“As a culture, Americans spend 90 percent of our time indoors, and in the majority of cases the air quality inside is far worse than it is outside. The largely terrible indoor air quality is attributed to the offgassing of chemicals from various building materials–paint, carpet, countertops, dry wall, you name it and chances are it’s got some sort of toxic ingredient. The thing is, in many cases those chemicals are mandated by either building codes or performance codes. Curtains need to be covered in flame retardant to prevent fire spread, for example, and certain other materials have chemicals added to them in order to make them more flexible, more rigid, or more rugged.”