not cleaning that, I also have some bad news for them about their washing machine.
Sure but, the core of the issue here is demonising "microparticles" entering your nose without any specifics.
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?
Both exist tbh. My more medicinal shampoos smell of nothing or bad (assuming because of the active contents and not to smell more medicinal). Sensitive shampoo/detergents seem to be very lightly scented. Kinda just enough to where you can check if your kid washed their hands by smelling them but it doesn't release a citrus bomb around the sink.
Lots of products smell bad if they're truly unscented. "Unscented" is an effect that is often achieved with... scent. So, still putting stuff in the air for you to smell, but to counter other odors so it smells neutral to you.
The scent thing can be useful for a forgetful person wondering "did I wash my hands recently?"
When we were little my dad used to check our hands before eating by smelling them, that's why I mentioned it. In retrospective it seems like a great feature since he didn't have to watch us do it and could with time start doing only occasional checks to see if we'll start slipping until we got the habit.
Imagine how much “air pollution” one inhales when taking a big whiff of a nice curry.
Actually, it's the cooking that pollutes your indoor air the most. Once the food is on the table, most of the damage is already done.
Don't you mean an hour after consuming said curry? :)
The sub-species that I belong to does stop smelling those nice things entirely as my nose clogs up, eyes water, and convulsions known to many as "sneezing" take over my body.
Same here, including incense and most in home fireplaces.
You don't smell particles, you smell volatile compounds, mostly organic, aka VOCs. These are in their gas phase.
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.
You can smell genuine, non-particulate gaseous molecules just fine. The issue is that there’s a large class of compounds that will form actual particles, and this phenomenon can be responsible for a surprisingly large fraction of smog.
Don't underestimate the amount of education needed for this opinion to be understood and enter conscious awareness.
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.
I think it's more so that people don't believe it's bad unless they start drinking parfume.
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.
Read the abstract of the paper. They were demonstrating that combustionless scented products generate very similar levels and types (in chemical composition, size, etc) to scented candles, which they considered noteworthy because many assume the combustion-less products are safer for you (they do not claim to be studying, nor do they make any claims, about health impacts.)
> how could you smell the scented candles if they weren't producing nanoparticles?
By smelling a gas?
Gases are also made of particles. Molecules that you can smell are easily a nanometer across.
Nanoparticle as a term has a specific technical definition that does not include a random gas made of organic small molecules, which include most molecules we perceive by smell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoparticle#Definitions ?
Sure, and most small organic molecules are an order of magnitude smaller than that definition.
What? Not an a whole order of magnitude.
I thought most orderants were around 0.5 to 1nm in diameter.
The nanoparticles that are the subject of the article are not single molecules.
I don't have any scented products in my house. Ventilation is key, especially in common areas like the living room. You should open the window occasionally even in the dead of winter to help circulate the air.
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).
> Abundant houseplants help naturally purify the air.
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.
The GP is not talking about removing CO2 from the air.
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.
That is correct. I was trying to make a basic statement. We should be careful not to make excessive claims about the benefits of houseplants, but generally speaking I think they are a benefit.
Given that the planet is not crammed in all dimensions so tightly there'd be no room for humans, and yet we have fresh air outside, I'm doubting your statement a bit.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/research-highlight-ocean-air-f...
1) the planet is a big, BIG place and there are rainforests and oceans. Like, all of the air that we breathe originally started from ocean life.
and 2) there have been studies on this done by NASA, et al, and the general consensus was you need a lot of plants
1) humans aren’t the only thing consuming oxygen outside. Bugs, cows, fish, etc add up. Similarly there’s a lot of empty land and sea without significant plankton.
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.
The planet is a bit larger than a house though.
We have the ocean
Vacuums don’t capture all of the dust they stir up. When you can, vacuum with the windows open.
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.
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.
Air quality is much, much better than it used to be.
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.
Well it was great for hundreds of thousands of years, then it was really bad for a couple generations, now it is just less bad for potentially forever. Hardly an improvement when you look at things in scales of our species time on this planet vs since grandad's day.
