The air in there: It's not pretty

WHEN air quality officials declared pollution from wildfires last month to be hazardous, they advised Southern Californians to stay indoors.

Unfortunately, the air inside may not have been much better.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the air indoors is often two to five times more polluted than it is outside. Part of the blame falls on the furnishings and finishes that consumers put in their homes -- products that may contain formaldehyde, toluene, benzene, volatile organic compounds (better known as VOCs) and hundreds of other chemicals clinging to every surface.

They might come from your walls, your carpeting, your drapes, your favorite bookcase. "Outgassing" or "off-gassing," the process is called, and it can last weeks, sometimes years.

"Over 60% of the air you breathe in any closed space is off-gassing from surface materials," says Ellen Strickland, owner of Livingreen stores in Culver City and Santa Barbara that sell environmentally friendly home products. "It's an accumulative effect of everything that's on the walls, furniture, counter surfaces, your clothes, the curtains -- anything that's brought into that space."

Anthony Bernheim, a San Francisco architect who helped to develop air quality standards for California state office buildings, says the health effects of hundreds of construction materials and home furnishings remain largely unknown.

"We carry things on our clothes, and molecules move back and forth -- the sealer on the floors, the furniture, the foam, the fabrics, the drywall," he says. "There are grout sealers that have problems we're finding now."

Our lives already may be overloaded with acronyms, but get acquainted with one more: IAQ -- indoor air quality. You probably will hear it much more in the years to come. Like climate change, IAQ is not a single problem. It's a construct, a dizzying mix of factors that may contribute to headaches, nausea and other health-related complaints.

The growing concern about IAQ can be witnessed in the array of low-VOC paints, formaldehyde-free flooring and other products touting their clean composition. But green washing is prevalent, and the truth is that this problem -- and its solutions -- aren't as clear as marketing slogans might suggest.

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THE most common indoor air pollutant is formaldehyde, used to bind composite wood products such as plywood, particleboard and medium-density fiberboard. That's why a colorless toxic gas emanates from some types of cabinetry, flooring, walls, countertops and furniture.