Hunting down the sources of air pollution in your home and ways to improve the air quality.
It’s easy to think of air pollution as an outdoor problem in big cities. When you hear about pollution, words like smog, ozone, factory emissions, or car exhaust likely come to mind. But did you know the air in your home or workplace is easily more polluted than the air outside? This is bad news considering that modern homes are built to be airtight, trapping pollutants inside, and people today spend a lot more time indoors than in years past.
Indoor air pollution is mainly caused by things that release particles or gases into the air we breath. A lack of fresh outdoor air to dilute indoor pollution, high indoor humidity levels, and high temperatures combine to increase the concentrations of pollutants. This causes negative health effects such as respiratory problems, headaches, asthma, fatigue, dizziness, lung disease, infections, heart disease, and cancer.
Now you can be in the know when it comes to indoor air pollution and take necessary steps to protect your family – Buford Boot Camp shows you how!
Main Sources
The five main categories of indoor air pollution include combustion sources, building materials, household cleaning and personal care products, biological pollutants, and outdoor pollutants. Combustion sources refer to things that burn, such as oil, kerosene, coal, wood, gas, or tobacco products. Examples of their pollutants are secondhand smoke and dangerous gasses emitted from malfunctioning or unvented stoves, fireplaces, and heaters.
Formaldehyde, largely useful in the biology laboratory, is a chemical found in numerous household materials such as carpet, upholstery, plywood, and particleboard. Asbestos is another dangerous chemical commonly found in materials used to make pipes, walls, roofs, insulation, floors, and ceilings.
You may just want the air to smell like vanilla, your floors to be absolutely sparkly, no more spider webs in the corner, your laundry clean, and your walls painted with a fresh coat of paint, but many of the products used for cleaning and maintaining your home emit hundreds of harmful chemicals into the air.
Mold that grows in an unwashed shower, pollen that settles in the spring, dander from your dog’s fur, dust particles from bugs, and radon (a dangerous radioactive gas found in soil that can make its way into any home through holes in the foundation or drain openings) are biological sources of indoor air pollutants.
Lastly, outdoor pollution finds its way into your home through air cracks, open doors, on your clothes, or on your shoes.
Improve Air Quality
Want to keep dangers out of your home? Buford Fit Body BootCamp provides steps to help ensure you and your family breathe fresh air with these steps.
First, don’t smoke inside your home. The smoke from cigarettes contain upwards of 4,000 chemicals that are known to cause multiple health problems.
Keep your home clean. Vacuum your floors and upholstered furniture regularly with a vacuum containing a HEPA filter to reduce the amount of lead, toxins, allergens, and dust mites in your home. Mop non-carpeted floors with microfiber cloths that capture dust and dirt without the use of cleaning products. And keep a mat by the door to wipe off shoes, preventing dirt, pollutants, and pesticides from entering your home. Better yet, take off your shoes at the door.
Run the bathroom vent during showers, vent the dryer outside, fix leaky pipes, or run a dehumidifier in the basement to reduce the humidity in your home to prevent mold growth.
Purchase fragrance-free products and avoid the use of aerosol sprays. On warm, sunny days open the windows for fresh air circulation and keep a few indoor houseplants in your home to naturally filter the air. As an added precaution, test your home for radon.
Radon Radar. Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that can find its way into any home, new or old. A personal trainer in Buford found that, in the U.S., radon exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer, killing 21,000 people a year. Buy a test kit today.
