Tips for the healthy design of living and working spaces

Tip 1: Don’t just trust your nose

The mat­ter seems simple enough: Odors are either pleas­ant or unpleas­ant, and the lat­ter are harm­ful. This assump­tion, how­ever, is wrong. Some odors are not only unpleas­ant, but may also pose a health risk. Nev­er­the­less, it can­not be assumed that harm­ful emis­sions are always accom­pan­ied by a bad smell, nor that all bad odors are harm­ful to health. Odor does not auto­mat­ic­ally mean that there is a crit­ic­al emis­sion. Nor does it mean, though, that every emis­sion can be iden­ti­fied by the nose. A good example of this is car­bon monox­ide: The gas, pro­duced by incom­plete com­bus­tion, is col­or­less and odor­less. In high­er con­cen­tra­tions, how­ever, it has a tox­ic effect on the res­pir­at­ory sys­tem and can even lead to death. The per­cep­tion of odors also var­ies from per­son to per­son. Many people find the smell of tree res­in pleas­ant. But res­ins con­tain terpenes which are also used as solvents in paints and adhes­ives. Their smell is then per­ceived as unpleas­ant by most people.

Tip 2: Prepare a clean substrate and ensure it is dry

Don’t worry if there is the typ­ic­al “smell of new­ness” after installing new floor cov­er­ings. With prop­er vent­il­a­tion, this will usu­ally dis­sip­ate quite quickly. Today, the odor is also greatly reduced through the use of solvent-free adhes­ives. What is much more import­ant is that the sub­floor under the new floor­ing is dry. Well over 90 per­cent of odor com­plaints are caused by damp screeds or oth­er sub­strates. When renov­at­ing floors, the old floor cov­er­ings must first be removed. Here, care should be taken to remove the residues com­pletely so that later no prob­lems arise due to unpleas­ant odors or oth­er emis­sions. After that, the sub­floor must be prop­erly pre­pared, usu­ally by apply­ing a primer and a lev­el­ling com­pound. In addi­tion to good dry­ing, it is highly advis­able to use low-emis­­sion products.

Tip 3: Choose your products carefully

Layper­sons often believe that organ­ic and eco­lo­gic­al products are always healthy, while they con­sider syn­thet­ic chem­ic­al products as rather harm­ful to human health. This is as decept­ive as the smell test with your nose. After all, also nature pro­duces many tox­ins. Form­al­de­hyde, for example, occurs nat­ur­ally in our meta­bol­ism as an inter­me­di­ate product and has import­ant germi­cid­al prop­er­ties. On the oth­er hand, form­al­de­hyde must be viewed crit­ic­ally due to its tox­icity and car­ci­no­gen­ic effect – depend­ing on the quant­it­ies involved. As a gen­er­al rule, make sure you select build­ing products and fur­nish­ings care­fully to ensure a low-emis­­sion, healthy liv­ing envir­on­ment. Products car­ry­ing the EMICODE^® label provide reli­able guid­ance for con­sumers. The label is awar­ded by the GEV, the Ger­man Asso­ci­ation for the Con­trol of Emis­sions in Products for Floor­ing Install­a­tion, Adhes­ives and Build­ing Mater­i­als. The Asso­ci­ation tests build­ing products under strin­gent cri­ter­ia and only awards the EMICODE^® label to par­tic­u­larly low-emis­­sion mater­i­als. Import­ant to know: Even after receiv­ing the cer­ti­fic­ate, unan­nounced spot checks car­ried out by neut­ral test­ing insti­tutes ensure that the pre­defined emis­sion lim­its are com­plied with.