What's in furniture? It's enough to make you sick. . Labels, certification could bring a breath of fresh air to consumers who can't tolerate the toxic emissions

Is That New Sofa Making You Sick? Chronicle illustration by John Blanchard Is That New Sofa Making You Sick? Chronicle illustration by John Blanchard Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close What's in furniture? It's enough to make you sick. 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Laura Ingram rarely buys anything new, but last spring the 58-year-old Oakland landlord sprang for 16 feet of new oak bookcases to line the walls of her backyard studio-office.

"There was no problem in the showroom, when I was standing there with huge stacks of shelves," she said. "But when the shelves arrived, they provoked such a violent allergic reaction in me after delivery that the vendor had to come and get them the next day and put them on a loading dock for three weeks to off-gas."

The bookcases came back, and Ingram paid a carpenter to install them and a helper to move 35 boxes of books. Still, her chest would hurt, her lips would swell, she'd get confused and feel as if she had the flu.

So the furniture sat in her yard for three more months while she waited for the chemical odor to dissipate. It didn't. The vendor finally returned Ingram's money and took the bookcases away.

"This was my attempt to spiff up my environment," Ingram said. "Now, I'd be extremely wary and want every certificate in the world."

The problem for Ingram and others who are growing increasingly sensitized to indoor air pollutants is that the certificate doesn't exist, and the furniture industry resists the notion of labeling its wares. Consumers can read a list of the ingredients in their cornflakes and a summary of what nutrients they contain, but good luck trying to find out what's in the new set of bedroom furniture we spend eight hours with every night.

The store owner concluded that it was some chemical in the lacquer that made Ingram sick. Lacquers can contain high levels of solvents that release volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, that the American Lung Association reports can irritate eyes, skin and lungs and cause headaches, nausea and even liver and kidney damage.

Kirk Saunders, a finish specialist at EcoHome Improvement, guesses it was formaldehyde off-gassing from pressed wood. Emissions from urea formaldehyde - "which is really, really bad for you, and is so ubiquitous in an urban environment," Saunders said - can cause cancer "and other adverse health effects," according to the California Air Resources Board.

If it had been a couch Ingram had bought, potential irritants would have multiplied. The upholstery might have been treated for stain and water resistance with a finish containing more formaldehyde and also perfluorooctanoic acid, considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a likely human carcinogen. It might have been dyed with chemicals including benzidine, a carcinogen, and filled with polyurethane foam made before 2006 and containing flame-retardant polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are now banned in California for their potential health effects.

The EPA has a list of 188 air toxics (referred to by some as HAPs, hazardous air pollutants), and has assessed and classified 32 of those. Benzene, a carcinogen that can emit knock-out fumes, is a solvent that has been commonly used for making resins, paints and dyes. Ethylene oxide, a probable carcinogen that can also cause brain and nerve malfunctions, has been used in polyurethane foam and adhesives. Hydrazine, a chemical used in textile dyes, is a probable carcinogen with a range of adverse health effects, and vinyl chloride, used in the making of some furniture, is a carcinogen that can cause liver damage with chronic exposure.

Furniture, the EPA's "Introduction to Indoor Air Quality" states, can release pollutants "more or less continuously," producing immediate effects such as eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches and dizziness that can be most intense right after the furniture comes off the assembly line and then seem to dissipate. But even for those without immediate violent reactions such as Ingram's, there can be long-term effects, such as respiratory and heart ailments and cancer.

"I might feel nothing now, but I might be at risk later of respiratory issues, cancer and so on," said Carl Smith, CEO of Greenguard, which tests emissions from new products seven days after unwrapping them. "You don't get cancer just from walking into the room."

"Only a small number of the 80,000 chemicals registered with the EPA have been tested for harmful effects," said Rowena Finegan, owner of San Francisco's Eco-terric (a green home furnishings store) and a specialist in Bau-biologie, the study of the effects of the built environment on human health. "I'm sure we all suffer from stuffed noses and achiness that's all due to chemicals."

