October 2003
Building A Healthy Home
Here's an exclusive showcase of furnishings built for a better world
by Mark Harris
I first became aware of the issue of the home environment and its effects on health in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, my awareness was born out of hardship, as recurring health problems at the time had left me increasingly sensitive to various toxins, chemicals, and products in the environment. I didn’t realize it at first, but I had been enlisted in the growing sector of the public suffering from environmentally related illness.
That was the beginning of a new kind of education for myself, one in which I learned about organic foods and pesticide-free, organic cotton mattresses and the value of not lingering in freshly painted rooms. Instead of a pet, I befriended my trusty, carbon-based air filter. I came to appreciate buildings with windows that opened and people who didn’t smoke. I also learned that not all apartment owners appreciate it when you take it upon yourself to hire a heating expert to investigate whether the boiler room you’re living above is making you sick.
These days I am fortunately healthier. I am also more aware of the practical challenges that face anyone wanting to make their home environment as healthy and non-toxic as possible. I count myself now among the large, educated ranks of consumers increasingly concerned about reducing toxic exposures in the home. Ask me about "outgassing" and I’ll tell you about the process by which new furniture and rugs release vapors from chemicals used in the manufacturing process into the air. I’ll also tell you that as someone for whom the issue of indoor air pollution has at times been a very immediate health concern, I consider it an issue I’d like to see more of my otherwise eco-aware, recycling, organic food shopping friends begin talking about. What good does it do to set up a space for meditation in a corner of a room, with lavender candles or ambient sounds, if formaldehyde residues from your new particle-board bookshelf are slowly, invisibly, introducing a different, more toxic kind of aromatherapy into the air?
That’s exactly the kind of question Barry Bursak, a local Chicago design consultant and former home furnishings entrepreneur, has been asking for more than a decade. But Bursak is also not the kind of person content to ponder questions aimlessly. In fact, he’s organized a remarkable showcase of answers about safe, non-toxic, sustainably produced home furnishings to premiere at next month’s Chicago Design Show at the Merchandise Mart.
The Sustainable Design Pavilion is a first ever for the prestigious Chicago show. It’s also the culmination of years of hard work by Bursak and others who believe home furnishings can be made in a more environmentally responsible fashion. The goal is to offer the public and trade professionals who attend the show unprecedented access to information and choices in eco-friendly home furnishings solutions. Co-sponsored by Sustain, the national environmental advocacy group, the Sustainable Pavilion represents a notable first step toward the nascent but expanding industry focus on ecology in home furnishings. For now, the pavilion will allow the small niche market of existing companies specializing in sustainable furnishings to parade their products in a more high-profile industry setting.
A Long Time Coming
Manufacturers have for the most part rebuffed the concept of safe, eco-friendly furniture and home furnishings opting for the long-time standard approach that is traditionally toxic, hard on health and the environment. Bursak, who for years ran City, a well-known Chicago-area retailer of high-end design collections, admits he’s often felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. "In general, furniture and home furnishings are made with a lot of toxic chemicals, particularly formaldehyde," Bursak laments. "By supporting our efforts to give consumers a choice, the thinking [among manufacturers] has been that this would be like telling the public that there are things wrong with what they’re doing."
He believes many consumers want safe, ethically made, home furnishings, if only they knew how and where to find such products. He’s also enough of a visionary to believe the home furnishings industry will eventually embrace the sustainable vision, too, as consumer demand grows and publicity about alternative design and manufacturing choices becomes more available.
If you’re a consumer who wants furniture made in safe, non-toxic or less polluting ways, get you’re pit helmet out because you’re likely going to find yourself on a safari of research and investigation. You are not going to find a Sustainable Furniture section at your nearby department store.
Not yet, at least.
What you will find is a small group of dedicated companies committed to manufacturing sustainable furniture and other home furnishings. One Chicago innovator in sustainable furniture, home, and lifestyle products is Bean Products, Inc., which got its start in 1987 manufacturing a product called Sleeping Bean Body Pillows. Their early success under founder Chuck Blumenthal led the company to gradually expand their merchandise line to include fully sustainable contemporary furniture, such as club chairs, love seats, sofas, and ottomans, using materials like Romanian hemp, organic cotton, steel springs and other non-toxic materials.
Admittedly, it’s a labor-intensive process, says Blumenthal, one requiring real Old World handcrafting and the number of products being made is relatively small compared to conventional manufacturers. Consequently, prices for fully organic or sustainable furniture generally remain high — comparable says Blumenthal to low-end designer prices.
Sustainable Design Pavilion Debut
As the market for sustainable products grows, perhaps the big question for most consumers is going to be, "How exactly do you know what you are purchasing is eco-friendly?" Bursak admits it’s a very good question and one he hopes visitors to the Sustainable Design Pavilion will have answered to their satisfaction.
