Indoor Air Quality in Flooring Removal - Crystalline Silica Dust Edition
Air pollution is a serious problem around the world. Exposure to pollution can lead to numerous issues, especially for those with respiratory ailments. Unfortunately, indoor air pollution can be worse than outdoor air pollution especially when it’s in your own home. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes that the pollution indoors can be as much as 2 to 5 times higher than what’s found outdoors.
In certain cases, it can be as many as 100 times more damaging than outdoor pollution. After all, modern working conditions and lifestyles have people spending more and more time indoors than ever before. This is the reason why you should be extremely cautious and well-prepared anytime you are doing home renovations or remodeling. Choosing a contractor that is OSHA certified and has proof of air quality tests, is greatly important. OSHA air quality field testing is how a contractor can know for certain how safe and dust free their results are especially for flooring removal projects.
Choose DustRam® and prevent exposure to crystalline silica dust
Dust Free Tile Removal Services: Get Your Free Estimate
Why Indoor Air Quality Is Important in Floor Removal & Home Remodeling
– It Can Improve Your Health
If you spend a lot of time indoors, having exposure to clean air is important to your general health and well-being. Having access to high-quality and clean air can keep you from getting sick too often and it can keep your respiratory health optimal.
When you are exposed to bad air quality, it can cause issues with your respiratory health by exposing you to harmful bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and more. All of this can have detrimental effects on your overall health.
– Reduce the Risk Of Developing Serious Respiratory Diseases
As you will see throughout this article, being exposed to bad air quality can be linked to a range of different diseases and other sorts of health complications. Not only does it compromise your immune system, but it can have devastating effects on your respiratory system, your eyes, and a lot more.
Having access to quality and clean air indoors is essential for limiting your risk factor for developing these preventable diseases and health complications.
– Enhance Your Quality Of Life
It doesn’t matter what you are doing, when you have access to clean air at home, your quality of life will improve. Having fresh and clean air flowing throughout your house can improve your quality of life by limiting respiratory symptoms and keeping you feeling energized and relaxed.
Breathing plays a critical role in how you feel at all times.
If you aren’t getting sufficient oxygen with each breath, your body will compensate and bodily processes will slow down. Having access to fresh air at all times in your home can ensure that your quality of life is excellent whether you’re at home watching TV or sleeping.
Dust Free Tile Removal Services: Get Your Free Estimate
What Can Cause Pollution Inside Your Home?
There are plenty of situations, elements, and substances that can cause indoor air pollution. An average home could be subjected to VOCs, lead, particles, mold, mildew, asbestos, and more. All of these pollutants can drastically decrease the air quality in your home. Likewise, they can all lead to a myriad of health complications when exposed to them for prolonged periods.
For instance, if you are getting renovations done in your kitchen, bathroom, entry way, or any other part of the home, there’s likely to be air pollution from the construction project. One of the major substances to watch out for is crystalline silica dust. This could be a resulting pollutant stemming from a floor or backsplash retiling project.
Unfortunately, breathing in respirable crystalline silica can cause numerous diseases and some can even be fatal. With crystalline silica dust, the particles travel through the vents and end up everywhere in your home but ultimately, the lungs are the final filter.
What is Crystalline Silica Dust
OSHA defines this mineral as one that is found in a range of different building materials. It can be found in stones, concrete, tiles, bricks, and more. They are generally not dangerous to work with when they are fully composed. However, during construction, they generally create dust. The resulting dust can end up exposing the individuals around the area.
When there are retiling projects being completed, a lot of dust can get created. After all, the old tile needs to get ripped out and cleared. This can end up spreading a lot of dust around especially when the right tools and equipment aren’t being used.
How Can Tile Removal Expose You to the Dangerous Dust?
The United States Department of Labor has estimations that as many as 2.3 million individuals get exposed to crystalline silica dust in workplaces annually. Unfortunately, many processes can create dust which leads to a high number of people getting exposed yearly.
Any material that contains crystalline silica that gets cut, drilled, crushed, or ground is likely to produce this dust. Unfortunately, the dust ends up being 100x smaller than a grain of sand. As a result, they are invisible to the naked eye. They can be silent and deadly pollutants drifting in your air.
To prevent exposure to crystalline silica dust, make sure you hire a DustRam® certified contactor for 99.99% dust-free tile removal.
