TOXIC SOLUTION

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 14, H.S.I.’s maintenance staff plugged multiple Glade air fresheners into the hallway outlets on many floors of Kenmore Hall. By late afternoon, the perfume was overpowering, and all over the building.

Staff and management didn’t explain why they did this, and tenants were not consulted or informed about it ahead of time.

Many floors of the building have a foul smell - smoke, urine, cooking odors (and worse) create a stew of odors that is constant and disgusting, so some tenants may find the perfume covering the stink to be an appealing alternative. However, for other tenants who have serious, chronic and potentially life-threatening lung diseases like asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and lung cancer, the air fresheners are a BIG PROBLEM. Covering bad smells with strong perfume is not the same thing as actually cleaning the air; it’s much worse - it’s adding a layer of potentially hazardous chemicals to the mix.

Many of the chemicals found in products like Glade Plug-Ins and Febreze are linked to cancer, developmental and reproductive toxicity, and organ system toxicity. Many of these chemicals are also potential allergens, immunotoxins, and neurotoxins which can cause irritation to peoples’ skin, eyes and lungs.

Of course, if you go to the S C Johnson (maker of Glade Plug-Ins) website, they make it sound like their products are totally safe, and present rave reviews of the new scented products they sell - but here’s a reality check: they have a whole section covering chemical ingredients that can potentially cause allergic reactions. Even though they minimize the potential for problems, it’s safe to say that enough people HAVE had problems with their products that the company’s legal department realized the need to essentially post a warning in a publicly accessible place.  Try typing the following phrase into Google: can scented products make you sick.

Some people may say that the solution to the air freshener problem would be for tenants having a problem with the perfume to keep their doors closed. That’s not practical, though: these perfumes seep around the doors of individual units the same way smoke and other odors do. Even if we keep our doors closed, we all still have to walk through the hallways to get to the elevators, stairs, trash chute area, and - on the floors that have them - the laundry rooms.

H.S.I. needs to find better ways to address this issue. We need better air circulation throughout the building. We need NOT to have additional chemicals added to the mix (isn’t the smoke from illegal drugs like crack bad enough?) And instead of pulling a sneak-attack, having maintenance plug all these units in without consulting tenants, why not do some research on a better solution, and then communicate with tenants so that there’s full disclosure and an opportunity for informed consent? It’s just another example of how H.S.I. tries to “resolve” issues within the building in autocratic, patronizing and inappropriate ways.