alt Hacker NewsI can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.
We can't even slow down the consumerism. Everyone's job around the world is someway tied into this rampant production of cheap plastic goods to replace cheap plastic goods from yesterweek. You try and nip it in the bud everyone is liable to lose their job and everything might very well collapse because of how we chose to stack this deck of cards on this planet.
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My house in the UK is 300 years old. It is built of stone with proper ventilation built in everywhere. It never gets damp, never too cold or hot. Air circulates enough to constantly be fresh yet not quick enough to create a draft.
Its a shame homes arent built like that anymore. Looking at how houses like this work really shows how we have created solutions to our own problems in modern home building.
Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building).
There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.
Sealed modern houses usually come with an HRV or ERV so that your air is regularly replaced filtered fresh air.
Sealed houses in favor of climate control / energy usage has a big impact on people I'm sure. I'm lucky ish in that my house is well insulated but has central ventilation, but only 'suck' so it draws in fresh air from outside. In the same neighbourhood, they built houses with recirculation systems with a heat exchanger so that outside air was pulled in through that. But because the system was noisy (constant fan noises), people would turn the system on low or completely off, causing health issues due to buildup of CO2 and the like. That was uh, a bit of a problem for them and the builders.
Air tightness is fine, because when it's done anywhere close to the right way it comes with filtered heat recovery ventilation.
You're right about building materials, but that's true regardless of the air tightness: engineered woods, all kind of glues, all kind of foams, paints, sealants, hard to tell how nasty they are but they for sure aren't beneficial.
It can be disheartening. I don't know that there's much strong evidence yet that air polluted with synthetic particles leads to bad health effects, but I do know that are lungs have been subjected to things in the last 100 years that they hadn't encountered in the previous 300 million.
Modern homes have to have HRV systems for removing indoor air and replacing it.
I uploaded you for nosedive and didn't read anything after that. Figured it couldn't get any better!
Air quality is much, much better than it used to be.
We used to burn leaded gasoline in our cars, coal pucks to heat our homes, smoke directly into our lungs on purpose, god knows what else.
I do agree with the broader point though.