Visit Our Blog For the Latest News & Trends
Health Issues Associated With Unhealthy Indoor Air Quality Levels
Just about all medical and science professionals would agree that indoor air pollution is a big problem. It’s something that can impact your overall health. Unhealthy indoor air quality levels not only harm your current health state but also bring long-term health complications when exposed for prolonged periods. While it will vary, depending on what air pollutant you are exposed to, you could end up suffering from dizziness, fatigue, asthmatic attacks, and much more. The American Lung Association says that poor indoor air quality can end up either causing or contributing to the development of lung cancer and other chronic respiratory diseases.
As it relates to crystalline silica exposure, you can risk developing silicosis. This is unfortunately an incurable condition that can negatively impact your lung function. It can end up reducing your lung’s ability to take in sufficient oxygen. It can also contribute to sustaining permanent damage to your lungs.
When you get the dust trapped in the lungs, the particles can end up causing progressive inflammation and it can subsequently damage your lungs. Typically, chronic silicosis can start to set in after being frequently exposed.
Some of the primary symptoms of chronic silicosis include:
- Chest pain
- Persistent cough
- Fatigue
- Shortness of breath
- That’s not it though
According to the CDC, exposure can also cause:
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
- Autoimmune disease
- Lung cancer
- Kidney disease and more
There’s no doubt that you will want to avoid all of the consequences that come from exposure to crystalline silica dust. That’s why it’s so important to enhance the air quality throughout your home. You want your indoor air quality to be safe and clean. This is especially true when you are getting renovations completed in your home.
The Benefits of Choosing Dust-Free Tile Floor Removal Contractors For the Job
We have a primary goal of helping all of our clients remove tiles without creating harmful dust. There are plenty of benefits that you can enjoy when you use our removal systems including:
1. Dust-Free
Perhaps the most significant benefit is the dust-free approach. Unlike a lot of the traditional removal methods, we don’t have resulting dust. Our dust-free method can effectively filter out 99.99% of the produced crystalline silica dust created during the entire process. We do this by effectively suctioning and extracting the dust right at the source. We don’t allow the dust to get released anywhere near your home. This means that you can count on your home sustaining 50 times better air quality than OSHA’s silica dust exposure limitation standard.
2. Healthier Air
A significant benefit of our removal system is the improved air quality that you will experience. This can help to improve the health and wellness of anyone living in your home. We capture the dust as it is being released. This means that you don’t have to worry about dust getting released into the air. This further means that you don’t have to worry about the dust getting trapped in your vents, air ducts, ceiling, and most importantly, your lungs.
3. OSHA Compliant
We utilize fully compliant systems. We pride ourselves on helping our clients achieve better standards than what’s required by OSHA. Our systems end up exposing you to 50 times less dust than what the OSHA deems acceptable.
4. Cost Effective
While we offer numerous advantages over traditional removal approaches, we offer them at a competitive price. Our removal solutions are cost-effective for homeowners. We don’t have to worry about constructing barriers to keep dust away. Also, we utilize the most efficient equipment to handle the process. However, one of the most important things that allow us to offer such a good price is avoiding any sort of expensive and extensive cleanup process. After all, we don’t release dust throughout the removal process. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about cleaning up afterward
Get a Dust Free Floor Removal Quote
DustRam® Guarantees a 99.99% Dust Free Result Every Single Time
We utilize the most advanced technologies and processes to ensure that our removals are dust-free. This ensures that our clients maintain the optimal air quality in their homes even after tearing out the riles. We know how important it is to keep crystalline silica from spreading in a home. Because of this, we make a point of emphasis to extract all of the produced dust when we are tearing out the older tiles.
High CFM
We utilize a patented vacuum system that is the very foundation of our removal process which allows us to achieve such efficiency. Our vacuums can suck up much more air with enhanced airflow which means we can keep it from getting into the air.
No More Manually Purging HEPA Filters
The majority of traditional dustless tile extraction systems will require filters to get purged often manually. We don’t have this type of shortcoming with our system. Our system is designed to work continually. This means that you don’t get exposed when the dust spreads inadvertently. Traditional systems wait for the vacuum to clog to the point where suction force is limited. This is the primary reason these systems are so ineffective and inefficient.
Our Equipment Collects Dust At The Source
When you choose our systems, you are getting one that collects the dust at the source. Collecting it at the source is the only way to ensure that it doesn’t spread throughout your home. Our approach is much more efficient than others because the others allow the dust to spread before it’s extracted.
Final Thoughts
It cannot be overstated how important your indoor air quality is to the health and quality of life of everyone in your household. If you are getting a retiling project done, you need to think hard about the dangers of crystalline silica dust. We utilize the best methods for dust-free tile removal to ensure your entire family is protected during and after a renovation project.
References:
[1] https://www.lung.org/clean-air/at-home/indoor-air-pollutants
