Monthly Archives: May 2013

Natural Mosquito Repellent

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Today is the Thursday before Memorial Day and hey, I should be thinking of summer.  Unfortunately, right now it is 40 degrees and the weather service says it feels closer to 33 with a stiff wind out of the north.  So with the temperatures feeling more like mid-November than late-May, please forgive me if this post seems a bit premature, but I assure you, you’ll need this information soon enough.

Mosquitos.  They are a sure sign of summer.  And they used to be a minor nuisance, but after the last couple summers, we now know that a simple mosquito bite can be deadly.  We also know that the sprays some municipalities are using in reaction to the West Niles outbreaks can detrimentally effect the health of humans, pets, and the environment.  Seethis petition from Altoona, Iowa as one example of not just the growing West Niles problem, but the health concerns that arise after our own reaction to it.

I came across something in my inbox today that talks about natural ways of repelling these little buggers.  So please follow this advice this summer and let me know how it works.

You can always ignore this advice and slather on the Off! insect repellent, but here’s a warning that comes direct from the Center for Disease Control when using Off! or any of the other EPA-registered insect repellent sprays:

Precautions when Using Insect Repellents:

  • Apply repellents only to exposed skin or clothing, as directed on the product label.
  • Do not use repellents under clothing.
  • Never use repellents over cuts, wounds, or irritated skin.
  • Do not apply repellents to eyes or mouth, and apply sparingly around ears.
  • When using sprays, do not spray directly on face—spray on hands first and then apply to face.
  • Wash hands after application to avoid accidental exposure to eyes. Children should not handle repellents. Instead, adults should apply repellents to their own hands first, and then gently spread on the child’s exposed skin. Avoid applying directly to children’s hands.
  • Use just enough repellent to cover exposed skin or clothing. Heavy application and saturation are generally unnecessary for effectiveness. If biting insects do not respond to a thin film of repellent, apply a bit more.
  • After returning indoors, wash treated skin with soap and water or bathe. This is particularly important when repellents are used repeatedly in a day or on consecutive days.
  • Wash treated clothing before wearing it again. This precaution may vary with different repellents—check the product label.

Let me repeat one line from above: CHILDREN SHOULD NOT HANDLE REPELLENTS.  Are you sure you still want this stuff around your home this summer?

So please try a natural alternative.  And if one does not work, try another natural alternative.  Or make your own mix.   I used to tell my customers at Whole Foods that we are all biochemically different–a supplement that works for you may not work for your husband or vice-versa.  The same can be said for insect sprays.  Keep trying until you find a product that works with your own biochemistry.  But please put the chemicals away and keep trying.

13 Uses for Baking Soda

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I’ve written in previous posts that building healthy homes is a start, but to enjoy a totally healthy home requires its occupants to adopt and practice a healthy lifestyle day-in and day-out.  

One way to start down that path is to ditch your regular cleaning products and begin a routine of nontoxic housecleaning.  Your home will not only be healthier, you’ll probably save a few dollars to boot.

So where to begin?  The good news is that there are many sources of information on which nontoxic cleaners to use and where to buy them, with one of my favorite sources being Mother Earth Living magazine which has a bevy of articles on this, and related, topics.  I visit their web site frequently, but also subscribe to the hard copy so I can cut and save articles of interest.

We won’t get into the nitty gritty tonight of what constitutes “nontoxic” or most of the chemistry that underpins the effectiveness of certain cleaners.  Instead we’ll stick with describing the basic toolbox of natural cleaners that you’ll need to get started and leave you with a link that offers 13 ways to use baking soda around the house.

Most natural cleaners may be found at the local grocery store–although not all of them in the cleaning aisle–and some of these items you may already have in your cupboard.  I consider the top three natural cleaners to be:

  1. Baking soda;
  2. White Vinegar; and
  3. Plain old natural soap.

Many people consider sodium bicarbonate–a mineral derived from soda ash and commonly known as baking soda–to be the star of a natural cleaning pantry.  Its slightly alkaline composition and abrasive texture means it not only effectively treat odors caused by acids, but also very useful when scrubbing household surfaces like sinks, countertops, appliances and bathroom fixtures.

Vinegar is slightly acidic and therefore used around the home to primarily corrode and dissolve.  It is also a powerful sanitizer, though not recognized formally by the EPA as a disinfectant, known to kill bacteria, molds, and microbes.  When shopping for vinegar, you’ll want to buy the larger containers of distilled 5% white vinegar.  Red wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar can leave stains behind and larger containers will be your best value.

And when it comes to soap, well, I’ll always remember my mom stocking our house with bars of Ivory soap growing up.  The Ivory was used every night around bath time, but would occasionally make its way into other cleaning projects.  

