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I’m starting to understand those houses where they make people take their shoes off at the door. The more I learn about indoor air, and dust, it’s feeling similar to why we wipe down a counter.
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Somewhere around 30 to 40 percent of the contaminants inside a home come from outdoors, carried in on the bottoms of shoes. Lawn chemicals, road grit, whatever got sprayed two houses down, and lead dust in older neighborhoods. Once it's inside, it stops breaking down the way it would outside.
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Sunlight and soil microbes aren’t there to continue breaking it down, so it settles into carpet fibers and stays put. Every time somebody walks across the room a portion of it lifts back into the air you're breathing.
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The heaviest concentration in most houses sits in the carpet right by the entry door. And small kids take the worst of it. They're down on the floor, their hands go in their mouths, and they're breathing a couple feet lower than you are.
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What to do
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