Yeah, that's easy to underestimate. Where I live they've even declared a ban on open fires; a number of people have a fireplace / pit / thing in their back yard which is used for social events, but during certain weather conditions that smoke lingers. And because firewood is expensive people will use whatever they get their hands on. Also, people don't have proper stoves, and people don't know how to make a proper fire, so the result is... a lot of noxious smoke and poor air quality.
My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft.
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.
What are average high and low temperatures where you live in the UK? I looked up the averages for the UK as a whole (which I’m sure can vary quite a bit once you get more local) but I found between 20C and 2C.
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.
We have highs of mid 30s and lows down to -10.
Stone is an incredibly efficient thermal material which is why animals and humans have lived in caves for thousands of years.
> 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.
They also died in caves for thousands of years. They lived there because it was the best shelter available, not because it was the ideal shelter.
Even then you don't get that sort of quality outside certain economic situations. The proverbial "old house" in california is a stick frame dwelling on a post and pier foundation over a crawlspace.
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.
What's the average temperature in your house on a cold winter day?
Look at passive houses, almost fully airtight, 70%+ reduction in heating requirements, fresh air all day long thanks to hrv
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.
> fresh air all day long thanks to hrv
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.
> 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?
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.
> Really?
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...
You can multiply 20W by whatever you want, and if you multiply 1kW by the same number, you will get a number that is 50x as large.
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.)
You seem very proud of your home ventilation system, and very keen to tell us all about it. Im not surprised you dont really care about the power usage to achieve that. Its quite telling that your alternative that you suggest is more power hungry air purifiers.
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!
> Im not surprised you dont really care about the power usage to achieve that. Its quite telling that your alternative that you suggest is more power hungry air purifiers.
Huh? I'm literally explaining, with actual measured numbers, how the ventilation system uses less power. I do care about it!
Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building).
There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.
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.
Sealed modern houses usually come with an HRV or ERV so that your air is regularly replaced filtered fresh air.
Really depends where you live and who built the home. Most contractors in the Midwest still aren't sure about putting network cabling in and haven't heard of air exchangers. Seems like the drive is to save 50 cents wherever possible per PVC toilet flanges vs at least PVC and metal ones
Tight homes dont happen by accident. If the contractor is just getting by, they likely arent building a home that needs passive ventilation.
Finding out that the reason my toilet was wobbling was because multiple people thought PVC was okay to use structurally was infuriating.
Sealed houses in favor of climate control / energy usage has a big impact on people I'm sure. I'm lucky ish in that my house is well insulated but has central ventilation, but only 'suck' so it draws in fresh air from outside. In the same neighbourhood, they built houses with recirculation systems with a heat exchanger so that outside air was pulled in through that. But because the system was noisy (constant fan noises), people would turn the system on low or completely off, causing health issues due to buildup of CO2 and the like. That was uh, a bit of a problem for them and the builders.
The constant fan noise issue always seems a bit absurd to me. There’s an excellent mitigation available that also happens to be to extremely cheap: insulated flexible duct. The cheap mylar-fiberglass-mylar sandwich stuff that’s reinforced with a steel spiral, is sold in big boxes, and is favored by cheap contractors because it’s easy to transport and install.
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.
Air tightness is fine, because when it's done anywhere close to the right way it comes with filtered heat recovery ventilation.
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.
> all kind of glues
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.
It can be disheartening. I don't know that there's much strong evidence yet that air polluted with synthetic particles leads to bad health effects, but I do know that are lungs have been subjected to things in the last 100 years that they hadn't encountered in the previous 300 million.
Inhaled particulates are never good news. Varying degrees of bad, but none of it is good.
Modern homes have to have HRV systems for removing indoor air and replacing it.
I uploaded you for nosedive and didn't read anything after that. Figured it couldn't get any better!
get some air filters
Not an easy silver bullet. They'll filter out pm2.5 but most don't touch VOCs. Most that claim to remove VOCs don't have enough volume of activated carbon to justify that. And even if you buy one of the ultra expensive machines that do filter VOCs, you're still left with rapid carbon dioxide accumulation which probably acutely harms cognition even at sub 1000 ppm levels, forcing you to open the windows which is self defeating.
