I have severe allergies. I need a throw rug that omits no odors. Airing them out or using some fragrance to mask the smell doesn’t work, and fragrances just makes it worse for me, I have severe allergies.
How can I find a throw rug which has nothing added to it in the manufacturing process such as glue or other chemicals?
I have an office in my home, and spending many hours working in there. It’s a wood floor and I want to protect it from my 5-wheel office chair. I need a rug larger enough to cover the chair and the desk so it doesn’t slip around.
Anyone have experience getting throw rugs for this purpose who had to deal with allergies? Have a success story, please share it.
I have a large sisal rug/mat under my desk and office area for just this purpose. I chose it because it’s hard-wearing and has little rolling resistance for my office chair. I don’t know if jute or sisal are allergenic, but it certainly doesn’t emit anything but the natural mild odor of the fiber (for which you’d have to have your nose an inch away from it). And pretty cheap to try out. I got mine from Ikea. I can’t find the exact one, but it’s similar to this, called the “Osted”.
While you are certainly free to put anyone you want to on your ignore list, saying that you are putting someone on your ignore list is forbidden here, except in the Pit.
Look for “all natural” or “organic” or “allergen free”. Start with Amazon. They usually have everything, but I’m fairly certain there are specialty sellers online that cater to exactly this. If there’s a material that you know you are “safe” with, like organic cotton, you can narrow the search farther.
“Hypoallergenic” is also a good search term. Searching Amazon for “hypoallergenic rug” gives numerous hits, including this one that’s similar to the Ikea one that I linked above, but says explicitly:
You might want to look into very tightly woven hand-made rugs. If my loom was up and running I’d make an offer to do one up for you, but I’m not the only weaver on the planet. Check out sites like Etsy for either something already done up or to find an artisan willing to do an all-natural no-chemical rug for you.
You’ll need to clean it from time to time, too - beating it outdoors is traditional. If it was a smaller rug you might be able to just toss it in a washing machine, depending on what it was made of, but one large enough for your purposes might be problematic, you might need a commercial-size machine for that.
Apparently, even if the materials are natural such as wool or cotton, it is during the manufacturing process they put some other chemical on it that causes VOCs, etc., then I still can’t use it. In the product description they don’t list if this was done from my experience. I know nothing about how rugs are made, so I don’t know what choices there might be to achieve the same function without the nasty stuff.
The other concern is simply the function of an area rug for an office chair to roll around out easily without causing damage to a fragile rug.
And that’s why I said I’d offer to do one up for you - you can utilize non-treated fabrics when making a rug, people used to it all the time. That’s also why you need an artisan rather than a commercially made rug.
That’s why I said “tightly woven” - a handwoven fabric isn’t necessarily fragile, although frequently rolling a chair over any rug is going to impose wear.