Carpet Bombings

Abstract

Outdoor images predominate in our cultural conceptions of “air pollution” even though indoor air quality (IAQ) is typically tenfold more contaminated. New modeling of LA smog in Science suggests that source emissions from indoor and personal care products contribute more to that city’s infamous poor air quality than vehicular combustion. In similar paradox, even as outdoor smoke from California wildfires in 2017 pushed PM2.5 levels past red into unprecedented magenta alerts, children were sickened inside school classrooms after new carpets were laid. This auto-ethnographic paper chronicles our ongoing struggle to remove those carpets from “Beacon” Elementary, a bilingual Mexican-American school in California's Central Valley that has suffered decades of racialized neglect of its facilities. Forging through the uncertain epidemiology of environmental illness, “Beacon” mothers began documenting their children’s ailments after the new carpet installation, but the school district dismissed the mothers' citizen science. The Superintendent continued to vouch for the carpet’s safety based on the industry’s voluntary “Green Label.” A historical section of this article therefore recounts how and why the carpet industry invented this label in the aftermath of a scandal in which new carpets sickened a fifth of the EPA workforce at their headquarters in Washington, DC between 1987 and 1988. Thirty years later, once again, three California environmental regulatory agencies are scrutinizing the carpet industry for hazardous ingredients.