Your home – a safe oasis of well-being

In Ger­many, more and more apart­ments are being built – with an ever-increas­ing floor space. This is also due to the grow­ing num­ber of single house­holds, which, at 42 per­cent, accoun­ted for the largest share accord­ing to a sur­vey of the Fed­er­al Stat­ist­ic­al Office in 2018. As a res­ult, the amount of liv­ing space occu­pied per per­son has ris­en, most recently to 46.7 square meters (2018), which means that also the area occu­pied by walls, floors and ceil­ings in our homes has grown. This, in turn, can lead to high­er emis­sions of harm­ful sub­stances accord­ing to inform­a­tion pub­lished by the Fed­er­al Envir­on­ment­al Agency. That’s why it is all the more import­ant to choose build­ing and install­a­tion products for our homes that ensure healthy liv­ing. Qual­ity seals like EMICODE^® provide use­ful assist­ance.

We spend the major­ity of the day indoors. Espe­cially our own four walls should be a place of relax­a­tion and recre­ation – a safe oas­is of well-being. Our suc­cess in reach­ing this aim not only depends on our per­son­al liv­ing habits and fur­nish­ings, but also on the mater­i­als used for floor­ing install­a­tion, thermal insu­la­tion and water­proof­ing. Build­ing products that release harm­ful sub­stances are there­fore not wel­come in our homes: They may cause head­aches, sleep­less­ness or even aller­gies and res­pir­at­ory prob­lems.

To ensure “clean” indoor air right from the start, it is import­ant to use healthy products when build­ing a new house or doing renov­a­tion work. Floor cov­er­ings, install­a­tion mater­i­als, seal­ants and oth­er products can release so-called volat­ile organ­ic com­pounds (VOCs), which can cause health com­plaints among the res­id­ents. Anoth­er key prob­lem is the fact that newly built houses are increas­ingly air­tight; the nat­ur­al exchange of air is there­fore much less fre­quent. This makes emis­sions from build­ing mater­i­als all the more prob­lem­at­ic. Reli­able qual­ity labels like the EMICODE^® EC1 seal help con­sumers identi­fy products that are low in emis­sions and can be used without hes­it­a­tion in new con­struc­tion or renov­a­tion.