GreenHomeGuide, one of the best general information sites for folks trying to maintain, restore or remodel their home in an environmentally conscious way, has a great article on three safe and renewable insulation products.
If you’ve ever struggled with huge, unwieldy bats of fiberglass
insulation or forced your way through a crawlspace, wrestling with a
hose and trying to blow fluffy white fibers into every corner — all the
while wondering what those toxic chemicals and shards of fiberglass are
doing to your body — you’ll be relieved to know that there are green
alternatives.
Here are three of our favorites for do-it-yourselfers.
The alternatives to fiberglass presented here – newspaper and cotton – are flammable materials. It seems disingenuous for the authors to imply the trace amount of “toxic chemical” formaldehyde used to bind glass fibers is of more concern than paper or denim drenched in flame retardants to make them workable as insulation. I’d like to see a better comparison of all the energy and chemical inputs involved. It’s just lazy to use the word “toxic” and assume new products are “green” simply because they use recycled material. Glass is a recyclable material, too.
I think the authors are confusing fiberglass insulation with spray-on urea-formaldehyde foam insulation, which actually emits significant formaldehyde. Cynically, Johns Manville is using this confusion to differentiate it’s new acrylic binder fiberglass product. Owens Corning isn’t happy: http://www.owenscorning.com/worldwide/admin/tempupload/pdf.2-74495-171_FactSheet_E.pdf