The Canary Report

“Earth-friendly” hotel uses toxic chemicals

Posted on Apr 10, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, News, Susie Collins

Canary’s Cry for Friday April 10:

The Lenox Hotel’s rooms are sanitized and sealed for a several-hour “shock” treatment of concentrated ozone, which the hotel claims kills bacteria.

The Lenox Hotel in Boston claims it’s ahead of the curve on the environmental sensitivity front. Boston.com reports the Lenox and other hotels in the Saunders Hotel Group have been using “earth-friendly cleaning products and pursuing resource efficiency since 1989.”

The hotel claims the 23 rooms on the top floor of the Lenox constitute their Pure Rooms, “the first hypoallergenic floor in Boston hostelry.”

But if this is their idea of environmental sensitivity, I hate to think what they’re doing in their regular rooms.

“It’s a continuation of the green program we’ve been working on,” said Elaine Strunk, the hotel’s director of green, “but there’s been a need for something like this for a while. A lot of people suffer from allergies or asthma, especially in Boston, and no one’s really catered to them like this before.”

The first hint of a difference comes fresh off the hotel’s elevator, when a slight, pleasant scent presents itself, emanating from tea tree oil cartridges placed in each room’s air ducts. The oil, distilled from the leaves of the Australian melaleuca tree, is said to have antibiotic and antifungal properties and is considered hypoallergenic.

But the changes are more than scent deep. All the rooms have undergone a seven-step treatment provided by Pure Solutions NA of Cheektowaga, N.Y. That process has two chief aims, according to Pure Solutions CEO Brian Brault: to get each room to a high state of cleanliness, and then to keep them there.

In the first phase, the mechanical parts of the rooms’ air-handling system are cleaned and disinfected, and a treatment is applied to prevent moisture buildup. The rooms are then sanitized and sealed for a several-hour “shock” treatment of concentrated ozone, Brault says, which kills bacteria.

For the second phase, a bacteriostatic agent is applied to all the rooms’ soft surfaces, which helps repel bacteria over time. “It’s kind of like a land mine, it will only kill you if you touch it,” Brault said.

Thank God no one’s “catered to them like this before.” How much you want to bet that “tea tree oil cartridge” is a chemical air freshener, and besides, even if it was “natural,” many if not most people with allergies or sensitivities can not tolerate tea tree oil. To make a general statement about tea tree oil being hypoallergenic is irresponsible if not outright dangerous.

Further, ozone treatments should NEVER be done in an indoor living space, ever. The Canary Report has reported on this many times.

While manufacturers of ozone-generating machines will tell you that the ozone is harmless and will clean the air you breathe (example of the spin here), the fact is that ozone generating machines are not only ineffective at cleaning the air, but they can be extremely harmful to your health. From the EPA website:

Manufacturers and vendors of ozone devices often use misleading terms to describe ozone. Terms such as ‘energized oxygen’ or ‘pure air’ suggest that ozone is a healthy kind of oxygen. Ozone is a toxic gas with vastly different chemical and toxicological properties from oxygen. Several federal agencies have established health standards or recommendations to limit human exposure to ozone.

Please note that while ozone machine manufacturers will tell you that the “unused ozone always reverts back to oxygen in about an hour,” the EPA, using “sound science, only peer reviewed, scientifically supported findings and conclusions,” says, “Some of the potential by-products produced by ozone’s reactions with other chemicals are themselves very reactive and capable of producing irritating and corrosive by-products (Weschler and Shields, 1996, 1997a, 1997b).”

So in reality, ozone in the home or in a hotel room creates chemical reactions with other chemicals already in the area, and no one has ever studied the impact of that lingering toxic brew.

Link to full story at boston.com.

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Tags: Air, Asthma, Chemicals, Children's Health, Fragrance, Indoor Pollution, MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, Products, Sick Building, Stink, Toxic