VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compound. Sounds bad, huh, well they really are that bad. VOCs can cause some pretty nasty things to happen to the human body. I am no scientist or even an expert, but I will put this forth.

Reducing the amount of VOCs present in the home both during construction and during occupancy can have a profound affect on your health and overall quality of life.

VOCs are present in many products ranging from solvents, paints, stains, glues, and even products you wouldn't guess because they are composed of products such as particle board that may contain VOCs. During some research, I found a list of VOCs and its 14 pages long. ( www.ene.gov.on.ca/envision/monitoring/VOC_List.pdf ).

By eliminating or even just reducing the amount of VOCs in your home you can greatly increase the air quality, the smell of your house, allergens, etc.

Some Low-VOC or No-VOC products can be more expensive, but so too are health insurance and medical bills.

I painted my niece's room recently and she is really sensitive to smells and certain allergens. I used a new No-VOC paint and boy was I surprised. It didn't smell much at all and when I put it on the walls, there was none of that typical paint smell. When my niece came in the room, she was surprised too.

I myself am going to switch no No-VOC paint just because its more pleasant to work with.

I know that most hardware stores are now carrying low and no-VOC paint lines. They are a little pricier than their cousins, but to not feel like you have a toxic waste dump in your house, its worth it.

Toxic waste dump? Really? Sounds a little extreme don't you think. I may not always like the smell of fresh paint, but it subsides over time and if you ventilate your house well while painting, I don't think its all that big of a deal. There seems to be this trend of blowing every little small thing out of proportion. VOCs are killing the world, cars are evil. Blah blah blah. I think that the big issues should be addressed, but sometimes I wonder if we are getting to specific with defining the problems and not addressing the root causes.

skeptic. that's like saying you shouldn't mind people who smoke because it dissipates in your lungs after a few seconds. VOCs are actually pretty dangerous and some have even been found to be carcinogens. VOCs may not seem like a "big issue" to you, but on a mass scale, they are causing health problems. I will have to find the reference, but I have heard that the air quality in a home can be much worse than the air quality outdoors. VOCs are partially to blame for that.

We know so little about short term and long term exposure to many chemicals, so its really important to not be exposed to them.

Volatile organic compounds are hydro-carbons, the stuff of life, hence the term “organic”. Indeed, all the VOCs in paint and varnish, which derive from solvents, ultimately originated as plant life. The main job of solvents is to evaporate rapidly, so they are, by definition, volatile.

When people say VOCs are bad, there are two utterly unrelated forms of badness. One is bad for human health and the other is bad for the planet. VOCs need not be either.

Hydro-carbons come in a wide range of forms (toluene, acetone, benzine, naphtha, mineral spirits to mention just a few). The number of hydrogen and carbon atoms can vary considerably and the molecules can form chains or rings. Some are far more dangerous to our health than others. Aromatic (ring shaped) are far worse than aliphatic. Some manufacturers purposefully modify their solvents, making them aliphatic, to make them safer for the user. The worst can cause all manner of damage to the human body – liver and kidney damage, headaches, cancer – and the culprits are all petrochemical products. But the solvents that come directly from living plants (turpentine comes from pine trees, delimonene comes from citrus fruit peel) are fairly harmless, but you still can’t drink them! Turpentine is used in Vicks Chest Rub, and many cake recipes call for lemon zest, whence comes citrus oil. Technical data sheets will warn that if you use these solvents on your hands regularly, it can dry them out and you can even get a rash. That’s a far cry from renal failure and brain damage.

In 2010 paint manufacturers will be legally obliged to reduce the amount of solvents used in their paints to combat global warming. This is because almost all the solvents used are petrochemicals, byproducts of the fossil fuel industry. They are fossil carbons, deriving from plants that died a hundred million years ago. When these hydrocarbons evaporate, carbon previously trapped deep underground is added to the atmosphere. If, however, turpentine were used, this would not exacerbate global warming. 40% of the VOCs emitted into the atmosphere every year come from pine forests. It is part of the natural life cycle of pine trees to absorb carbon dioxide and to release the carbon again. If turpentine is extracted from pine and used as a solvent and the carbons then escape into the air, well, the natural cycle is unchanged, but humans have had “free” (from the planet’s perspective) use of the volatile hydrocarbons.

