My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke, founder of Wellness Within Your Walls. We’ll be talking about how to connect the global family with healthy, eco-sensitive products, that result in beautiful, sustainable, non-toxic environments. WWYW® addresses the “Tight Box Syndrome”- which has become an issue with poorly ventilated buildings that have placed energy efficiency above health. These buildings can’t breathe and harmful toxins are trapped in the interior environment with no way of escaping the living environment. WWYW® strives to educate the builder, manufacturer, architect, designer and consumer on how to take control of reducing toxins in the interior environment and how to off-gas toxic chemicals from products responsibly (we’re going to talk about off-gassing in particular). Jillian is also the founder of DES-SYN, an interior design firm that was established in 1991. She is known as a premier eco-interior designer and creates interiors that are beautiful and healthy for the client and kind to the earth. With more than 30 years of experience in cities including New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, she has become well known to many in in the residential, commercial and hospitality design industry. Jillian has authored numerous articles that specifically deal with reducing harmful toxins in the interior environment. She has been featured on CNN, Martha Stewart Radio and her design have been published by Veranda magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Professional Builder and Builder Magazines and numerous other publications nationally and globally. www.wellnesswithinyourwalls.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Wellness Within Your Walls—Outgassing & Indoor Air Quality
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Jillian Pritchard Cooke
Date of Broadcast: August 14, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic free and talk about how we can make things right.
I love this song. This is why I chose it as my theme song about being points of light and about knowing what the right thing is to do and doing it in our own lives and doing it in the world and making the world a better place.
And that’s really why I do this radio show. It’s because I want to give you the information so that you can tell what is the right thing to do with regards to toxics, how we can identify toxic chemicals that are making everybody sick and what we can do so that we can all be healthier, happier, think more clearly, just have more productive lives because we are not being harmed by toxic chemicals.
Today we’re going to be talking about indoor air quality. My guest is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s a founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She specializes in addressing the tight box syndrome.
Now, I haven’t talked about this in a long time, this idea. I remember when I first started doing this work that there was a time when our walls, the walls of our houses were built to be leaky (I guess is a good word). They weren’t built tight, and so there was air-exchange between the outside and the inside.
And then, back in the 70s we had the energy crisis. And so suddenly, it became an issue to save energy on home heating.
Everybody started coughing and closing up those little spaces.
And so, what happened was, suddenly, all those toxic things that were in our homes which had been leaking out suddenly became an issue. We came up with the phrase “indoor air pollution” at that point.
So, Jillian is an interior designer. I want to make sure I get that right. She’ll correct me if I was wrong because there is an interior decorator and an interior designer. They’re two different things. She is specializing in looking at what is outgassing from home interior products. So now that we’re in this tight box of the way our buildings are now, they’re building up, and how can we reduce the amount of out gassing, how can we be aware about gassing, how can we choose products don’t outgas.
She does some other things too, but that’s the one that’s of most interest to me on this show today. But we’ll talk about lots of other things that have to do with them, with decorating as well.
Hi Jillian!
JILLIAN COOKE: Good morning, Debra! How are you?
DEBRA: I’m very good. How are you?
JILLIAN COOKE: Very good, thank you.
DEBRA: First, I want to say I love Wellness within Your Walls. I love that as a name. I just immediately gravitated to that when I saw it.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, we took some time to really think through when we were naming our standard. And it really says it all. So…
DEBRA: It does, it really does.
JILLIAN COOKE: I’m thrilled that you liked it.
DEBRA: Thank you! So, tell us, how did you get interested in this subject?
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, for me it was very organic. I was involved in sustainability. I really didn’t have a firm understanding of “wellness within your walls” as it relates to everybody’s homes.
But the organic nature of this, I was very involved with sustainability in the last 20 years. And about 10 years ago—a little less than 10 years ago—I was invited to participate in the first LEED-certified home in the United States.
We have been around for a while as a commercial program, a commercial certification. And a real dear friend of mine, Laura Turner Seydel, and her husband Rutherford Seydel, decided that they wanted to participate not only in this program, but have their home be somewhat of a show house to the public in different organizations to help educate on sustainability.
And the three of us approached it from three different directions. But my direction initially was to find a sustainability with Laura, and her husband Rutherford approached it from the standpoint of energy efficiency.
