Harvard Kicks Up the DUST in Our Workspaces // A Lecture for Parson’s Healthy Materials Lab

Images: courtesy of Parsons and Harvard

Many organizations are beginning to refocus their attention onto air quality, and its ability to make or break the health of their workspaces. Adjacent to this subject of air quality is dust – a tiny substance made of fine particles of solid matter.

Last week, dust and toxic chemicals were the subjects of a lecture hosted by the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, which is quickly becoming a reliable source of intriguing, uncommonly specific information about materials in the built world. The Healthy Materials Lab gets much of its information from top-notch research centers, and one of those is Harvard.

For its lecture last week, titled “Our Global Chemical Experiment: How Healthy Building Strategies Can Reduce Exposures to Chemicals.”, the Healthy Materials Lab invited Dr. Anna Young from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to share her team’s research on how we can use healthier materials and products in buildings as a strategy to reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals. In light of the current glaring spotlight on disease transmission and public health and safety, the work coming out of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health is all the more important.

“We created the Parsons Healthy Materials Lab in 2015 to explore how materials in interior environments impact our health, especially in lower income communities,” said Jonsara Ruth, Design Director and Co-Founder of the Healthy Materials Lab, who introduced Dr. Young. “Harvard’s healthy buildings program research serves as a foundation for much of what we do. We were talking with their team one day, and someone provided a statistic that said a full third of our life is spent in our bedroom. We thought, ‘Wow!’, and we really wanted to learn more.”

Before getting into the research, Dr. Young invited participants to consider the presence of toxic chemicals in their everyday life, and why it’s been so difficult to eliminate them.

We know very little about the chemicals all around us.

“We are so widely exposed to toxic chemicals, that they are detectable in our blood or urine in 90% of people,” Dr. Young said. “And the problems associated with these chemicals aren’t going away anytime soon.”

But, Young noted a phenomenon called “chemical whack-a-mole”: in eliminating one problematic material, ten new ones may take its place.

“As an example, we’ve done a really good job at developing and using BPA-free plastic; but the substitutes to BPA that we’ve created may be just toxic, if not more so.”

Young stresses that one critical piece to solving the safer products puzzle is to understand the substitutes we’re creating and their shortcomings. She also touched on something “apocalypse fatigue” a phrase used by Anna Robuck, a marine scientist at the University of Rhode Island, to express the colossally overwhelming feeling that prevents most people from attacking the toxic chemicals problem.

We know very little about the chemicals all around us.

We’re also wildly unknowledgeable about the chemicals all around us in general. Dr. Young provided a few telling statistics to show this. Of 550,000 chemicals in the EPA database, we have hazard information for just 20% of them. We have exposure data for only 4%, 0.1% are monitored in humans, and <0.1% are restricted in the U.S.

Harvard’s research indicates that Americans now spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, and studies show that the spaces in which we spend that time directly affect human health and performance.

Dr. Young provided a visual explanation of how toxic chemicals have the ability to impact our bodies: instead of an estrogen hormone receptor successfully connecting with estrogen, for example, toxic chemicals can swoop in and connect to the hormone receptor instead, taking away the estrogen’s ability to reach its receptor.

It turns out that dust is an excellent indicator of the chemicals and toxins that are floating around in our interior environments; dust acts as a reservoir for the chemicals in an environment. How do we know this?

Young’s team conducted novel human hormone cell assays of dust – which would be able to quantify the “health” of the dust without needing a multi-year, expensive, time- and labor-intensive human epidemiological study. These cell assays [assay meaning the testing of a specimen to determine its ingredients and quality in chemistry] would reflect all chemicals in the dust, and would be able to capture the combined effects from co-exposures of all chemicals.