The cruel irony is that the public are sold water-based acrylic paint as an environmentally friendly, green alternative to traditional oil paints. Because water is used instead of solvents, it is true that less fossil carbon is found in the paint. And when water evaporates it is far less harmful to the painter than solvents. But the oil in oil paints derives from plants, the plastic in acrylic derives from petrochemicals. Admittedly, most of the carbons stay trapped in the dried paint film rather than escape straight into the air so the contribution to global warming is small, but using and buying plastics help the petrochemical industries. And which sounds greener to you, the industrial manufacturing of plastic from crude oil or the industrial manufacturing of fatty oils from sunflower seeds and soyabeans?

In my book, oil paints with drastically reduced solvents are greener than acrylic paints (not everyone agrees). These paints do exist. If manufacturers used solvents derived from living plants instead of fossil fuel, oil paints would be far, far greener than acrylic paints, no arguments. Such paints are extremely hard to find.

You can do your part, small as it is, by not buying white spirits or turpentine substitute ever. For our American cousins, don’t buy naphtha either. Buy only genuine turpentine. I use orange peel oil (much harder to find and I may start selling it on the web soon). The problem is, you just want to sniff it.

rosssams, thanks for the great explanation.

I understand railing against the petrochemical usage, but don't you think that to some degree plastics and other petrochemical derived products are beneficial to society. Sure there are better alternatives to latex acrylic paint out there and one is not to paint at all but rather look for alternatives using plasters or stucco type products. I have seen "mud" walls that are gorgeous and "breath".

I would also like to point out that just because something is plant based does not make it safe. "Natural" is not synonymous with beneficial and safe for consumption. Turpentine can and will cause neurological damage, renal failure and respiratory damage if you inhale too much of it. VOCs, whether oil or plant derived are unhealthy for human consumption.

I don't know if I agree that turpentine is safe. My understanding is that most if not all of the aromatic hydrocarbons pose a danger to human health, whether petrochemical or not.

No amount of railing against the oil business is too much! As a weapon against these multinational giants, whining is pretty feeble, so you won’t find me watering down the polemic by admitting that the use of fossil fuel helps alleviate much of the grind of manual labour.

More important is the point that natural products can be poisonous. To start, we can rule out ingestion except in the case of small children and the suicidal. Because of the taste, it is hard to be poisoned by solvents. In any case, d-limonene produced far less violent ill health than petrochemicals when ingested by, believe it or not, volunteers. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN, is all I have to say.

Yes, turpentine and d-limonene are terpenes, with a small percentage of aromatic hydrocarbons and a larger percentage of aliphatics. This puts it alongside white spirits but below toluene in terms of aromatics, which I have always assumed were worse for humans than aliphatic and alicyclic hydrocarbons. But now I’m not sure. Aromatic hydrocarbons get absorbed into the blood much faster, it is true. Because they are not so readily absorbed, aliphatic hydrocarbons are more likely to be exhaled safely. But the differences between the two isn’t great. And tests on rats find the aliphatic hydrocarbons much more likely to collect in the brain. Exactly what hydrocarbons do to the body is not clear, but mostly they are converted into alcohols before being excreted in urine.

Assessing how dangerous solvents are to human health is not easy. There are many cautionary tales about kidney and liver damage. Given the role of the liver and kidneys in converting the hydrocarbons this is not surprising, but probably stems mostly from the damage done when quantities have been ingested. However, medically ascribed instances of breathing solvents as the cause of organ defects are not numerous. And not even white spirits are deemed carcinogenic by the medical world. Much of the damning of various solvents comes from those who are not objective, usually acrylic paint manufacturers. I am no different, and take a partisan position concerning terpenes (solvents from plants). Because d-limonene has not been used for long as a solvent and because turpentine was only common before good medical studies were possible, it is hard to find solid medical evidence of their ill effects (although a thorough pre-1950 literature search would probably uncover plenty of anectodal evidence to suggest deleterious effects from turpentine, and there is plenty of evidence of artists who mix their own oil paints with turpentine becoming ill and having to give up the practice).

