How Much Formaldehyde Is in Your Car, Your Kitchen or Your Furniture? Here’s What Our Testing Found.
How Much Formaldehyde Is in Your Car, Your Kitchen or Your Furniture? Here’s What Our Testing Found.
The chemical can trigger health problems and causes more cancer than any other toxic air pollutant. Our reporters traveled around New York City and New Jersey with equipment to measure its presence. The results proved concerning.
Invisible Danger: Formaldehyde, a colorless pungent gas, can cause cancer, breathing problems and reproductive harms.
Greatest Threat: Most of us face the highest risks in our homes, where formaldehyde is released by some types of furniture, gas stoves and other everyday products.
Our Testing: We found concerning levels of formaldehyde in furniture stores, inside a nail salon, in cars and at a dinner party.
So basically, the safest choice is to buy used furniture that left most of its formaldehyde at the previous owner since the industry is far from regulating it and there is no way to avoid it without living in a cave, but theses have radon gas aplenty.
I think solid wood is the key, the problems are in the plywood and chipboard. For many things that will mean buying good quality used furniture.
I stopped breathing due to formaldehyde poisioning when I was a baby. The new house we moved into (because the old one burnt down) was too air tight and all the formaldehyde in the wood wasn't let out of the house. So I have a personal connection to there being too much formaldehyde in things and the danger.
There was a huge scandal a few years back where cheap flooring from China was full of it. It was so bad Lunber Liquidators changed names to "LL Flooring" to avoid the association. They ended up filing for bankruptcy this year anyway.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lumber-liquidators-linked-to-health-and-safety-violations-2/
Ditto drywall if I remember correctly. Let's see how my Google-Fu is today:
There's not a fucking thing I can do about it unless I throw out whatever it's in and replace it, which would cost money, so maybe it's better I didn't know.
Well you could not buy any more of it.
Bold of you to think I could afford any of those things at this point.