Eco-kitchen: earth-friendly tips for your home

Better Nutrition, March, 2004 by Lori Tobias

Lisa Pickett spent 2 1/2, years looking for the perfect kitchen cabinets. When the cabinets arrived at her favorite building store, she had mere minutes to make a decision or risk losing them to another shopper. She quickly said yes, hauled her new kitchen furnishings home, then stored them in her dining room while she spent another 9 months redesigning her kitchen to fit her find.

No, Pickert isn't some persnickety homeowner with a penchant for one-of-a-kind wares, but rather a remodeler trying to do things the environmentally friendly way.

And she's succeeding.

Last fall, Pickert's Portland, Oregon, home, a 1907 "four square," was featured in Portland's Second Annual Green Building Home Tour--an example of how salvaged materials can give new life to an old space.

Pickert, a higher education administrator, found her cabinets, complete with Corian countertops and original hardware, at The ReBuilding Center, a Portland nonprofit salvage shop. She reconfigured the cabinets to fit her space and added a new coat of paint, had the solid surface countertops refabricated (with enough left over for two culling boards) and polished the old hardware to a shine. She also installed a reclaimed hardwood floor that had formerly been used in a Boys and Girls Club. And she even reused the home's original kitchen baseboard and trim.

"What's surprising is how seamless those cabinets look in my kitchen," Pickett says. "They fit the character of my home perfectly. Most people look at them and ask 'Why did the former owners take them out of their kitchen?' I had to repaint them, but other than that, they were in fabulous shape."

Healthy Home

As Pickert learned, creating an eco-friendly space isn't particularly difficult, nor is it necessarily more expensive than conventional remodeling--the same materials Picker picked up secondhand for $1,700 would have cost roughly $10,000. It does, however, require research, patience and a lot of thought.

Typically, people inclined toward eco-friendly practices consider such issues as energy use, sustainability and whether or not a product will be harmful to the environment.

When it comes to our homes, however, there is another consideration--eco-friendly should mean not only good for the planet, but good for our health as well. "You need to be aware of your indoor air quality and that it is created by the products that are in a space," says Denver designer Shelly Black. "When choosing materials, you need to think about whether there's a lot of glue in the product and [whether or not it's] in direct sunlight. If it is, it's probably outgassing potential toxins that you're breathing into your lungs and that are connecting with the foods you're preparing."

(Outgassing is the term used to describe the process in which chemicals escape from a material into the atmosphere. If you've ever smelled a new car, carpet or shower curtain, you've been exposed to outgassing.)

Chic Cabinets

Among the biggest kitchen culprits for outgassing is the cabinetry--typically made of particleboard or melamine.

"If you did nothing else in your entire kitchen, finding an alternative to conventional particleboard would accomplish more than just about everything else put together," says architect Darrel DeBoer of Alameda, California. "Conventional particleboard has some fairly toxic glues in it. They're made from urea formaldehyde ... one of the most sensitizing chemicals the industry has come up with. It causes allergic reactions in people."

Until recently, the best alternative was to find good old-fashioned solid wood cabinets. Now there's another option: wheatboard.

"Wheatboard is like a wood-based particleboard except it's made from chopped tip wheal straw and glued together with a better glue that does not outgas," says DeBoer. "It's just a much more stable mix than traditional particleboard and formaldehyde-based glues."

Two other options DeBoer recommends is to use 1-by-12 pine instead of plywood or particleboard, or to use an exterior grade of plywood, which, he says, "Is much less water-soluble, so it will outgas at a rate of 1,000 times less than standard plywood."

Fabulous Floors

Just as particleboard is the culprit in cabinetry, vinyl is the big offender underfoot. It not only outgasses chemicals, but when burned, such as in a landfill, those chemicals become deadly toxins.

One of the more popular eco-friendly alternatives isn't a new material, but one you might recall from childhood--linoleum. Today, you're most likely to hear it referred to as Marmoleum. Made of pine rosins, wood flour and linseed oil with a jute fiber backing, Marmoleum, is touted as biodegradable, allergen-free, bacteria-resistant and easy to clean.

"Another really good one," says DeBoer, "is cork flooring. The bark is harvested every 9 years. They make wine corks, and what's left is ground up and used in sheets of flooring. "I've seen cork floors in courthouses dating from the 1930s, and it's still there all these years later. It's a good choice for a kitchen because it's easy to clean. You can get it in 12-inch squares or in tongue and groove."