To evaluate the dangers of solvents to humans, we really have to turn to white spirits. And there is probably no report more thorough or trustworthy than the Environmental Health Criteria 187 (white spirit) compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme, International Labour Organisation, and World Health Organization. A dozen boffins met in 1995 and reviewed all manner of studies available, with a bias towards British and Danish research. Irritation to the skin, eyes and lungs are all well documented and easily demonstrated experimentally. Long term health risks are very hard to prove. The report makes it clear that the best evidence comes from statistical studies of large groups of painters whose health was compared to other tradesmen who did not regularly come into contact with solvents. And here there is only one obvious health danger: damage to the brain, producing neuropsychiatric symptoms, depression, short-term memory loss, loss of peripheral sensory perception, inability to concentrate and anxiety. Mild or chronic toxic encephalopathy was the real danger to workers exposed regularly to large concentrations of white spirit fumes.

For painters, this meant exposure to mineralised spirits in alkyd resin paints. The report notes that the painters studied, working in the 1960s and 1970s, worked with paints with higher levels of solvents than today. And it should be noted that with the common use of acrylics, few painters today are exposed to anything like those solvent concentration levels on a continuous basis.

So, is turpentine and d-limonene any better for you. I believe so. Partly, like religion, it is no more than faith. Cold pressed orange oil is sold as a food stuff. Working in a sawmill exposes sawyers to plenty of pinene hydrocarbons – and it is a big industry – but chronic toxic encephalopathy is not a complaint you read about. Pinenes are put into cleaning fluids to give us that fresh pine smell. It smells good. White spirits smells bad. Perhaps I am being naïve, but I like to think that my senses are telling me something about what is safe and what is not. Partly, it is experimental science, with a sample of one. Working with white spirits has always given me headaches, sometimes of migraine proportions. Working with turpentine and d-limonene does not.

Let me leave you with this pseudo-scientific observation. Terpenes are quite pure C10H16 hydrocarbons. White spirits range from C7 to C12 and were described by the UN report as comprising a complex chemical mixture and a total of 208 different substances were found in one sample of a common European white spirit. It is possible that this solvent chemical cocktail manages to mess up the human mind more intensely.

Now, what was I talking about?

So to sum all that up,. VOCs bad, even the one's from nature. We don't know how bad, and we can talk and talk and talk and talk about what we don't know and what we do, but in the end, they aren't safe.

Do you think paint companies, solvent companies, stain and plywood companies would all be leaning toward low VOC products if this was all a farce? Its real. Just find the safest products and go with them. Do your research and keep it all safe.

As so often happens, the debate about VOCs centres not on the green issues but on the health question. Paint manufacturers are being made to reduce VOCs come the first of January 2010, not for reasons of painters’ health but to reduce the addition of fossil carbons in the atmosphere.

I don’t understand the alarm of the possible personal harm of VOCs, since the danger has been around for sixty years now, is lessened by the common use of acrylics (they are now three times more common than alkyd resin paints), is only really dangerous to those regularly exposed through their profession, can be reduced considerably with good ventilation, and almost completely eliminated by the use of correct vapour grade masks. Perhaps I am too cavalier with my own health, but VOCs do not scare me. And, as God is my witness, I regret more the C2H5OH (ethanol) I have voluntarily ingested over the years than the C10H16 I have inhaled.

If I weren’t so old (and thus will miss the hideous effects that will be brought about by global warming), I would be scared of the 4 million tonnes of mineral spirits – or refined crude oil if we call a spade a spade – used annually in the USA and Europe as solvents. Terpenes, solvents from citrus fruit peel or coniferous trees, rather than low octane petroleum should be in our paint and varnish. And our paint resin should come from plants (oil) not from petrochemicals (acrylic).

That is a green issue and this is a forum for green building practices.