Soaps can come solid or in liquid form. The solid varieties use a vegetable- or nut-oil base, (you’ll see these sometimes labeled as castile soap), or use animal products like beef tallow as the ‘glue’ to hold them together if in solid form.  

But the liquids are what works best for household cleaning and there are many very fine natural soaps available to consumers.  One of my customer’s favorites when working at Whole Foods was Dr. Bonner’s made with organic ingredients, certified fair trade, not tested on animals, and came scented with essential oils.

FYI, detergents work like soaps but are manufactured using synthetic ingredients…. developed during World War II when oils were in short supply.  If you must use a regular detergent instead of a natural soap, try to find one that is not derived from petroleum products, is biodegradable, and phosphate-free.

With all that said, here’s the link to the latest from Mother Earth Living and their recap of the top ways to use baking soda around your home.

Happy natural cleaning!

 

Leave No Child Inside

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From time to time, I’ll post a link or reference here to one of my favorite organizations or causes– typically to an event or calendar of events that somehow relates to healthy homes or a more healthy, natural lifestyle–and which I feel you might be interested in too.  At the very least, if you’re reading this blog on a regular basis, I’m confident you’ll find people within these organizations and at these events who you’ll find interesting and who share your values.

The first organization I want to introduce you to is Chicago Wilderness.  Their “Children Outdoor Bill of Rights” is a credo that the Ahlheim family tries to live by every week and something that ought to be posted in every Chicago Public School classroom.  In case you did not know, Chicago Wilderness has cleverly labeled June as ‘Leave No Child Inside’ month, and here’s the link to all the regional June activities that provide an opportunity for kids and family to get out and explore:

http://www.chicagowilderness.org/what-we-do/leave-no-child-inside/june-is-leave-no-child-inside-month/

I encourage you to reach out to Chicago Wilderness if you know of an event worthy of making the list but not currently on it.

The second organization I’ll mention tonight is a group called Seed Savers Exchange.  If you do not know them, you must learn more about this group.  Their Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa–about a six-hour drive from Chicago–is worth the trouble getting to and seeing firsthand, especially if you have kids.  And the perfect excuse to visit is their 33rd annual Conference and Campout, July 19-21, 2013.

If you can’t make that, than at least try to RSVP and make it to the Field Museum next Wednesday, May 22, starting at 5 PM for a talk given by David Cavagnaro who was in charge of the Farm for eight years.  He’ll be speaking about the local Peterson Garden Project, and Seed Savers will have representatives there so you can learn more about them and other local seed saving organizations as well.

You might ask yourself what does an organization like Seed Savers Exchange–which has a mission of collecting, conserving, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants–have to do with natural homes?  Well, I’d say practically nothing, but on the other hand, almost everything.

You see, thinking about building ‘One Fine House’ begins with designing homes with the most natural, least processed, and if-you-will the most organic/ least chemically-altered materials we can find.  (If the building codes in Chicago would allow and building lots were a tad bigger, I’d probably seriously consider developing straw-bale homes.  But alas they do exist and some natural building materials are simply not an option in this part of the world.)

So building healthy sometimes means ‘going back to basics’ and researching our homebuilding heritage to find building materials and construction methods that we used to use in homebuilding, but stopped using as builders found cheaper chemical mass-produced alternatives and looked for ways to shave labor costs.

So like Seed Savers Exchange which tries to save our endangered garden heritage by building a network of people committed to sharing heirloom seeds and willing to educate others of the value of genetic and cultural diversity, I feel a similar obligation.  I’m writing this blog to try and build a network of people who are committed to living in a healthier home and living a healthier lifestyle and willing to educate others on the value of doing so.  As this network grows, we’ll be increasing the demand for heritage building supplies, materials, and construction methods which are often more durable, more sustainable, less processed, and hark back to an earlier era of building homes.

Now don’t take this too literally:  I am NOT advocating going back to living by candle-light, sawing our own logs for structural walls, or heating our home with fireplaces (well, maybe fireplaces….more on that in a future post), but there is something to be said for using clay plaster rather than drywall, recycled metal roofing rather than asphalt shingles, or say lime stuccos rather than vinyl siding…..items that will be prominently featured in all of my healthy homes.

Happy seed saving and wilderness exploring!

Green versus Healthy

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Sometimes I think out-loud when I write, and that can lead to a stream of consciousness or a muddling of words rather than a series of consistent, concise, crystal-clear statements.  As I reread my last couple posts, I might be guilty of this.  I don’t always like the way I intermingle the words “green” and “healthy”.  Or at least I do not like the way I imply that green and healthy are somehow mutually exclusive.  So give me a moment to step back and begin to explain how I differentiate green building from healthy building.