And while I was involved in the project, unfortunately, I was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer. And I realized that as I shared that with Laura, she would do what friends do. She would’ve said, “Oh, you need not to be involved in this. Step back and take care of yourself.” So, I chose not to tell her and I stayed involved. My entire focus on the entire project shifted from sustainability and energy efficiency to health.
My first question when I was diagnosed with the cancer was, “Where did it come from?” And as an interior designer, I have been involved in projects for, at that time, over 25 years. I was required by my contract to be on a site during times when they were most toxic. I really did not pay much attention to that.
So, knowing the toxins I was exposed to and the type of rare cancer that I had, it became very much a mission to figure out how we could reduce the toxins in that first LEED-certified house.
And LEED does a great job especially on the gold and platinum levels. But most programs about there at that time didn’t really pay much attention to the wellness side of it. There was education placed about what lead was doing as it related to paint in old homes, and we have really addressed the asbestos problem. But there were so many other problems that have not yet been revealed.
But with the right kind of research and working with the many different groups in the United States that have become part of this wellness movement, Wellness Within Your Walls was established more as a partner to other entities in the industry with the main focus being on wellness.
So, the genesis, if you will, for the Wellness within Your Walls standard really came from that one particular project. So, my cancer was—as crazy as it sounds—a blessing in disguise.
DEBRA: Well, I always say that too. I didn’t have cancer, but I started doing my work because I became extremely chemically sensitive. People didn’t even know what that was back in 1978. It’s a difficult thing.
A lot of people have a very difficult time with it. And it certainly defined my life since then, but in a very good way that it led me to, as with you, to be able to see that there are things that are dangerous and toxic in the world and that we can do something about it once we become aware that they are there and that they are affecting us and that we have alternatives.
So we have a similar path.
Could you, just for a second, explain for our listeners how sustainability—I’m very familiar with sustainability too. It’s a bigger picture, but it doesn’t always contain being concerned about health because other issues are—go ahead and tell us your experience with that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, the word sustainability is a fantastic word. And it is overused. But most of the words that are attached to the green building movement or the wellness movement are overused. And in many cases, there is the conversation of greenwash (which I know you’ve featured from time to time on your radio show).
But sustainability as it relates to health, unfortunately, you can be very sustainable in regards to how you harvest wood for manufacturing of homes and furniture. But if you don’t finish the process with paints and stains that are no VOC or low VOC using a positive gassing-off method, then really the conversation of sustainability is just a one-sided conversation.
It’s just that. You’ve done right by the trees, and you’ve done right by Mother Nature to a certain degree. If you don’t carry all the way through—as a cradle to cradle refers to it—like a life cycle, then really, you’re mitigating the good work you started by finishing the product with something that is actually, in the end of the day, maybe not as harmful to the atmosphere because of the gassing-off and the time it takes. It is harmful in many respective or in many, many months or years. But to the human body, it’s instant exposure to those chemicals on a sustainable piece can start the change of your cells going from a healthy cell to a pre-cancer cell, for example, to finally a cancer cell.
So, this conversation of sustainability, it needs to be had at the same time as the conversation of wellness and health and off-gassing and vapors and fumes and chemicals, harmful chemicals.
DEBRA: I totally agree. We need to go to break. And I just want to say that, for me, having studied sustainability and applied a lot of it, I came back to focus on toxics because I think that’s the first step to sustainability. And we can talk about that more too.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She’s at WellnesswithinYourWalls.com.
Jillian, before we go on, I just want to say again what I said before the break about toxicity being non-toxic. Addressing toxic issues is the first step to sustainability because I think that everything else that sustainability encompasses—energy efficiency, sustainable resource management, all those things—they’re all just as important.
But to me, I actually was including sustainability in my own standards for many years. And then, I decided I really needed to focus on toxics because so many people working on the field of sustainability don’t include that. They’re looking at the environmental effects, but not the human within the environment. I think that we’re all part of life, and that we need to be looking at all of that.
And every time we use toxic chemical, it goes into the environment as well. So, that’s where I start. And then, once things are not toxic, then it’s great for them to be sustainable in other ways as well.
