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371 points clumsysmurf | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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xnx ◴[] No.43109665[source]
On average, we inhale 20 lbs of air per day. This is greater by weight than the food or water we consume in a day. We should be paying a lot more attention to air quality.
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asdff ◴[] No.43110361[source]
I can't help but feel like it has taken a nosedive as well. Modern homes are sealed and don't recirculate much outdoor air. As a result you have all this modern american living plastic material constantly offgassing. your fleece shedding microplastic particulate into the air that you then breath, eat, burn over the stove and inhale the fumes. You can't even do anything about it. Get rid of all the plastic you want in your life and the water supply is what is contaminated next. Your neighbors dryer exhaust and their fleece polluting your air. Restaurants. The food suppliers. Move a thousand miles away to the tip of the mountaintop upstream of everything conceivable, and you are liable to be bombarded with it carried via updrafts from around the world along with the rest of the usual pollution.

We can't even slow down the consumerism. Everyone's job around the world is someway tied into this rampant production of cheap plastic goods to replace cheap plastic goods from yesterweek. You try and nip it in the bud everyone is liable to lose their job and everything might very well collapse because of how we chose to stack this deck of cards on this planet.

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amluto ◴[] No.43115854[source]
Competently built modern houses are well sealed, so not much air filters in through leaked walls, doors, etc. Instead, outside air is actively introduced through a filtered intake, by a fan (or by deliberate negative pressure, but that’s riskier, as air will come in through other paths too, bypassing the filter and potentially introducing contaminants from the structure and/or soil into the building).

There are plenty of systems to do this. My favorite is an ERV, with an aftermarket, oversized, upgraded supply filter.

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1. macNchz ◴[] No.43116731[source]
While it's totally possible to build competently, my impression is that, in the US at least, there are tons of existing houses—built roughly between the 70s (energy crisis) and the mid-2000s when ventilation requirements became more common in building codes—that are fairly tightly sealed but lack any sort of real ventilation systems beyond like, kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans.

Having grown up and lived primarily in (uncomfortably!) drafty old houses, I've noticed the phenomenon ever since I was little kid because they have a distinctive stuffiness and smell of furniture/carpet/plywood even if nothing inside is actually new. I think many people are just used to it/consider it a normal smell of a house because so much of the housing stock is in this category.