The term “green” and how we use it in our day-to-day conversations merits a series of posts all by itself.  So this post can only be viewed as Chapter 1 of a much longer conversation.  But suffice it to say, almost all baseline definitions of green building—and the way most of the mass media portrays it—anchors around two main concepts:  (a) better energy efficiency, and (b) more environmentally-friendly design and finish, with the greater use of recycled materials generally being the thing that consumers immediately recognize as a surrogate for the latter. 

“Sustainability” increasingly is the watchword for green design and is a term that unfortunately is misrepresented and exploited by builders, material manufacturers, and Corporate America alike.  Greenwashing is a consistent problem in green building, and another topic we’ll leave to future discussions.

Healthy building, in my book, goes way beyond green.  In a spectrum from light lime green to deep forest green, healthy building is the deepest shade of green.  And while healthy is ALWAYS green, ‘green’ is NOT always healthy.

The bottom line is that while healthy building deals with all the same issues that green building does—like the two concepts mentioned above, plus a series of others like water conservation, reduced construction impact, durability, and a smaller ecological footprint—its core focus is the health and vitality of its occupants.  Millions of people are chronically ill from either acute or seemingly insignificant daily indoor environmental exposures—sometimes with tragic consequences—and healthy building attempts to remedy the root causes of these exposures through better design and building material selection.

One of the major tenants of healthy building is healthy indoor air quality.  That means much more frequent air exchanges within a home and many fewer sources of indoor air pollution. Practitioners of healthy building design classify indoor air pollutants into five main categories: natural occurring pollutants (like radon or pollen), pesticides, electromagnetic fields, byproducts of combustion, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).  

My wife the firefighter has been in her share of new “green” homes that had  dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide with CO2 detectors going off for no apparent reason.  These homes may be more energy-efficient and may have been marketed as green, but they are not healthy by my definition because of poor ventilation and high concentrations of VOCs.  One of my favorite bits of advice to clients is that a home can never be built too tightly, but can be—and when newly constructed often is—under-ventilated. 

The off-gassing from VOCs is analogous to the evaporation from solid materials.  It is increasingly considered a health hazard and linked to things like allergies, asthma, attention-deficit disorders, and so on.  The reduction of VOCs in modern home building is one principle of healthy building that green builders are beginning (and I stress beginning) to adopt and where the lines between green and healthy building is beginning to blur. 

Why Build Healthy?

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Why Build Healthy?

This is a question I typically get from others after introducing myself as someone with an interest in healthy homebuilding and as someone who is striving to develop the healthiest homes in Chicago.  And when I hear it, and when I dig deeper into the motivation for asking, I often find that this very innocent question “Why build healthy?” is often underpinned by a fundamental believe that there is nothing unhealthy about the ways we currently build–or the materials used to build—the vast majority of our modern homes.

Of course the flip side of this question is: why would you not?   I can only think of two reasons:

  1. It’s too expensive to build that way; or
  2. You don’t fundamentally believe that our synthetic building material choices, and by extrapolation the chemical-laden food we ingest and the chemicals that are part of the products we use for household cleaning, gardening, personal body care, etc., negatively impacts human health.

Regarding the first point, when I used to work in organic foods, I found prices for organics typically 20% to 100% higher than conventional foods.  That’s a wide spread but pretty much true across the board.  A premium for natural building materials certainly exists as well, but a more robust discussion on the relative size of that premium, the comparative long-term costs, and the underlying reasons for its existence is the grist of a later post.   So for the moment let’s be clear that up-front costs to building or remodeling healthy can be significant, and a deterrent to building that way.

Regarding the second point though, I ask: how much more evidence do we need?  While we may not always have direct proof that toxins in the home cause illness and disease, we have empirical data that correlates the rise of childhood and adult illnesses with increased toxicity around the home.   The link between increasingly-poor indoor air quality (as one example) and a host of human health issues like headaches, nausea, respiratory ailments like asthma, learning defects, allergies, autism, infertility, and cancer is undeniable, and documented by organizations like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, the American Lung Association, the Healthy Building Network, the Environmental Working Group and The President’s Cancer Panel.  Consider:

  • Indoor air quality is consistently ranked as among the top 5 risks to human health;
  • Americans spend 90% of their time indoors where the EPA says air can be 2 to 10 times more polluted than outdoor air;
  • Autism and other developmental or behaviorial disorders like ADHD were barely recognized by medical professionals 50 years ago.  Today Autism or some variation thereof affects 1 in 54 boys;
  • The U.S.  Center for Disease Control keeps statistics on life expectancy and cause of death.  In 1900 cancer was the 8th leading cause of death in the U.S., way down the list from pneumonia and tuberculosis.  Today, cancer is practically tied with heart disease as the number one cause of death.  Among children, cancer incident rates are on the rise since 1975 [p.4, President’s Cancer Panel Report];
  • Only a couple hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the U.S. have ever been tested for safety, with about three-quarter of those exempt from testing as per the Toxic Substances Control Act.

