what's in your paint

Thinking about Indoor Air Quality: What's In Your Paint?
by Jim Quigley, MS, Healthy Spaces

Everyone wants to have a healthy, safe and comfortable home.  Often we try to make the home cozier by altering the paint color in warm or cooler shades.  What color to pick, though, often gets more thought than what's in the paint itself. Let’s take a look and talk about some good paint options.

What’s in Paint?
Some ingredients of caution are called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), chemicals that readily evaporate into the indoor air.  In other words, we can breathe them -- but we shouldn't. VOCs can continue to evaporate for approximately six months, much longer than it actually would take for the paint to dry.  

Referencing a brand name paint, from the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) list of ingredients, we choose one VOC and investigated its potential health impact:  Styrene. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR), “Exposure to styrene is most likely to occur from breathing indoor air that is contaminated with styrene vapors from building materials, tobacco smoke, and use of copying machines.”

Published research has Styrene associated with impairments in memory or attention span, hearing loss, heart attacks, or developmental delay in children. We are not addressing the dosage required to experience these conditions, merely raising awareness about the potential health impact. Styrene is just one VOC of many of which health risk is present.  

What do you do about it?

If you plan to paint, you can choose paint formulated without the VOCs which are known to cause harm.  It's very important to understand that "Low VOC" paint does not mean it's healthy; it only means the paint causes less smog formation.  It can still be very unhealthy.

Some brands of paint that are formulated differently and are available locally include those below. You can visit their websites to learn more and find local dealers:

If you have painted recently and are concerned that you already have a VOC problem, you can have your air tested.  It's relatively inexpensive.  If the tests indicate a VOC problem, there are several steps you can take to safeguard your health. To learn more about indoor air quality in general, go to:
http://www.epa.gov/iedweb00/voc.html