What If?
In her terrifyingly eye opening groundbreaking book “Countdown: How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Female and Male Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race”, leading environmental epidemiologist presents the case that plastics, laden with phthalates, bisphenols, UV stabilizers, traces of heavy metals, and much more, are causing worldwide crippling effects on children’s endocrine systems. She provides staggering data-based evidence that sperm counts among men worldwide, along with fertility and estrogen levels of women, have drastically decreased with the continual introduction of plastic based products. It doesn’t take much skeptical observation that it may play a key role in the escalation of cancer rates worldwide as well. In fact, the NIH claims that the average person consumes - intake through food - roughly 5 grams of microplastics a week. The size of a credit card.
What if the matter is more than just what we eat - it’s what we breath? What if the greatest health epidemic of our generation is right under our feet?
Our environment is laden with plastic based products. The vast majority of carpets today are produced with polyester or nylon extruded fibers. Every HGTV show you know and love promotes the cheapest LVTs possible, and nearly every home you see on the real estate market has LVT flooring covering nearly every square foot. Every flipped house you see has the cheapest flooring products possible, but not one person ever stops to think about the consequence of buying such cheap products.
Have you ever noticed that new carpet smell? The odd odor when you get that Wayfair rug fresh out the box and laid out? Have you noticed any pronounced smell when that freshly installed LVT floor is bathing in the warm window-diffused heat from the sun on a cold wintery day? That’s simply chemical off-gassing from those products. What if those UV stabilizers, phthalates, etc are all being airborne, innudating us at a potentially equal or greater rate than the amount of plastics we consume in our food?
There’s a cost for cheap. We see it on every flooring commercial - LVTs for $2/sf. Facebook marketplace vendors purchaase bulk pallets of cheaply made Chinese products which are being dumped onto our soil. The reason LVTs can be made so cheaply is the products they make as fillers - frequently even containing formaldehyde.
Ever hear of LL Flooring? They used to be Lumber Liquidators. They had to rebrand to recover from a catastrphic lawsuit that found them guilty of selling formaldehyde based cheap LVT.
Flooring manufacturers do a great job of specifying when certain products they make is Phthalate free - many health care specifiers require phthalate free products for their projects because they’re aware of the risk. These products are generally slightly more expensive, but the fact that they’re phthalate free is rarely a selling feature. If you have young kids especially, it should be a key consideration when searching for flooring for your home.
There’s been an uptick in more natural-based flooring products - wool carpet and rugs, cork and wood options ILO of vinyl based products, and if the data proves correct, it should be considered hopeful that these products continue to trend upward.
Yep, this is a bit of a contradiction and conflict of interest seeing as I’m a flooring installer that sells his own products, but I also am careful to source my products before selling. It’s necessary to provide LVT and affordable carpet options to customers to survive, but lets hope that the industry as a whole comes around and helps to turn the tide in eliminating these harmful chemicals in plastic-based products.