Those who stop by the Pavilion will discover model rooms set up to showcase a variety of coordinated home furnishings. A model living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, home office, and study/reading area, all in a 1,000 square foot area, will anchor the exhibit. There will be a separate model kitchen and kids’ area. Visitors will also find plenty of information on sustainable flooring, furniture, lighting, accessories, fabrics, and wall coverings. Get ready for a few surprises, too, like — believe it or not! — carpeting made from corn, and furniture built from recycled cardboard, wheat, and sunflower seeds.
In addition, the exhibition will feature a separate section of bamboo products, which has moved beyond its traditional Asian influence. It may also be one of nature’s best-kept sustainable secrets — bamboo is actually harder than any American hardwood (e.g. oak, maple, cherry) and yet remains underutilized in furniture production. It also grows well without pesticides or fertilizers, and takes only six to eight years to mature. By contrast, hardwoods often take 100 years or more to mature.
"A good, basic definition of a sustainable wood furniture product," according to Bursak, "is one that comes from environmentally managed forests and uses finishes with natural rubbed oils like linseed or other non-toxic oils. It’s a process that by definition is free of chemical preservatives." Bursak adds that such production techniques represent not so much a modern innovation as simply how quality furniture was traditionally made, before we humans discovered the 20th century wonders of synthetic chemicals.
In fact, some 50 years ago, formaldehyde-laden particleboard and other building materials scarcely existed. Yet many manufacturers have come to view formaldehyde as impossible to replace, economically and chemically. In her book, Staying Well in a Toxic World, noted environmentalist Lynn Lawson cites a statement by a spokesperson for the Hardwood Plywood Manufacturers Association who, while hastening to add that he didn’t consider formaldehyde a great problem, admitted that he would certainly look for "low-formaldehyde products" if he were adding to his own house.
Lawson herself learned that lesson while writing her environmental study in the early 1990s. In preparation for a long writing stint, she bought handsome wood desks for her new computer. After they were delivered, she noticed a new-furniture smell that had been masked in the store, and as she worked at her computer, she began feeling dizzy. Environmentally savvy — but not savvy enough to do this in the store — she reached down and felt the lower edge of the desks: rough plywood. Suspecting formaldehyde (and possibly other chemicals), she put aluminum tape over the rough edges, and the dizziness gradually went away. However, when she developed a severe all-day headache after a few hours at the computer, she knew the problem had not been solved. Next step: hiring someone to apply four coats of a sealer that she first sniff-tested for possible reactions. Only then did the furniture become safe for her.
Lawson’s anecdote is a good example of how insidious the problem of chemical exposures in furnishings can be. In fact, to compare and contrast a sustainably made sofa with one made by conventional methods makes you wonder just how our technology and economics could over the last century lead us so astray at least as far as playing with the fire of the great chemical experiment otherwise known as modern manufacturing technology goes.
According to Bursak, if you buy a conventional sofa, expect it to be made with little or no consideration of the consequences of forestry practices on the land, the air, the water, or wildlife habitats.
"The wood is usually soaked in chemical preservatives, toxic glues are used to hold it together, and the wood is then wrapped with polyester fiber," Bursak explains. "The seat and back pillows contain polyurethane foam and are also wrapped with more polyester fiber. As far as fabric coverings are concerned, they’re often synthetics, or possibly‘natural’ fabrics, but either way they’re dyed with toxic chemicals and then sprayed with‘protective’ chemicals." Unfortunately, all of these chemical products can be expected to off-gas, over a period of months or even years.
A sustainable sofa will instead be made with certified, forest-managed wood, using non-toxic glues and organic cotton, silk, or hemp batting. It will utilize natural latex rubber or fiberfill made from a type of recycled plastic that allows no further off gassing the second time it is produced. The fabrics are likely to use new, recycled fibers produced with no pollution or fumes. They should also be free from harmful dyes.
According to Bursak, there is as yet no formal, national certification process for home furnishings, as now exists for organic foods. For the time being, consumers have to rely largely on the integrity of the manufacturer, as well as their own diligence in discovering the avenues to explore (see Resource Box for suggestions). Bursak encourages consumers to ask retailers what they might specifically know about their products.
A Sustainable Home, A Sustainable Future
If you had asked me 20 years ago what sustainable furniture was, what most likely would have come to my mind was a chair that didn’t collapse when you sat on it. Now, I think of sustainable home furnishings as those made in ways that do not collapse our world. Today, there are some 80,000 synthetic chemicals in use, the overwhelming majority of which remain untested as far as long-term health effects are concerned. Our world also faces depleted forests, global pollution from manufacturing and farming, child labor practices and other environmental and ethical concerns that ask us to look hard at how the products we enjoy as consumers are made. It strikes me that it’s time to bend our economics and our lifestyles toward more environmentally judicious practices.
