Chemical Emissions of Residential Materials and Products: Review of Available Information

Abstract

PREFACEThis report is prepared in the context of a larger program whose mission is to advance understanding of ventilation and indoor air quality in U.S. homes. A specific objective of this program is to develop the scientific basis -through controlled experiments, monitoring and analysis -for health risk-based ventilation standards.Appropriate and adequate ventilation is a basic element of a healthy home. Ventilation provides outdoor air and in the process removes indoor odors and contaminants including potentially unhealthful chemicals emitted by indoor materials, products and activities. Ventilation traditionally was assured to occur via infiltration of outdoor air through cracks and other leakage pathways in the residential building envelope. As building air tightness is improved for energy efficiency, infiltration can be reduced to inadequate levels. This has lead to the development of standards requiring mechanical ventilation. Though nominally intended to ensure acceptable indoor air quality, the standards are not explicitly tied to health risk or pollutant exposure targets. LBNL is currently designing analyses to assess the impact of varying ventilation standards on pollutant concentrations, health risks and energy use.These analyses require information on sources of chemical pollutant emissions, ideally including emission rates and the impact of ventilation on emissions. Some information can be obtained from recent studies that report measurements of various air contaminants and their concentrations in U.S. residences. Another way to obtain this information is the bottom-up approach of collecting and evaluating emissions data from construction and interior materials and common household products.This review contributes to the latter approach by summarizing available information on chemical emissions from new residential products and materials. We review information from the scientific literature and public sources to identify and discuss the databases that provide information on new or low-emission materials and products. The review focuses on the primary chemical or volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from interior surface materials, furnishings, and some regularly used household products; all of these emissions are amenable to ventilation. Though it is an important and related topic, this review does not consider secondary pollutants that result from reactions of ozone and unsaturated organics bound to or emitted from material surfaces. Semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs) have been largely excluded from this review because ventilation generally is not an effective way to control SVOC exposures. Nevertheless, health concerns about exposures to SVOCs emitted from selected materials warrant some discussion. EXECUTIVE SUMMARYChemical emissions from construction materials, interior surfaces, and household products are a major source of indoor air contaminants. Emissions characteristics of building materials have been extensively reported. Several large-scale studies have also been conducted in ex...

Formaldehyde and acetaldehyde exposure mitigation in US residences: in‐home measurements of ventilation control and source control

“…Source control can be pursued by limiting the quantity of VOC-emitting materials in the space, sealing materials to reduce emissions, and changing use patterns of household products. While laboratory emission data exists for a range of specific materials and conditions (Myers 1984;Kelly et al 1999;Baumann et al 2000;Kim et al 2007;Zhang et al 2007;Willem and Singer 2010), emission rates from installed materials in occupied buildings have been observed to vary…”

“…Source control can be pursued by limiting the quantity of VOC-emitting materials in the space, sealing materials to reduce emissions, and changing use patterns of household products. While laboratory emission data exist for a range of specific materials and conditions (Baumann et al, 2000;Kelly et al, 1999;Kim et al, 2007;Myers, 1984;Willem and Singer, 2010;Zhang et al, 2007), emission rates from installed materials in occupied buildings have been observed to vary significantly from the same materials tested in the laboratory (Kang et al, 2012). At the whole-residence level, few studies have examined the effectiveness of source control, specifically how VOC concentrations in homes built with low-emitting materials differ from those in homes built with conventional materials.…”

Formaldehyde and acetaldehyde exposure mitigation in US residences: In-home measurements of ventilation control and source control

“…Source control can be pursued by limiting the quantity of VOC-emitting materials in the space, sealing materials to reduce emissions, and changing use patterns of household products. While laboratory emission data exists for a range of specific materials and conditions (Myers 1984;Kelly et al 1999;Baumann et al 2000;Kim et al 2007;Zhang et al 2007;Willem and Singer 2010), emission rates from installed materials in occupied buildings have been observed to vary significantly from the same materials tested in the laboratory (Kang et al 2012). At the whole-residence level, few studies have examined the effectiveness of source control, specifically how VOC concentrations in homes built with low-emitting materials differ from those in homes built with conventional materials.…”

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