Courtesy of Mish.
People in California complain their flooring is making them sick. The complaints have one source in common, Lumber Liquidators laminate flooring from China with toxic levels of Formaldehyde, up to 20 times the maximum amount in one test. US manufactured flooring does not have the same defects.
Health and Safety Violations
Please consider Lumber Liquidators Linked to Health and Safety Violations.
The following is a script from “Lumber Liquidators” which aired on March 1, 2015. Anderson Cooper is the correspondent. Katherine Davis and Sam Hornblower, producers.
Lumber Liquidators is the largest and fastest-growing retailer of hardwood flooring in North America, with over 360 stores in 46 states and revenues of more than a billion dollars a year. But hardwood isn’t the only product they sell. More than 100 million square feet of the company’s cheaper laminate flooring is installed in American homes every year. Lumber Liquidators is a U.S. company, but much of its laminate flooring is made in China, and as we discovered during our investigation, may fail to meet health and safety standards, because it contains high levels of formaldehyde, a known cancer causing chemical.
Lumber Liquidators insists its Chinese-made laminate flooring is safe, but it doesn’t appear that way based on what we learned from our own reporting and from the work of people like Denny Larson [executive director of a nonprofit group called Global Community who teamed up with Richard Drury, a prominent environmental attorney, to test Lumber Liquidators Chinese-made laminate flooring.]
Anderson Cooper: You want the company to remove all the flooring?
Denny Larson: Every single board. At their cost and replace it with clean flooring.
Anderson Cooper: How much is that gonna cost?
Denny Larson: You know what? I don’t care. Because they’re guilty of selling people product that could make them sick. These worried California homeowners, who didn’t want to be identified, aren’t waiting for Lumber Liquidators. They are ripping up their floors now. But many can’t afford to replace the flooring on their own.
Anderson Cooper: Do you have any idea how much of this wood is in people’s homes right now?
Richard Drury: We believe there are probably tens of thousands of households in California that have installed Lumber Liquidators Chinese laminates that may exceed formaldehyde standards. …
