Paying The Price For a Stain and Water Repellency

At INDIGO, we have always been concerned with the added chemicals and solvents put into traditional building and interior materials we fill our homes and buildings with. Two things in particular paint and carpet, have been raising concerns for decades on not just indoor air quality (IAQ) but also hazardous air polutants (HAP's) as well persistant organic pollutants (POP's) that can remain not just in the environment, but in our bodies as well. In this post we are looking at the bioaccumlative stain and water repellency compounds known as PFC's.

This is from The Healthy Building Network, a place of great information on building materials that goes beyond the greenwashing:
Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) are manmade compounds, based on the element fluorine, and are the key ingredients in stain- and water-repellent treatments such as Teflon®, Crypton® and Crypton Green®, Gore™, and Stainmaster®, and in nanotech products such as Nano-Tex™ and GreenShield™.2 Scientists have raised concerns about PFCs because they are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic. Moreover, biomonitoring studies confirm widespread human exposure to this class of compounds.
click here for a fact sheet on PFCs.

next week we will be looking at the greenwashing of the paint industry and what zero VOC really means.