We recently moved our office to a new building after nine years in our previous location. When we designed our new space, we spent a lot of time finding ways to make it a better workspace for ourselves as well as a place where our environmentally-sensitive patients would feel all right.
Many people these days are ill with environmentally-induced problems. They are like the canaries of our society. Traditionally canaries were used in coal mines to indicate when the atmosphere had become too toxic for the miners - the death of a canary was a cue that it was time to get out before people started dying. As the environment gets more filled with pollutants and toxins, people are becoming more sensitive to toxins and becoming ill. As more and more people develop these problems even major manufacturers are taking it into account and producing less toxic products. In our office, we see many people who are ill from environmental exposures and we wanted to design our space to make sure they could be comfortable in our waiting room and our treatment rooms.
There are many aspects to creating a conscious living/work space. Things to consider include building materials, floors, walls, lighting, furniture, and of course budget.
In our building, the basic structure was already in place. We added interior walls, used good quality materials and then painted the walls with nontoxic primer and paint. We were able to find a special paint called Envirocoat. It comes in almost all colors except the really dark ones. Some environmentally good paint smells worse than latex paints, but the Envirocoat paints have almost no smell at all.
For floor covering there are many choices that minimize toxic exposure. Bamboo flooring is becoming more popular and is a sustainable resource. Hardwood floors with nontoxic finishes are available but very expensive. Natural linoleum is more readily available than it used to be. We chose wool carpet because it is quiet and non slippery. We had concrete flooring underneath so we got a thicker natural foam pad and did not use glue to attach the carpet. The installers had to use special nail guns to get the carpet attached to the concrete, but many types of glue are very toxic.
Another very important thing is what sort of stain to put on wood items. Our office has about half a mile of wood trim and many beautiful oak doors that we ended up staining and finishing. There are special nontoxic wood stains readily available through Internet resources. If your surfaces are already stained, there is a coating you can apply that stops off-gassing of toxic aromatic chemicals. All these products are easily found by typing in "nontoxic wood stains" on google.com.
Don't use wood building materials that are infused with formaldehyde, such as particleboard. Inexpensive cabinets are often made of laminated particleboard held together by formaldehyde. Many people are extremely sensitive to that. We put the cabinetry only in places where our patients don't spend a lot of time, which minimizes their exposure. Obviously another way to go is to use natural wood for cabinets, which can get very expensive depending on whether you need them custom made. The least toxic form of cabinetry and furniture is metal and glass. They do not emit any chemicals from their surfaces and for a place such as a dental office (WHY A DENTAL OFFICE? WHY NOT A DOCTOR'S OFFICE?) or home where the owner is extremely sensitive, this is one way to go.
My favorite improvement was the installation of Solatubes in the halls and rooms with no windows. They are aluminum-lined tubes that go from the roof to the ceiling and reflect daylight off the aluminum interior of the tubes creating beautiful natural light throughout the day. We rarely use our fluorescent lights, the tubes create a lovely warm light everywhere and at certain times of day there are rainbows on the walls.
All the things we did are possible to do in your home or office space. There are varying degrees of paying attention to these matters and many people go way beyond what we did. It can be extremely expensive to create a space that does not emit any toxic substances at all. Once you have weighed the options and cost, you can decide how to design your space to be as healthy as possible.



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