How To Reduce VOCs in Your Home

Addressing indoor air quality is unfortunately not as easy as simply changing you air filter every few months. The air inside your home is complex. Learn how to protect yourself and loved ones from VOC’s in many different ways. 

Chemicals enter our environments in many different ways through the products we use, our foods, cosmetics and medicines, things we are exposed to outside our home, and of course where we live. Since we are constantly breathing and inhaling whatever is in our immediate environment through the air, it is important for us to take care of our air and personal environment.

Any harmful chemical that enters our personal environment and airspace should be addressed and eliminated. Whether it is on a surface, your belongings, your hands, or in the air, steps should be taken to remove and eliminate them, ideally at the source.

Your body has processes it carries out via a range of biological pathways and organ systems in the body to get rid of some of the chemicals that enter our body. Analogous systems occur in your home. Air filters in HVAC systems remove particulates, we clean and vacuum to remove other dirt and debris, but what systems does your home have for odors and chemicals?

Since the removal of hazardous pollutants from the air is an important application area with significant impact on human health and quality of life, there are a lot of systems designed to address them. Portable home air filters, personal protection respirators, and large scale filtration systems installed in buildings are examples of air filtration products widely used to improve air quality and prevent exposure to harmful particulate pollutants. When it comes to cleaning surfaces, however, most of our cleaning products are actually negatively impacting air quality and increase chemical pollution.

A survey of selected scented consumer goods showed the products emitted more than 100 volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including some that are classified as toxic or hazardous by federal laws.

Steinemann’s study “strongly suggests that we need to find unscented alternatives for cleaning our homes, laundry, and ourselves,” says Claudia Miller, an allergist, and immunologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. An expert in chemical sensitivity, or toxicant-induced loss of tolerance, Miller created the Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory, a screening tool for chemical intolerance. According to Miller, products intended to keep homes smelling fresh can set people up for a lifetime of chemically induced illness, and repeated exposure to small amounts of household chemicals can trigger symptoms to previously tolerated chemicals.“The best smell is no smell,” Miller says. This was first reported in this study.

How Can You Protect Yourself?

An innovative product line called EnviroKlenz has been helping people address these multiple sites of chemical contamination and pollution. The line of products includes a variety of things like Hand Soap, Laundry Enhancers, Cleaning Products, and even Air Filtration products to work together to solve the complex problem of improving air quality.

Treating Chemical Odors in Carpeting and Furniture

A home contains many different surfaces that can harbor chemicals and pollutants
differently. Soft surfaces like rugs and carpets may actually, on a short term basis, act like an air filter by trapping various contaminates both particulates and chemical, but if you don’t clean them often enough they become a chemical storage area and will be recirculated back into the air.

The best way to address soft surfaces lie these to use EnviroKlenz Everyday Odor Eliminator or EnviroKlenz Odor Neutralizer Granules. These two products are directly used on different surfaces to neutralize odors at their chemical source.

When it comes to the belongings in our home, it is often our clothing that is one of the most exposed items we have. We wear our clothing and jackets out into the world and bring back a day’s worth of smells, fragrances, and pollution. I don’t know about you, but I’m repulsed when I buy new clothes and they smell like chemicals.

EnviroKlenz offers an advanced Laundry Enhancer that works with your favorite detergent to eliminate toxins like fragrances, VOC’s and other chemicals. But more importantly the unknown chemical pollution you may have encountered while wearing them. I cannot live without this product to zap chemical odors – especially in new clothes!!!!!

Reducing VOC’s In the Air

Lastly, we are constantly breathing and the world around us is full of chemical pollution, odors, and fragrances. We can each make our own choices for the foods and other things we ingest, but it is much more challenging to choose what is in the air we are breathing.

Using the EnviroKlenz products for surfaces and contents is half the battle and air filtration devices do a great job of removing particulate matter, but chemicals and odors are not easily caught by sized-based filtration technology. EnviroKlenz has been able to address this problem of residual chemical air pollution.

By combining their advanced chemical neutralization technology with particulate removal, one can effectively address two of the biggest contributors to poor indoor air at the same time. They offer air filtration products in both standalone air purification system and through advanced pleated air filters that can be used in many HVAC systems.

The company behind these EnviroKlenz products believes the best methods, products, and technologies should offer the ability to chemically dismantle a wide range of undesirable chemical compounds without releasing fragrances and odors. That logic makes a lot of sense.