Help, my sofa is killing me! The toxic chemicals hiding in your home – and how to avoid them

By Rebecca Seal | The Guardian | July 17, 2026

Read the full article by Rebecca Seal (The Guardian)

"Heating and burning

The problem Whenever we burn anything inside our homes, we cause indoor air pollution, whether we’re cooking using gas, frying bacon, lighting a wood burner, an open fire, a cigarette or incense, or ruining the toast. “ We spend 80-90% of our time indoors,” says Prof Francis Pope, chair of atmospheric science at the University of Birmingham. “And there is potential to have quite high concentrations of pollution indoors. This affects your respiratory and cardiovascular systems; certain components are carcinogenic, and there’s a growing body of evidence that air pollution affects cognition. In the long term, you get awful diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. But relatively short exposures to air pollution are linked to things like educational outcome, workplace productivity and general mental wellbeing.”

Gas cooking is another significant source of pollution, says Prof Frank Kelly, Humphrey Battcock chair of community health and policy at Imperial College London. “It produces both nitrogen dioxide – which is a respiratory irritant and has long-term consequences like cardiovascular disease and dementia, causes problems in pregnancy and has even been linked to asthma development – and also tiny particles, known as PM2.5.” These measure less than 2.5 microns across, making them small enough to reach the brain.

“Our nose and throat are really good at blocking out bigger particles, but these small ones can get all the way down into your lungs,” says Nicola Carslaw, professor in indoor air chemistry at the University of York.

The solution For most of us, the impact of all types of indoor pollution can be mitigated by opening the windows whenever we can, unless you live on a polluted road. Burn as little as possible indoors, turn on the extractor during cooking and clean or replace filters regularly. Most vacuum cleaners leak PM2.5 and larger PM10 particles back into the air; those fitted with a Hepa filter should not."