JILLIAN COOKE: I thoroughly agree, I thoroughly agree. And I think that so much of this is a dialogue, and being able to make available to the consumer at large the concept that they do have choices.
They may not be seeing those choices everyday as it relates to labeling (which is a huge issue in the country), but if they could identify what the harmful chemicals are through different organizations throughout the United States, then they can be part of the dialogue and they can be part of the choice.
And at the end of the day, it’s tried and true that we really do vote with our pocket book, don’t we? If we start making these choices to stay away from products that are toxic and that can cause harm to every age group, and specifically the young—which is one of the age groups that just concerns me the most because they cannot speak for themselves. Their parents are being sold through marketing campaigns, all kinds of things that are not healthy for children that are, in many cases, under the age of even eight years of age, 15 years of age depending on what things brought into the home.
So, I think that the dialogue that goes along with what you’re saying about is more than sustainability. It is health. We have to be able to channel the information to the public at large so that they can not only make the right choices, but be part of the dialogue.
I used the farm to table example more often in our credit courses that we offer to ASIDNAIA. It’s pretty simple at the end of the day. When you look back 10 years ago on the farm to table concept, people were sort of getting it, sort of talking about it. And now, all of a sudden, it’s in mainstream America. They’re paying their hat on the fact that they are farm to table.
And I do think that that’s what the wellness movement is really starting to stir not just in this country but internationally.
Everybody’s got that concern of why is cancer on their lives, why is autism on their lives, and a number of other known diseases. And more often than not, it does go back to the toxins.
And of course genetics comes into play. But the toxins more and more are becoming identified as being responsible for so much of what medical industry is dealing with.
DEBRA: Yes, that is absolutely true. That’s been my experience as well.
So, you’ve mentioned that you have a standard for Wellness within Your Walls. Tell us about that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, actually, it’s pretty simple. There are seven folks that are part of the Wellness within Your Walls team. And we really kept coming back to the concept that certification can be complicated. And often, certification can be not real. Folks can come up with just about any kind of certification based on any set of criteria.
So, we wanted to make it simple and useable. The three categories we identified was natural, sustainable and responsible.
Not all natural is good. Formaldehyde is a natural product and chemical. It’s good in certain cases—our bodies produce formaldehyde—but it’s bad in certain cases when it’s used in adhesives and in many building products when it gets to a certain level.
So, our program defines the word natural and the good that’s from natural. Water is a chemical, and it’s natural. It’s a good thing especially if it’s purified. Air is natural, and it’s a good thing. But radon is natural, and it’s not a good thing. Same thing can be said for lead and asbestos and a number of other products that are out there.
We wanted to make sure that when we created that part of the category, that dialogue was going to exist, so that we can identify that many years ago, people did not know lead was bad for you. Now, lead is not in paint. So, let’s take that concept and look at all the things that are out there that might be natural that are not good for you. And let’s have the conversation.
Let’s have the dialogue. Let’s lead our way through the information and make the column to the left what is not good for you versus what is good for you that’s natural instead of just looking at the word natural on packaging and assuming that “it’s natural, it’s good for you.”
Sustainability is not all—recycling and reusing is a fantastic concept, but not all that you recycle is good. If it was bad the first time, why on earth would we recycle it the second time? So, that’s the sustainable category. It speaks to responsibly taking plant life as in trees or bamboo, not clear-cutting and having an understanding of what the outcome is when you clear cut as far as just bamboo.
Bamboo is the latest, greatest product that’s being pushed in the furniture industry, and also in the textile industry. And if it’s done responsibly through plantation growth, then I’m all for bamboo. But if you’re going to clear cut a forest and take the animals away from their habitat, then that’s not exactly sustainable. It’s not a sustainable product. It becomes a non-sustainable product if that happens.
And then the category that I like the most, that I had the hardest time wrapping my hands around is the responsible category.
DEBRA: Okay, we need to take a break. We need to go to break, so when we come back, we’ll talk about that. I know you want to talk about that, and I want to talk about that too.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. Her website is WellnessWithinYourWalls.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s the founder of Wellness within Your Walls. She’s at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com.