It is possible to find furniture that is chemical free and made of all-natural material; Finegan has partnered with Cisco Brothers to create residential furniture that uses only sustainable wood frames, pure latex foam and pure wool batting. Natural Sense makes foam from tree sap. Columbia Forest Products has replaced formaldehyde in its pressed-wood products with soy-based and cost-competitive PureBond, which could revolutionize the ubiquitous plywood and particleboard (see your kitchen cabinets for examples and a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer for extremes) and even MDF, or medium-density fiberboard, which appears in many expensive pieces of furniture as a veneer because it tends to be less flawed than natural wood.

"We're doing low-VOC lacquer, a low-fume urea formaldehyde, we've made great strides in reducing formaldehydes, VOCs, HAPs," said Bill Perdue, the vice president of environmental affairs, health, safety and standards for the American Home Furnishings Alliance. "I guess part of what's happened is we have not told our story very well."

The High Point, N.C., trade group launched its Enhancing Furniture's Environmental Culture program in 1999, prompted partly by increasing regulation (much of it in California, much of it global) and also by growing public awareness of environmental issues. Now it is partnering on a new launch, the Sustainable Furniture Council, which has set out to establish an "eco-label" for furniture.

"We're in the process of developing a hangtag that customers can see," Perdue said. "It's been to the detriment of our industry that we haven't gotten the word out."

The Sustainable Furniture Council, more than 100 members strong after only one year, announced its standards for certification at the High Point Furniture Market this month. Meanwhile, two respected third-party standards, that of Green Seal and Greenguard, have zeroed in on components (with Green Seal testing paints, adhesives and other materials used in the making of furniture) and on office/contract furniture (Greenguard is testing and certifying a long list of brands of furniture for meeting standards of VOCs, formaldehyde and other indoor air emissions).

"The residential furniture industry has been slow thus far adopting standards for indoor air quality," said Smith of Greenguard. "It is something that is very problematic for them - not so much for the cost of testing, but for the need to make changes in their formulations."

Smith said that there are two ways a furniture-maker can receive Greenguard certification for a product that has exposed particleboard: Switch from formaldehyde to another ("slightly more expensive") binder, or seal the particleboard in laminate or some other coating. So far, architects shooting for high ratings from LEED (that's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a certification program run by the U.S. Green Building Council) have driven the office/contract furniture manufacturers to make changes; of course there are also standards for school furniture, because children are considered at risk.

"But in the home," Smith said, "furniture is one of the three or four things we should be most concerned about," along with carpets, adhesives and paints.

Formaldehyde emissions levels have dropped in recent years - though try telling that to someone doing a kitchen or installing 13 feet of shelves. The California Air Resources Board has taken aim at urea formaldehyde and established regulations that by 2012 "will set a standard for the entire world," Perdue said. He and his group succeeded in removing from the regulations a requirement that manufacturers test and label their furniture before sending it to retailers, but there will be third-party certification by the board.

"Woods shipped through California will be clearly marked, and the box you buy at Ikea should be clearly labeled, and everybody throughout the process will be held responsible for it," said Dimitri Stanich, spokesman for the board, which adopted the new regulations in April and, barring an industry challenge, will begin implementing them in tiers starting in 2009. "Once these regulations are implemented, they will be the most health-protective in the country."

"Phase 2," Perdue said, "will set a standard for the entire world. I would anticipate that to meet Phase 2 compliance levels, we'll have to move away from urea formaldehyde altogether."

As to other chemicals, Perdue said, "We think down the road there may be some type of certification for residential furniture." He's joined the U.S. Green Building Council's committee developing LEED certification for residential furniture.

But, beyond certification and a stamp of approval, where is the label that merely lists the components of a product and lets the consumer make an informed choice about what to inhale from the breakfast table besides the cornflakes?

