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Want Voc-Free Furniture? This Is The Certification You Should Look For.

While you may be conditioned to check for certifications like USDA Organic on food and FSC on paper or wooden products, you may not know that you should also be looking for certifications like UL GREENGUARD GOLD when shopping for furniture and building materials…

Summer Land Writer & Author

At The Tot, we never use or recommend anything that hasn’t passed The Tot Test. This means we’ve looked deep into third-party testing, examined ingredients lists and asked in-depth questions about a product’s composition to ensure it’s free of the chemicals we avoid.

What makes our job a whole lot easier is when a brand commits to exceeding CPSC (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission) guidelines (like we do!) and strives to pass the most stringent safety tests from independent certifying bodies like UL and earn the highly regarded UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certification.

Ensuring that a product is low or no-tox is particularly important when choosing items that will go in your nursery because this is where babies spend the majority of their time. Since they have sensitive skin and delicate developing endocrine systems, it’s wise to try to make their environment as safe and hypoallergenic as possible.

To help you get a firmer understanding of how to shop safer for your family and what the UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certification means, we’ll go over:

Chemicals to avoid in nursery furniture
What UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified means
UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified Nursery Products we love
How to tell if a product is UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified

Scroll down to learn more!

Chemicals to avoid in nursery furniture

As mentioned above, babies and children are particularly susceptible to chemical exposure for a few reasons:

They spend a lot of time on mattresses, playmats, padded chairs and flooring which puts their mouth and nose close to materials that can potentially off-gas.
They tend to explore the world with their mouths, making them more likely to ingest a not-so-nice chemical.
Their skin is thinner to accommodate all that growing, which means chemicals can enter their bloodstream easier.

When shopping for nursery furniture, we are extra careful about avoiding products that contains VOCS (Volatile Organic Compounds).

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), VOCs can off gas from certain solid or liquids and pollute both indoor and outdoor air quality. They include a huge list of chemicals and are emitted from a wide range of products numbering in the thousands.

Why we avoid VOCS:

VOCs can lead to both short and long term health issues.

Exposure can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, shortness of breath, headaches, fatigue, nausea, dizziness and skin problems. Higher concentrations may cause damage to the liver, kidney, or central nervous system.

VOCs are also a suspected human carcinogen with some being known to cause cancer in both animals and humans.

Click here to view the full list of ingredients that The Tot avoids.

What UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified is

Put simply: products that have achieved GREENGUARD GOLD Certification are screened for over 10,000 chemicals and VOCs known to pollute indoor air and are scientifically proven to meet many of the world’s most rigorous third-party chemical emissions standards, helping to reduce indoor air pollution and the risk of chemical exposure.

According to UL, they have two tiers of certifications: GREENGUARD and GREENGUARD GOLD.

“While the original GREENGUARD Certification emissions limits were first used as purchasing specifications for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the state of Washington for furniture and commercial building products, the GREENGUARD Gold Certification Standard includes health-based criteria for additional chemicals and also requires lower total volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions levels to ensure that products are acceptable for use in environments such as schools and health care facilities.

In addition to limiting emissions of more than 360 VOCs and total chemical emissions, GREENGUARD Gold Certified products must also comply with requirements of the state of California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Standard Method for the Testing and Evaluation of Volatile Organic Chemical Emissions from Indoor Sources Using Environmental Chambers, (also known as California Section 01350).”

UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified nursery products we love

Million Dollar Baby Classic Liberty 3-in-1 Convertible Crib with Toddler Bed Conversion Kit

Scroll down to see our Tot Tested & Approved UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified nursery products!

UL Greenguard Gold Certified Cribs & Twin Beds

Million Dollar Baby Classic Tanner 3-in-1 Convertible Crib

$499

Want Voc-Free Furniture? This Is The Certification You Should Look For.

Chemicals to avoid in nursery furniture

Why we avoid VOCS:

What UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified is

UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified nursery products we love

UL Greenguard Gold Certified Cribs & Twin Beds

UL Greenguard Certified Crib & Twin Mattresses

UL Greenguard Gold Certified Nursery Rockers & Gliders

How do I know if a product is UL GREENGUARD GOLD Certified?

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