Come explore eco green and healthy building tips galore at the West Coast Green conference coming up September 25 - 27, 2008 in San Jose, California.

The conference is open to the public, with homeowners day on the 27th. The conference features the latest and greatest in sustainable, green and healthy building. It will cover everything from clean tech, global warming, solar, wind and waste reduction to healthy building products. And, lots of educational presentations and networking opportunities.

There will even be a showcase house right in the middle of the San Jose Convention Center. It’s made out of shipping containers and it is dubbed the “Harbinger House”. Gregory Schaefer, the chef on Planet Green’s Daily news show, “The G Word”, came up with the name and it was voted in as the favorite.

How about that! A building conference where you can actually learn how to make your home castle - or work castle - efficient and healthy. That’s a surefire breath of relief for those of us with chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or mold sensitivity. Asthmatics too, and…well, you get the picture.

This year Al Gore is the Saturday plenary speaker. There will be 400 exhibitors, 200 presenters and 14,000 attendees. And, even if you can’t make it, the presentations will be videotaped and available online.

Yep…West Coast Green has got you covered.

So, come check it out…you’ll get lots of cool, eco-healthy building and home ideas.

Sustainable, Guilt Free and healthy…

Will the environmental, pollution and green building advances spurred on by the Beijing Olympics have a lasting effect in China?

To be sure, there were many issues around the politics, internet and media prohibitions and human rights aspects of the Beijing games, That’s an issue unto itself.

But, we also saw a race towards greener buildings that use resources wisely and more cleanly. There was a shift from coal use to electricity.

We saw an effort to reduce smog and pollution in the air, however late the effort came. We saw that air pollution can’t be solved in just a week or a month. We saw the health concerns brought forward vividly by athletes who refused to come and athletes who came with breathing masks.

We saw the introduction of organic produce and what was said to be hormone and antibiotic free organic meats, even if it came after countries wanted to bring their own food to avoid toxins and positive banned hormone tests. And even if it came from a select number of purveyors, seemingly organized just for the Olympics.

We saw a spotlight on the health effects of pollution on the Chinese people. Just as we saw a glimpse of Chinese graciousness…despite how choreographed it might have been.

Have things really changed, or was it all a show?

Change…

That slow, lumbering, reluctant beast.

That can sometimes morph into an excited adolescent, eager to take on the world…

What do you think?

Has China really begun the journey towards being a greener, less polluted, healthier place? Or not?

Will the changes spurred on by the Olympics become a long lasting legacy for China and the world? Or not?

Arsenic! Yet another thing to be linked to type 2 diabetes…

We’ve known for a long time about the presence of arsenic in the environment. But a new study has found that even small amounts of arsenic have a link with diabetes.

That’s right. Small amounts.

Researchers looked at how much arsenic was in the urine of the folks in the study. Those with arsenic had a 24% increased risk of having diabetes than those that had no arsenic. We already know that arsenic exposure can lead to cancer and other health problems, but the diabetes link is a new one.

But where is the arsenic coming from, you may ask? Good question.

The assumption is that arsenic is coming from the water supply, as the researches discounted the non-toxic natural arsenic in food and fish sources.

Arsenic can find it’s way into the environment and water supply from coal burning and copper smelting. It’s found in the pressure treated wood used to make decks. It’s also found in some insecticides and fungicides, though that is banned in many countries. Arsenic gas is even used in microchip production.

It can also be found naturally in rock and soils. That’s been a problem with well water and chronic arsenic illness in rural China and places such as Vietnam and Bangladesh.

But another source of arsenic is nutritional supplements. Sea algae and kelps can contain a lot of arsenic too.

Arsenic binds and disrupts the sulfur containing metabolic enzymes that help us produce energy. Previous studies have found that pancreas cells, where insulin is produced, produce less insulin when treated with arsenic. Less insulin leads to diabetes.

It’s actually unclear in this study if the arsenic contributes to diabetes, or if something about diabetes causes the arsenic to clear from the body differently.

Urine can be tested for arsenic, as they did in this study. You can also check hair and even nails, but those may not be reliable because of external contamination.

Luckily, filtering the water is something we can all do. On the public level, cities can beef up testing and filtering for arsenic. And at home, this study provides just one more incentive for filtering of tap water.

You can also use treated wood to build decks that has not been treated with arsenic. And you can make sure to use integrative pest management techniques to avoid harmful insecticides and fungicides.

Arsenic and diabetes. Who knew?

The Olympic Water Cube is a green, energy saving, engineering marvel. Yes, yes, that’s nice, but did you know - it uses UV sanitation instead of chlorine to keep its water clean?

It is estimated that up to 20% of swimmers have asthma. So a pool that cuts out the chlorine to reduce asthmatic effects can only help athletic performance. And if it helps reduce the chances of children developing asthma from swimming over the years, so much the better. So from a health point of view, the Beijing Olympic pool is anti-asthmatic.

For sanitation, the pool will rely on a combination of filtration types: zeolite, coarse sand, aeration, high capacity UV disinfection and only a very small amount of chlorine for residual. This should also do a good job of removing environmental toxins such as silver, mercury, cobalt and arsenic. A good idea given environmental toxicity concerns.

That may not seem like such a big deal, but having asthma affects performance and general well being. For these Olympics, Peter Vanderkay, Dara Torres and Jessica Schipper and Park Tae-Hwan are just some of the swimmers with asthma. And in 1972, the US swimmer Rick DeMont had his gold medal in the 400 meter freestyle taken away because of testing positive for a banned asthma medication and was disqualified from another event.

Ironically, some youngsters take up swimming to help with asthma and others develop asthma over the years. Either way, it only makes sense to use a method of water sanitization that does away with the asthma inducing effects of chlorine, and that is exactly what the Water Cube pool does.

Competitive swimmers spend a huge amount of time in pools. Which means, they have a huge potential exposure to the effects of chlorinated water. The problem is that chlorine reacts with body debris like sweat, skin flakes and ammonia causing the chlorine to turn into trihalomethanes and other respiratory irritants that sit above the water where they are breathed in. In closed natatoriums, that problem tends to be even worse than in outdoor pools. Adding to the complexity is the increasing evidence that different people are able to detoxify chemicals in their systems more (or less) efficiently than others.

Studies have found higher rates of asthma in swimmers who train regularly and in people who work as lifeguards or around chlorinated pools. Research has shown that breathing these chemical can contribute to the development of asthma. This is particularly the case in indoor pools.

Chlorine exposure during childhood happens at a time that is particularly important for development of the lung. And most swimmers start early and swim for many years. In fact, researchers have found that exposure to chlorinated water before the age of 6 corresponded with higher rates of asthma at age 11 whether or not there were symptoms in the meantime.

So even though some folks question the high rate of asthma in swimmers and wonder about athletes just using asthma medications to get a performance edge, there really are scientific reasons that point to chlorine exposure and airway reactivity as being a real problem. If you are competing against the likes of Michael Phelps, you need normal lung functioning, and the best asthma medications in the world might just bring you up to even if you have asthma.

Luckily, there are some methods that drastically reduce the need for chlorine in pools. The two main alternative methods are ozone and UV sanitation. Europe has been using ozone filtration since the 1950’s. In the US, we are just catching up.

We think it would be great, actually, if all pools were chlorine free.

The news is out today that the CDC and FEMA have found excessive levels of formaldehyde in the post Katrina trailers.
This is a tragedy that adds to the already sizable burden of Katrina tragedies.
But, it also brings out into the open the dangers of formaldehyde in building materials. Not just in the Katrina trailers. [...]