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.
The carbon filters are also a second more expensive consumable on top of the particulate filter.
Yes and the problem is you need a lot of activated carbon. A thin sheet of it is just theatre.
Not to forget also that inhaled micro/nano particles get into the bloodstream more easily than ingested particles.
It's probably way more than that, IMO. Like 10x more.
Edit: Back of the envelope math puts it around 60-70kg per day, conservatively.
Can I just stop being right?
Where does our math differ?
2,000 gallons/day * 4.6 grams/gallon = 20.3 lbs.
https://www.lung.org/blog/how-your-lungs-work
A person breathes 20-22k times a day (although I agree that number will vary greatly among people).
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)
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I think as an American, "food" should be in quotation marks
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A rule of thumb is that if you paid sales tax for it, it's probably not food.
Of course "not food" is mostly fine.
Everything in New Hampshire is food
Not a great rule of thumb as every state and municipality is different in this regard.
Many places will have different rates for raw food, prepared to go / delivery, and prepared for on-site consumption.
https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2024/08/26/109453/109453/
Some states tax all food.
California logic, I feel you.
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Actually Americans are the first to invent everything, including food.
Oh so they could hypothetically make food they just choose not to. Makes sense.
"A forest is a pristine environment..." Hmm, is that really so? The forest air is also full of pollen, fungal spores, viruses and bacteria, all kinds of volatile organic molecules and so on. The terpenes mentioned as problematic come from conifers after all.
Not just conifers. In Los Angeles, liquidambar trees are planted all over for autumn color, and it turns out that they’re an enormous contributor to smog formation.
And male trees upping pm because they’re lonely and looking for love.
To be fair, those are large particles, which are neither as dangerous nor as persistent as smaller particles. Unless you’re allergic to them, of course.
PM2.5 is the really nasty carcinogenic stuff, but pollen size overlaps substantially with other forms of soot and IIRC is a double digit percentage of poor urban air quality. It’s somewhere around fourth or fifth largest source.
Things we had hundreds millions of years to evolve with and adapt too... now we have brake pad dust and haribo strawberry flavored candles
I'm pretty allergic to all those things so I'm going to disagree with your implied preference and take the haribo and brake pad dust all day.
Would the world be a better place if we had brake pad dust flavored candies? I like to believe so.
There weren't many North American conifers on the African savannah when humans were evolving, and our ancestors' reproductive success was not generally affected by air quality. We haven't evolved immunity to things like volcanic gasses which have been around forever. Many plants deliberately evolved to produce toxins. A few of these we find delicious specifically because we did not co-evolve with those plants. Natural = safe is a bad heuristic.
I am having a hard time reconciling the claim in the post headline with common sense.
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.
It’s likely selective factors being measured but on some metric the top engines produce outputs cleaner than air going in so I don’t think it’s all that improbable
> 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.
You’re missing my point entirely. VOCs and PM2.5 are bad for you no doubt, which means this study is showing that these non combustible scented candles are producing measurable levels of dangerous indoor air pollution — we’re all in agreement there. That’s not at all what I meant by common sense and my comment was in no way intended to be a defense of scented products.
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'm supposing that when people say "pollution" they most readily mean the PM and the VOC.
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?"
Well said. I'm not the first to say it, but: common sense ain't so common.
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.
When I saw the title, I half-expected it to be this researcher: https://www.drsteinemann.com/
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.
Random smells can trigger headaches for me too. When I was little it was Fanta or Crush, something about the orange. Now I found the Trader Joe’s blood orange tea has the same scent and immediately triggers something.
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.
Completely off topic to the actual article - but...
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.
I wonder just how bad those essential oil diffusers are, compared with, say, smoking, laser printers, and tyre microplastics.
My plan to sell flavoured printer toner has been foiled.
Who would not want their print out to smell like fresh apple pie?
> My plan to sell flavoured printer toner has been foiled.
> 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?
Gives a very different meaning to eating your words.
I mean scented markers are a thing (or are they gone now because they’re “too toxic”?) so scented (or flavored) printer toner doesn’t seem too far fetched
and yes I am one of those people who enjoyed the smell of freshly laser printed pages
Also scented paper
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.