The Chemicals in Hormonally Active Dust study found that the vast majority of dust

The research team was interested in measuring flame retardants, including PBDEs and OPEs that have adverse effects on thyroid function, fertility, pregnancy outcomes, and fetal development. They also wanted to measure stain repellants, including PFAS that are associated with thyroid disease, high cholesterol, fetal development impairment, immune system suppression, and possible obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

Nuclear hormone receptors are things that regulate critical genes, so disruption in their signaling can lead to reproductive, developmental, and metabolic disease and malfunction.

Young provided a visual explanation of how toxic chemicals have the ability to impact our bodies: instead of an estrogen hormone receptor successfully connecting with estrogen, for example, toxic chemicals can swoop in and connect to the hormone receptor instead, taking away the estrogen’s ability to reach its receptor.

The research team measured the chemicals in 46 indoor dust samples in offices, common spaces, and classrooms across a university in 2019. For each sample, they measured concentrations of 15 PFAS, 8 PBDEs, and 19 OPEs.

In essence, they were measuring the “health” of the dust.

““There is a public health opportunity here to reduce exposures to toxic chemicals,” Dr. Young said. “Measuring the chemicals in dust is a great way to quantify the health of a space, as it’s both quicker and inexpensive, but still helps us understand real health outcomes. This is the first study to be able to scientifically evaluate the benefits of a chemical class-based intervention on PFAs and flame retardants in building materials.”

It turns out that dust is an excellent indicator of the chemicals and toxins that are floating around in our interior environments.

The study resulted in the following takeaways:

1. Dust is hormonally potent. Every dust sample was hormonally active, and 100% of samples interfered with human hormonal receptors.

2. Stain-repellent, flame-retardant, and plasticizer chemicals used in building materials influence potencies

3. The potency of a chemical, not just its amount in dust, matters and should be assessed.

The study found that the vast majority of dust samples affected each of the following endpoints: PPARy (Receptor) suppression, thyroid hormone transport suppression, estrogen receptor activation, thyroid hormone receptor suppression, and androgen receptor suppression.

Young’s research also includes a study of a university that has renovated many buildings with “healthier” furniture and carpet that are specified as free of the entire classes of PFAS and flame retardants. In this study, they measured 25 conventional spaces and 22 “healthier” spaces.

The intervention worked; compared to rooms with no or partial changes, rooms with a full “healthier” materials intervention had 78% fewer PFAS, 45% fewer PBDEs, and 65% OPEs.

At the lecture’s conclusion, Dr. Young stressed the importance of continuing to expand our research activities in order to create change.

“It really starts with ingredient transparency – with manufacturers understanding what materials and chemicals are in each of their products,” Dr. Young noted. “Part of that is developing internal standards, as well as third-party certification.”

“Buildings and their structural components will require much more time to phase out materials with toxic chemicals. We need to intervene on more product categories next, to create scalable change. Beyond furniture and carpet, the products in electronics and in children’s toys will also be a focus in the future.”

“And, we’ll only be paying more and more attention to homes, as homes have become our ‘new’ offices. These healthier standards and environments need to be present in both commercial and residential buildings.”

In the Benefits of Healthier Materials study, the research team found that compared to rooms with no or partial changes, rooms with a full “healthier” materials intervention had far fewer toxic chemicals.

Ms. Ruth wrapped up the session, saying, “Today has been a great deep dive into the ins and outs of your world, and understand how you look at this, spending time indoors really measuring all of these things, and teaching us about how chemistry has a lot to do with interior design and architecture.”

The lecture certainly accomplished its mission, as we are much more woke to the health impacts of the dust that surrounds us! If you’re interested in learning more about Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, head to www.forhealth.org.

Anna Young is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on healthier materials and products in buildings as a strategy to reduce our exposures to toxic chemicals. She recently earned her PhD in the department, where she conducted dissertation research about global exposures to chemicals in office buildings, the hormonal activities of building dust in cell assays due to chemicals, and the benefits of healthier materials interventions to reduce toxic chemical loads in buildings. Anna also holds an MS in Environmental Health from the Harvard Chan School and a BA in Computer Science and Environmental Studies from Yale University.