Jillian, before the break, we were talking about your three categories. The third one is responsibility, controlling toxins responsibly through accountability. So, tell us about that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, that’s the one I had the most trouble with when we were creating it because, originally, we just didn’t wanted to discuss toxins. We were like ostriches with our head in the sand.
And then, I realized with the help of our fabulous group that that’s a huge mistake. Because we live in a toxic world, we no longer can say that there’s a place on this planet that’s not affected by toxins in some way. And then, the weather is a perfect conversation (though obvious, it’s a separate conversation).
So, we created this level of the standard, this category to say, “Okay, yes! There are toxins. You are going to encounter toxins all day every day. You could potentially be encountering toxins during the eight hours of sleep at night depending on what your mattress is made of.”
So, let’s have a really strong dialogue about what those toxins are and how you can mitigate them if they are in your life. A simple example of that is you might be ordering something off the internet, you open up the box when it arrives at your home, and you’re just overcome by some level of vapor that might have to do with the textile finishing process, it might have to do with the paint that was used, the steel that was used, the fire retardant that might be on them.
And so, what do you do at that point? Do you send it back? Do you seal it? Do you take it and put it in the garage for a certain number of days with windows open and off-gas it?
That became the real focus for our team as it relates to everyday living and the accountability all the way with the beginning of the food chain with the manufacturers to the end of the food chain with the consumer and the purchasing.
DEBRA: This is a really the interesting part of it for me that you’re doing because it’s a little different from my approach, and yet, I think is a complimentary one because as I’m always saying, “How can we find things that have no off0gassing, no toxic chemicals?” and yet, we are faced with—I get these questions all the time, “I bought this” or “I bought that” and “How do I get rid of the odor?”
And so, let’s just start our discussion of off-gassing by having you explain what it is.
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, off-gassing even can take place with natural products that do not involve man-made chemicals.
For example, I ordered for a client recently a mattress from a reputable mattress company that claims everything to be organic. I had that mattress show up into our warehouse, we unwrapped it and it smelled like a barnyard.
DEBRA: I get people write to me and they say, “Oh, I bought this organic thing and it has an odor to it.” And it’s not necessarily a toxic odor, but it’s something—like, example, for myself, I can’t use anything that’s made out of latex. It could be a 100% natural organic latex and I can’t tolerate the odor. Even though it’s not toxic, I just can’t tolerate the odor of latex.
So I can understand that. I have no problem buying organic cotton which has a little stronger smell than non-organic cotton that has been processed more. But some people don’t like that, so they don’t want it. And so go ahead.
JILLIAN COOKE: So, we’re just so much a part of the dialogue. That’s why when you identify the category of natural within the standard, it feeds in the category of sustainable, which feeds into the category responsible.
So, even responsibility isn’t necessarily always related to harmful toxins, the conversation responsibility is related to the big picture as we see it—not just natural, but also those products that are man-made.
We’d be really kidding ourselves if we thought that we could live without man-made materials that involve toxins. At this moment, I do not know of an adhesive that is in certain sealants that have to withstand certain levels of traffic and maintenance specifically in institutions like hospitals and schools unless you use these toxins.
And the reason is because there hasn’t been something produced to date—not that the scientist aren’t working on it.
Recently, we’ve been involved in a summit put on by UL Industries. I was fascinated by the direction that the green sciences they’re going in. And not until recently, they didn’t even offer green science in colleges. Now, it’s become a new department—and thankfully so. That, in itself, is going to help us deal with the accountability as it relates to being responsible through the manufacturing process.
So, it would be great to say that we could all just suck the rubber out of the tree and that would glue everything together, the natural gassing off or the natural rubber is a lot less than a lot of the adhesives that are coming out of the chemical industry.
But there lies in the middle probably something that hasn’t been created yet.
The paint industry, they just really took the bull by the horn. Seven years ago, eight years ago we worked on Echo Manor.
We used no VOCs and low VOCs mainly because of the maintenance. And three years later, Benjamin Moore jumped on board with “We’ve got to get these VOCs out.” And then, right next to them, big names like Sherwin Williams. You can now go to some of the biggest building shows in America and you can find no VOC products. There’s another company, Imperial Paint, that’s found a way to have it be the best it can be for hospitals and for institutions like schools that are no VOC.