Scented markers, as well as pencils, are still a thing.
You can also get scented paper, but it seems mostly thicker paper meant as drawer liners.
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Maybe you're not old enough to have cultivated a taste for (or addiction to) the smell of fresh ditto printed pages.
My air purifier was instantly showing red and running at max fan speed, it took me a while to realize that the incense i ignited is causing it to detect the extra particles in the air and spin up. Now the question is whether this is a limitation in air purifiers, their inability to distinguish inert and harmless particles from harmless ones, because all they do currently is just detect particles, not their nature.
How sure are you that it's harmless? Campfire smoke is pretty bad for your lungs.
What makes you think soot from incense is “harmless”?
I wonder about the inline air fragrance systems used by pretty much every hotel these days to produce a "signature scent".
These must be nicer hotels than any of the ones I’ve ever been to…
The signature scent of Motel 6 is leftover Long John Silvers and Waffle House.
When you get down to basics it is all about conservation of mass. Nearly all of the stuff in these products have to end somewhere. So if you have candle or air freshener and it "disappears" with use. It must go to air you breath and then well surfaces and so on.
Meaning that well whatever is in them might get inhaled. Or improperly burned...
The biggest and more recent phenomena is the (at least in Sydney, Australia), the popularity of ambroxan(?) laced perfume. You can't walk into a lunchroom or walk down the street without being literally assaulted by the stuff.
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...
> But have you thought about how you’re contributing to air pollution inside of where you live by using seemingly innocuous products like scented, non-combustible candles?
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?
I believe this is a strange way to refer to wickless candles, which are used with candle warmers.
Probably, those wick-only stuff that people put one end in an oil, and let it evaporate though the body.
Yeah, I stopped going to houses that ran those plug-in diffusers.
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.
Most (all?) "essential oil" products, used in diffusers, are edible. I like the peppermint oil as a breath freshener.
My dumbass Republican family members don't use the "essential oil" ones -- they use whatever cheap corporate bullshit from Glade or whoever.
It's good to know, however, that non-chemical ones are available. Thanks.
When we had the Canada fires months ago I bought a air quality sensor that measures among other things CO2. Right now shows 548 PPM which means good.
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.
I use essential oils in water in an ultrasonic diffuser. Does that reduce the toxicity at all? Is the issue here mostly wax?
Is 30 minutes too much to handle, to burn an indoor candle?
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.
Yeah... I understand the intent here, but what people are going to hear is "oh car exhaust isn't that bad then".
I cannot wait for the day when people stop scenting their homes and offices with scented products. They smell like chemicals and cause migraines in some people. If you're doing this, please please stop.
Or burning CPAP machines: https://www.apneaboard.com/forums/Thread-ResMed-AirSense-10-...
Does anyone have any clue what the point of "scentless wax melts" even is? Like isn't the scent the whole point of the product?
As is explained in the research paper, they are marketed as (or considered by the public to be) safer than candles because they don't involve combustion. They show that the same amount/type of particles are nearly the same between the two.
The point is to make money. Any notional utility by the consumer is a byproduct.
...and so do perfumes, most likely.
And methanol is not good for anyone, in any measure.
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.
> I'm pretty sure that's why, 100 years ago, there were so many blues folks with names like "Blind Lemon Jefferson"
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...
Thanks!
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I don't understand why you'd want anything in your house to release smells independently of delivering some essential function. I find it distracting at best, and headache-inducing at worst. Cosmetic products are particularly offensive. Let this study serve as a call to eliminate stinky products!
Generally the "pleasant" odor is meant to cover up some combination of "unpleasant" odors. It's nice when the area around a liter box doesn't smell like cat piss.
I would counter that it now smells like a combination of perfume and cat piss
Well if it's weighted heavily enough towards the perfume side that's still preferable.
I agree wholeheartedly. The more unnatural the scent the more it impacts me. Cinnamon is tolerable but as we trend towards “beach day bonfire” it creates a feeling in my olfactory system similar to tasting something sickly sweet. I think it ties back to my brain smelling what I expect to be eating.