Dear Waylon,

Hi! I am glad you didn’t get killed when Pale Girl hit you.  I hope you (and your groin area) are okay.

I have a consideration for elephant journal: I would like to ask whether you have looked at non-toxic paints in your Conscious Consumerism articles.

I am trying to paint my apartment, as a temporary habitability improvement, before I get around to buying a house (which may take me several months).

I would like to use non-toxic paints, for a few reasons: (a) my girlfriend is asthmatic and has allergies (although she has never had a specific allergy to paint diagnosed, and has been a fine-art painter in recent incarnations); (b) I really do want to save the planet (although I don’t want anyone to know that I really care); (c) my fellow Buddhist buddy Barry Solomon is on my ass about the toxins (but he believes that even chocolate pudding is a toxin!).

Barry referred me to a hardware store on 51st and Telegraph in Berkeley, Scout Hardware (really a design shop with paint), that carries a brand of non-V.O.C., non-carcinogen paint, Mythic. Mythic claims realistically to be the only non-V.O.C., non-carcinogen paint.  I got a few samples, and the service person the hardware store told me that Mythic covers better than ordinary paint (it’s latex-based, but I believe its basic latex formula has been changed to remove V.O.C.s etc.).

My Buddhist buddy August Garcia, also a contractor, floor-sander, painter and house-flipper, recommended the Aura line from Bemjamin Moore, which is supposed to be non-V.O.C., but I can’t figure out whether it really is from its product information, which looks like it merely fills out a detailed government form.  The colors are awesome, and August says it covers extremely well.

There are also the milk-based paints.  A very nice neo-Hippie Mission-Hipster single-speed bicycle-riding collage-artist acquaintance of mine told me that his friends have used these and they work, but that they do indeed smell bad for several days, as the milk curdles on your walls.  Ugh.  Let’s get real.  Everybody knows you can’t make paint out of milk, unless it’s for a one-day kindergarten project.  If you do it right, it’s called a milkshake, and you drink it. 😉

So, I would like to know about V.O.C.s, carcinogens, and other things in paint, and which paints have how much of them and which of the really bad ones they have or don’t have.

I would also like to know how toxins in paint work.  What is their lifecycle?  When and for how long do they come out?  Mostly when you paint, or later too?  And how much?  And what helps to bring them out (exposure to air, heat, heavy breathing, or what?)  

I have a few other problems re paints and toxins:

1) There have been mildew problems in my building due to leaky pipes in the walls, and I would like to coat at least the bathroom and the kitchen with a mildew-resistant primer.  The ones that have been recommended include the Zinsser’s Bulls-Eye line, and these are definitely toxic (any product with “Bulls-Eye” in its name is toxic); the one I would get, the water-based, is less so.  I feel like the mildew would definitely be worse for my girlfriend (and me) than the paint toxins, but this really depends on the toxin lifecycle I mentioned above.  Also, maybe covering the toxic mildew-resistant paint with non-toxic paint would keep out the toxins – is that so?  Are there even non-toxic, mildew-resistant primers?  or are toxins necessary to kill or to stop mildew?

2) Even though especially Aura has awesome colors (and Mythic isn’t bad at all in its color selection), I can’t find the colors I want (golden apricot cream; I know it sounds like an ice cream from Humphrey Slocombe).  Scout won’t (and perhaps can’t) mix them to spec, and the Aura brand just can’t be so mixed – its colors are mixed by some computerized mixers that can’t be reprogrammed by the human mixers.  So besides the issues with toxins in paints, there are the issues with no-one mixing your paint how you want these days!  What happened to humans doing it right for other humans?

Well, please let me know if these paint issues are ones elephantJournal is willing to take on.

In any case, I will look forward to more posts from you and I will now try to break my habit of buying a new shower curtain, closing the bathroom door and sealing it up with towels, then huffing for an hour or so…

Thanks!!

Keep up the GOOD work. 😉 Best,

Yours, C.