So, the good news in this—and why I now find the responsible category to be probably my most favorite category—is the onus is being put back on the manufacturer. It’s being put back on the retailers, those that are bringing it into their homes, the consumer, the end-user. They’re all having a dialogue. And that happened because the green sciences got together with the manufacturers and said, “Hey, we got to figure this out!” And they are.
DEBRA: And they are. I see that. I do see that that’s going on in the world today, that we have many more possibilities than we’ve ever had before and that’s the direction we’re going.
We need to go to a break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s founder of Wellness within Your Walls at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com. We’ll be right back.
= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Jillian Pritchard Cooke. She’s founder of Wellness within Your Walls. You can visit her website at WellnessWithinYourWalls.com.
So Jillian, now given that we have these products—and in in particular, you’re addressing interior home products—given that we have these products that are out gassing, what can we do about it, about the out-gassing?
JILLIAN COOKE: Well, really, that is what we need to do, understand the time that each of these chemicals need to off-gas.
And it’s extremely complicated because you can have more than one chemical off-gassing at a time. One harmful chemical might take 10 days, and another harmful chemical might take two years. So, when we talk about off-gassing, it’s not that simple.
So the best thing to do—we’re working on putting together a guide to help maneuver through the minefield of harmful chemicals and exactly what the timing is. But the best thing to do is anything that you bring into your environment, you just make sure that you can trust your nose often. You just need to get it into a space that is very well ventilated and that children aren’t around, and animals aren’t around, and let it off-gas.
Mattresses are a perfect example. There are number of mattress companies out there that promotes the best night’s sleep ever, but there’s a reason for that. When your body hits this mattress with these foams, they mold themselves to your body.
And as you move, they remold themselves to your body. Well, it takes a lot of technology and a lot of man-made chemicals to make that process happen during your eight hours of sleep.
So, I would say you start with make the choices not to bring those products into your home. But if you have, then—a return mattress policy is non-existent unless it’s defective in some way. The laws are such that you own that mattress. So, really, you’re not bringing it into the home.
But that really relates back to pesticides on your lawn, right? You don’t really want your children playing on pesticides and bringing them into your carpets or your animals bringing them in and then spider-jumping into your two-year old’s bed. Your 2 year old’s petting the dog, and the pesticides are getting everywhere. The whole idea of off-gassing directly links back to the dialogue, and it directly links back to the choices.
So, my preference is that you would not have to off-gas. But if there are chemicals written in, you can ask for a safety data sheet. Most folks don’t realize you can go anywhere in the United States to a retailer and you can ask the question, “What is this made of?” And you can request the safety data sheet. But no one totes that or promotes that.
DEBRA: I do, I do.
JILLIAN COOKE: The average individual, Debra. You’re not average.
DEBRA: I know, but I’ve been telling people in my books for years to look for the material safety data sheet. And on my website, when people ask me questions, I often are quoting the material safety data sheet.
So they are available. Yes, I agree with you. And people should look at them. But they don’t always tell 100% of what’s there.
The reason I use material safety data sheets if you see a toxic chemical on it, then you know it’s there. What it doesn’t do is guarantee that there are no toxic chemicals in it because not all the toxic chemicals are on the lists of what needs to be recorded.
JILLIAN COOKE: No, they’re not. They’re not. And they can rewrite the names of them just on a whim. You take a little of this chemical, a little of that chemical and put it together. You might think that you’ve gotten to the end of finding out what this harmful chemical is going to do. And then all of a sudden, it pops up in a new name and a new entity.
It’s very, very difficult to stay ahead of the curve. It’s not unlike the pharmaceutical industry in that way. But that’s how they make their money. We are very much in a capitalist society, so really, they’re not breaking any laws as they are at this time.
You have to be ahead of the game and making the decision to first go with the non-toxic approach. Wherever possible, make that non-toxic decision.
If you cross that line, that’s when the off-gassing comes in, that’s when you reduce the living in a tight box. Find ways to really ventilate your home. Stay on top of what is coming out of industries like the HVAC, the air and heating industry. They are making tremendous steps to the right direction. They see it as being a big issue with closing these houses up.
DEBRA: So, I would just add in there that if you have some kind of product that is giving off some vapors, one thing that you could do is, as Jillian said, you could put it in the garage or someplace where it has time for those vapors to emit and dissipate before you bring it in the house.