Bursak understands that for many people, environmental sensitivity is a troubling, increasingly frequent fact of modern life. Like a thief in the night, environmental sensitivity can slowly, insidiously and often invisibly steal away a person’s sense of well being. He likens it to the experience of putting a plastic bag over a person’s head, then waiting a few minutes to see how they react. The likely reaction is going to be one of panic, if it seems as if there is no escape. Sadly, that’s how it can be for many sufferers of environmental illness, who find homes, offices, buildings, and many of the products they use toxic, chemical-laden threats to their health and survival.
The issue of sustainable home furnishings also touches on critical, wide-ranging environmental concerns. Consider that every year an additional 39 to 49 million acres of tropical forests and woodlands are lost, sacrificed in one way or another to a version of economic "progress" that over the last century has raised environmental short-sightedness almost to the level of an ideology. Or that only about 8 percent of the world’s forests are currently protected by environmental management agreements. Or that conventional cotton farming is mostly a toxic pool of pesticides and pollution, a cascading source of potential ill effects associated with meat, dairy, and other commercial food products using industry by-products and oils. Not to mention the chronic health problems often faced by cotton farm workers.
The positive news is that the technology exists to make home furnishings using safer alternative and recycled materials. Why rely on forest-depleting particle board products, sealed by toxic chemicals and formaldehyde, when it is possible to use soy-based binders and bio-composite board materials made from wheat, alfalfa, and straw? They’re just as durable and far safer environmentally. Even recycled plastics are far safer the second time around, and yet remain underutilized. These are the kinds of questions the sustainability movement is now asking.
It is Bursak’s hope now that the Sustainable Design Pavilion will be one of those breakthrough moments, one that lights a torch in the home furnishings industry about product safety, ethical manufacturing, and sustainability. Let’s hope he’s right.
Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.
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Barry Bursak: Pioneer in Eco-friendly Furniture As owner of City, the internationally known Chicago home furnishings retailer, Barry Bursak knew a lot about beautiful designs in furniture. Traveling to Europe and Japan, visiting furniture suppliers and factories, he also came to know a few things about how furniture was manufactured. What he learned convinced him that we had to find safer ways to furnish our homes. "I used to go into factories and be struck by how bad things smelled," says Bursak, who ran City throughout the‘80s. "In the early days, I would just wonder why. Of course, there were a lot of toxic materials being used in the factories. I had customers who would order furniture from me; not infrequently after the furniture was delivered, I would get calls from people who would say,‘I can’t breathe in here! "For a time, I would say, well, it’s just‘new smell,’ whatever that is. I’d tell them to open the windows for a few days, let it air out. Gradually, however, I began putting two and two together. As a result, I found myself starting to ask some hard questions. By 1990, I had become aware enough to realize that there had to be other, safer ways of doing this, because furniture wasn’t always made this way. The result for Bursak was a new definition of environmentally responsibility in home furnishings — one in which products could be considered fully "sustainable" on the basis of being safe, non-toxic, and made in ways that didn’t irreparably damage the environment. Will eco-friendly furnishings at best become a successful niche market, or does this growing field have the potential to transform the entire home furnishings — one in which products could be considered fully "sustainable" on the basis of being safe, nontoxic, and made in ways that didn’t irreparably damage the environment. — MH |
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Cruel Demise Inspires a Furniture Line For Chicago interior designer Jill Salisbury, an interest in sustainable furnishings has deep roots. "My grandfather was a major influence on my life course," says Salisbury, whose new company, el: Environmental Language LLC, premiers at the Sustainable Design Pavilion. "He was a carpenter who designed and built custom homes the old fashioned way — with pride and care." Salisbury says she remembers as a child hanging around with her grandfather, watching with particular interest as he built her family home. It was an environment growing up that would spark a life-long interest in interior design for Salisbury, a veteran of some of the city’s top design firms. Unfortunately, the builder’s life was also an environment rife with environmental hazards. "My grandfather was exposed to asbestos throughout his career," Salisbury says, "not knowing that this contamination would someday take his life. His death made me realize the importance of knowing as much as possible about the products that I use." As she pursued her career, Salisbury remembered her roots. But finding safe, non-toxic materials was not always practical. Fortunately, interest in sustainable products has grown in recent years and convinced her a couple years back to launch her own furniture company. The el: Environmental Language line being unveiled at the Sustainable Pavilion features upholstery using natural latex, organic cotton batting and barrier cloth, along with organic wool and hemp. Salisbury says el designs include furniture structures made from wheat-board, which is free of formaldehyde, woods from certified sustainable forests, and chromium-free leather coverings. All finishes are also derived from natural, non-toxic materials. — MH |
Get More Info
Sustain (active Nov. 2003)
Furniture Companies
Where to Go to See the Show
The Sustainable Design Pavilion is open to the public, November 6-9 at the 2003 Chicago Design Show at the Merchandise Mart. Visit www.merchandisemart.com for more information.
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