Carpet's NSF-140 Better Than Green Building For Indoor Air Quality

Environmental Expert: Green Building Not the Same as Healthy Building. Carpet industry’s NSF-140 Sustainability standard deals with environment and health

At the recent NeoCon World Trade Fair in Chicago, I attended a seminar titled, “Stop and Smell the VOCs: How to Design for Healthy Buildings”. It was presented by Henning Bloech, executive director of GREENGUARD Environmental Institute in Marietta, Georgia.

The introduction to the seminar read, “More than 80 million people suffer from debilitating asthma, allergies, respiratory disease and other ailments attributable to indoor chemical exposure. While sustainable design mandates good indoor air quality, most “green design” programs offer only rudimentary guidance.”

Henning’s point was this – that a green building is not necessarily a healthy building. Current systems of designing green buildings (the U.S Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program being the most prominent), depend too much on filling out a checklist of requirements, and do not focus enough on the health of the intended inhabitants.

“We must look at a building as a holistic system – at its core is how the building will affect the occupants – that kind of thinking has gotten lost. We must recognize that, even if you choose a product with recycled content, if it’s full of unhealthy pollutants, it’s not necessarily a good choice,” he said.

As an example, Henning spoke about a case he was involved in where the residents of one of the first LEED for Residences Gold-certified houses became ill within weeks of occupying their new home. Indoor air quality measurements immediately showed a high chemical load in the air. The culprit? A foam spray-in insulation that was not a low-emitting product. It certainly wasn’t the carpet, as the home had very little carpet - even as area rugs. LEED for Residences actually gives a point credit to homes that have no installed carpet – a fact the carpet industry strongly objects to and disagrees with.

Henning told the designers in the audience to keep the health of their buildings’ occupants, “topmost in your minds.” He said LEED was “A toolbox; not the end-all of green buildings, and he urged designers to look, “beyond the checklist.” He added that GreenGuard recommends clearance testing for the health of Indoor Air Quality prior to a new building being occupied.

Henning praised the carpet industry for being at the forefront of Indoor Air Quality testing. The carpet industry’s ANSI/NSF 140 Carpet Sustainability Assessment standard looks at sustainability from what Henning calls “the triple bottom line” of people, products, and processes, and it includes health issues as well, in that, for a carpet to be certified under the standard, it must first pass the Green Label Plus standard for Indoor Air Quality.

Thank you, Henning, for helping people understand this complex subject.

~Bethany