Poor indoor air quality is not the only factor that is adversely affecting human health.  As Ann Louise Gettleman explains in her book Zapped, dozens of European studies have indicated that exposure to varying levels of electric fields, especially cell phone use, can also be detrimental.  Our diet is another huge factor.

Our home ought to be the place where we most nurture and protect those who are most vulnerable to environmental toxins—our children.  Yet ironically, all too often in modern American homes, they are not.  As costs for healthier building materials decline; as more people remodel using natural materials and more architects specify them in their designs; as we throw away our chemical household cleaners and substitute with the natural cleaners my grandma used to use; as consumers increasingly use naturally-derived body- and personal-care items;  as the evidence mounts about the extent of indoor air and electromagnetic pollution; and as natural whole foods become more plentiful and less expensive to buy, let’s hope that changes.

The Genesis of ‘One Fine House’

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A couple years ago I was fortunate enough to take a tour of Dow Chemical’s corporate offices in Midland, MI at the location where they research and develop some of their insulating foams.  Dow is one amazing company and Midland is one of the most company of company towns—an “Edward Scissorhands” kind of town with perfect looking homes and perfect architecture and with citizens Garrison Keillor would most assuredly characterize as all-above-average.  During that visit, I picked up a marketing brochure that included this quote:

“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”                  –Henry David Thoreau, essayist, poet and philosopher

Quite true I thought.  But as someone with a long-standing interest in organic foods, alternative medicine, and healthy green building, something about that quote struck me as odd, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.  And then, after a few days, it struck me:  What good is a tolerable planet if that same fine house is a toxic stew of chemicals and electromagnetics and stifled air that all contribute to its occupant’s poor health….. or even death?

Not much good at all frankly.   As Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th century German philosopher once noted, “health is not everything, but without health, everything is nothing.”

Moreover, what good is ‘One Fine House’—that is to say, a home that I heretofore will call healthy because it maximizes the use of natural and unadulterated building materials and finishes, allows for natural self-regulation of indoor air humidity using hygroscopic materials, and minimizes stray electric and magnetic fields—if its occupants live an unhealthy lifestyle?  A knowledgeable green developer can build new healthy homes all day long, but for those homes to stay healthy takes a commitment from the owners to eat natural or less-processed foods, use natural bodycare and personal care and medicinal products, garden organically, use non-toxic cleaners, practice natural pet care, reduce their wireless emf exposure, and decorate the home with furnishings made from natural fabrics and finishes.

It’s not necessarily easy or less costly to do so and it often takes a vigilant commitment to make it happen.  But thankfully, the consumer’s job of maintaining a healthy lifestyle is getting easier to do as products with attributes like those mentioned above gain wider distribution (think Whole Foods Market which 30 years ago was a one-store natural food grocer in Austin, TX but now the world’s largest organic grocer, and whose stock last Tuesday hit an all-time high), and as consumers get better educated about using them.  Better living begins with better building and the choice to live in a healthy home.  But it ends with consumers who internalize the principles of natural living and actually live them each and every day once they’ve moved in.

With that as a backdrop, today I am officially starting a blog about healthy home building and living a healthy lifestyle within your home.  Entitled “One Fine House” with the subtitle “Healthy Homes in a Toxic World” my intent is to both educate and to learn from the discussion it generates; to entertain while also making some very serious commentary about the toxic world we find ourselves living in; and do so in a way that keeps you interested enough to come back here two or three times a week to see what’s new and to forward these messages on to your friends, family, and neighbors.

Over the weeks and months to follow, I’ll share some tidbits of wisdom about healthy building techniques; about the people across the country who care most about designing homes that put health and the environment first; about why it is important to build this way; about the growing list of non-toxic building materials and finishes, including commentary about their durability and ease of use; about the various definitions of the word “green” and how “green” is not always healthy; about how energy-efficiency fits into healthy building; about the lifestyle choices occupants of healthy homes need to make to keep them and their families healthy and life-affirming; and above all, about the things you need to know to find or create a space that nurtures your body, mind, and spirit.

I hope you will follow me on this journey, let me know when I stray off course, and help deepen and broaden the conversation through your feedback and commentary.

Wishing you Health, Happiness, and Equity,

Mark Ahlheim

Compass:  Chicago’s Premier Real Estate Brokerage