You are working hard to make your home energy efficient, comfortable and self-sufficient what more can you do? How about making sure that the environment inside your house is not as bad or worse then that of a major city industrial zone.
It has been shown that because of building materials, furniture, carpet, animals and so on that the indoor air quality can be much worse then your outdoor one. On top of that unless you have some test done you don’t know what is polluting your home. If you have the time and knowledge you can research each product already in your home to see what could be released from each item into your home environment.
Then there are those products that claim to be friendly and not harm you interior air quality, but how to research their claims can be mystery in itself. If you want to make sure that all new products you want to use in your home are safe ask if they are GreenGuard Certified. You can follow this link to search products and find out for yourself about products you own or are thinking of buying.
GreenGuard is an independent tester of products that will not harm the inside environment. Since they are a third party entity this certification is one that can be trusted. GreenGuard has three certification levels, GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®, GREENGUARD for Children & SchoolsSM, and GREENGUARD for Building Construction. As stringent as their indoor air quality certification is they added the level for children and school as children are exposed to more toxins then adults, by eating, drinking and breathing more then adults along with their bodies additional sensitivities. They have used a correction of 0.43 in their standard test to make sure products carrying this certification are also safe to our youth. You can find listing and more detailed information through each of the links provided.
Since we are building our homes to improve the environments we live in, it just make since to make sure that we include indoor air quality in that equation.