The other thing you can do is seal it in some way. There are some sealants that do—you could put a sealant for formaldehyde on particle board and it will seal in the formaldehyde and it won’t out gas.
I also want to give a suggestion. If you just look up—type into your favorite search engine “NASA out-gassing”, N.A.S.A., National Aeronautics Space Administration, N.A.S.A. If you type in N.A.S.A. out gassing, you’ll get a lot of links to various sites that talk about—it’s the N.A.S.A. data for how materials out-gas.
And the reason that N.A.S.A has done this is because they are concerned about toxic chemicals in space ships. And so, whatever they put inside the spaceship, they need to know what the out-gassing data is.
And so you can look up on these sites and see what N.A.S.A. has to say about how long it takes for a material to out gas.
It’s very fascinating reading if this is something—
I mean, I often am not concerned about this because I’m buying things that don’t out gas and I know that they don’t out gas because I’ve done a research. But if there’s any question about whether or not some chemical that you know of out-gasses, you can look it up on the N.A.S.A. site and you’ll find out all about the out gassing.
JILLIAN COOKE: That’s a wonderful resource.
DEBRA: Yeah, it is. It is. They’ve been researching it as long as I’ve been writing for many years. I think they started doing it when they first started making rockets—when I was seven years old or something like that.
JILLIAN COOKE: Another option is if you’re moving into a new home, take a warehouse and have all your furniture go to a warehouse first—with carpeting as well. I think that some of the big carpet industry folks up in Dalton, Georgia are jumping on the bandwagon where they are making available for large project spaces where they can have the carpet rolled out.
That’s a big culprit. I’m all for where you are, hardwood everywhere. But unfortunately, especially in a commercial world with tenant finish, that’s not a first choice.
So, I think we’re going to see more of those types of businesses pop up where you can have off-gassing take place in a controlled environment.
DEBRA: I think that sounds like a great idea. I would prefer—and I know, I think that we’re moving in a direction, particularly with green chemistry, where we’re going to be reducing the amount of toxic chemicals at the source more and more and more. That’s going to become the standard. I can really see that happening. And particularly, the amount of products that are available now versus when I started 30 years ago is amazing. We’re really going in a direction.
And I think that we will get to a point where we won’t have to be concerned about this.
But something like a paint or finish, it has these chemicals in it so that you can spread the finish on and then it evaporates off. And then you have a finish that you just have the particle part, not the vapor part. And so that can be not very toxic at all.
After paint has dried, after paint has cured, it’s not a toxic exposure. It’s the stuff that makes paint liquid that is the VOC.
The key thing here is if that’s the way the product works, you need to have that out-gassing time. And often, what happens is that you’ll buy a piece of furniture or something where the off-gassing time has not occurred. And that’s why it’s toxic to the user.
So, not only do we need to be looking at how can we use less toxic materials, but also, if there is out-gassing involved, to make sure the manufacturer puts in that time or there’s some interim place to put the item, so that by the time it ends up to the consumer, it isn’t toxic.
JILLIAN COOKE: Yeah, it could be as simple as a labeling that has the word “cured” with the date on it. Just like labeling on our products that are in our refrigerator, things that we eat, we know when our milk should be no longer good to drink, it should be the reverse concept when it was cured on this date, manufactured on this date, cured on this date. And that alone will start a dialogue, “Oh, if you wait a few extra months, you get better curing.”
DEBRA: I love that, I love that. I hope that people will start doing that and that consumers will start asking about that.
Particularly with furniture, you don’t know how old the piece of furniture is, so you don’t know how long it’s been curing.
JILLIAN COOKE: And I think it’s folks like the Sustainable Furnishing Council (which is a great group) and NAHD who represents all of the building entities in the United States, I think if they could adopt something as simple as that along with their data sheet, I think we’d be in a much better place as it relates to toxins and in the environment.
DEBRA: I think so too. I think so too. Well, we only have 10 seconds left, so thank you Jillian so much. This has been very interesting. My guest is—oh, we got to go! She’s in Wellness within Your Walls. Be well.
JILLIAN COOKE: Thank you so much. Take care, Debra. Bye.
DEBRA: Bye.
