The air inside our homes can be pretty bad for us, as we talked about yesterday, but what to do? We’ve learned a few tricks to keep the air inside your home fresh, clean, and toxin-free. Take a look and breathe easier.

1) A collection of the right plants can help filter your air from inside.
2) Keep volatile organic compounds (VOCs) out of your home; when you re-paint, only use [url=http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/10/affordable_low.php]low- or no-VOC paints [www.treehugger.com].
3) Regularly check and clean your home’s air filter [www.treehugger.com] so it can do its job well.

4) Furniture and other furnishings can bring a lot of baddies into your home. Greenguard-certified seating [www.treehugger.com] and furniture like the Steelcase’s Think chair [www.treehugger.com] and Haworth’s Zody chair [www.treehugger.com] won’t contribute nasty stuff to your air. Our pals at Q Collection [www.sundancechannel.com] are also working hard to improve our indoor air quality, both with their furniture [www.treehugger.com] and
[brand-new collection of furniture and accessories for kids called [url=url=http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/q-collection-junior-launch.php]Q Collection Junior[/url] (pictured above).
5) You can’t keep all the bad stuff out, so portable air cleaners [www.treehugger.com] can help remove some of the nasty stuff that’s already in your home.
6) When it comes to heating and lighting, both wood and pellet stoves [www.treehugger.com] and scented candles [www.treehugger.com] can have a significant impact on the indoor air quality in your home.

7) Your cleaning products can also have a big impact on indoor air quality; we recommend non-toxic cleaners like Seventh Generation (and we also recommend their book [www.treehugger.com]); check out our How to Green Your Cleaning [www.treehugger.com] for more tips on cleaning green.
Lastly, a super-green option is the Green Light [www.treehugger.com] (pictured above), a slick gadget that combines solar power, LED lighting and plants to help improve your indoor air quality and support alternative and green technologies at the same time.

We got started [www.sundancechannel.com] on a discussion of green ideas for the workplace earlier this week by looking at some desks and workstations. Many of us spend much of our time at work sitting down, so today we’ll examine a few of our favorite chairs that are good for comfort, posture and the planet.

We can’t think “office chair” without picturing Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair [www.treehugger.com]. Perhaps the most recognizable (and imitated) of these contemporary designs, the chair combines distinctive looks with pioneering ergonomics and is the envy of office workers the world ’round. Aeron is based on the ideas that ergonomically, the chair should do more than just sit there; functionally, it should be as simple and natural as possible, and environmentally, it should be durable, repairable and designed for disassembly and recycling. Made largely of recycled materials, the Aeron chair is designed to last a long time, with parts that get the most wear easily replaced and recycled.

Unfortunately, Aeron isn’t in the budget for all of us; thankfully, there are a host of office chairs that offer similar ergonomics, design, use of recycled materials and recyclability. Haworth’s Zody chair [www.treehugger.com] and the Think chair from Steelcase [www.treehugger.com] both have serious eco-cred (they’re both [url= http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/10/the_first_six_c.php]Cradle-to-Cradle certified[/url]) and offer real comfort with a smaller price tag than Aeron. There’s more to green seating at work than these beauties, though. Along with Herman Miller, Haworth and Steelcase, companies like Humanscale (their award-winning Liberty side chair [www.treehugger.com] is pictured) and Krug offer guest, hospitality and conference seating options that will satisfy just about any office seating requirement while taking care to design with both human comfort and planetary well-being in mind.

Of course, where you sit and work are just the tip of the greening-the-office iceberg; from office supplies and printing to lighting and energy use, there are a bevy of quick and easy things you can do to reduce your office’s ecological footprint. We’ve put as many as we can think of in the How to Green Your Work [www.treehugger.com] guide, part of our “How to Go Green” series, that we recommend for further green-office reading and ideas. There are so many ways to do it today, the only hard part is choosing which one you’ll do first.