"We're where food was 15 or 20 years ago - now there are labels," said Victoria Schomar, principal of the Green Built Environments design firm, who gave a design seminar at the San Francisco Furniture Mart's Live Green, Live Well show last month. "We're not there yet with furniture."

"Most furniture companies probably don't know what's in their furniture," said Saunders of EcoHome Improvement.

Indeed, one furniture manufacturer said that although he upholsters and finishes his chairs locally, frames come from overseas, so he knows only how they are supposed to have been made. Keith Parker, owner of the small, family-owned company where Ingram bought her bookcases, said the ones Ingram chose came from a firm in Southern California that he assumed used a "standard lacquer" of primarily acetone, which has been exempted by the EPA.

Said Finegan, "Those businesses that are involved in the healthy furnishings industry know what they are selling and are proud to be leading a very worthwhile cause. I would suggest that you advise your readers to ask searching questions when they are buying furniture, and if the person they are addressing hasn't a clue what they are talking about, they should go elsewhere."

Perdue in part agreed. "Don't take the furniture home and then complain," he said. "Go to Levitz and say, 'I want furniture that's low-VOC, low-HAPs, without UF.' They can't go into the buying situation and then say, 'Oh, this furniture makes me sick.' The companies that are retailers, you'll be able to ask them those questions pretty soon and get good answers."

(A Levitz spokeswoman was in contact via e-mail for this story but did not answer questions about the contents of the store's furniture.)

Furniture manufacturers thus far would like to leave it up to the consumer to press for answers; one salesperson said, "They didn't used to tell us what was in it because they didn't want us to know."

"Historically, there has not been the concern or awareness that it needed to be disclosed," said Greenguard's Smith. "But there was also not the awareness that it could make you sick. Increasingly, people are becoming aware of that. I think that over time, formulations and components will have to be disclosed."

In the meantime, Ingram had an empty wall in her studio and decided, she said, to buy "something used that the poison has already seeped out of." So off she went to the Berkeley Outlet and found five rustic, 7-foot-tall pine bookcases salvaged from Fantasy Records.

One more thing we don't know: There is no timeline for exactly how long a new piece of furniture containing formaldehyde or other potentially harmful chemicals continues to emit gases after the obvious smell has dissipated. But shelves that once held music on vinyl should be a safe bet.

House calls Don't bother calling the doctor to ask for a prescription for furniture to breathe by. But here are a few resources to help you shop: Try the lists of products that have been third-party certified by Greenguard (www.greenguard.org), Green Seal (www.greenseal.org) and Scientific Certification Systems (www.scscertified.com). Greenguard and SCS deal specifically with air quality, while Green Seal also examines environmental impact. The Sustainable Furniture Council ( www.sustainablefurniturecouncil.com) is an industry partner without independent testing, but its 120 or so members represent a good place to start shopping and asking questions; all of their links are on the council's site. Some of the better-known names include American Leather, Century, Harden, Lee Industries, Palecek and Room & Board. Surf for furniture on the search engine TheFindGreen.com. Again, there's no independent testing or certification, but many of the merchants are listed in other databases or at least declare their devotion to sustainability and natural processes. Check out the offerings at Eco-terric (1812 Polk St. in San Francisco, www.eco-terric.com), which promises to use healthy, nontoxic materials in its products. For listings of other Bay Area retailers that have eco-friendly furniture, see the San Francisco pages at Greenopia (www.greenopia.com). At the fall furniture market in High Point, N.C., green was declared "the new beige." Bernhardt, a leader in contract/office furniture eco-options, introduced an eco-friendly collection of residential case goods; Rowe showed upholstered furniture cushioned in plant-based foam; C.R. Laine premiered an upholstery package it's calling "down2earth"; and Palecek, a longtime user of sustainable woods and fibers, came out with all-natural fabrics of hemp, bamboo, cotton and linen. Don't look for these in stores just yet - fall market introductions usually start making their way into the retail sector early in the next calendar year. - Susan Fornoff