Plastic Found in Almost Every Surface of US Factory-Built Home

Plastic is in the floor, the paint, the cupboards and the insulation.

Researchers at Parsons School of Design in New York found plastics and their chemical additives in nearly every major surface of an affordable factory-built home sold in Minnesota. The finding was reported on 22 September 2026. Dezeen

The work comes from the school's Healthy Materials Lab, a design research lab that studies how building products affect health and climate. Its report is titled 'Manufactured Homes: An Analysis of Health and Environmental Impacts of Common Building Materials'. It states that heavy use of petrochemical-based materials, products made from oil and gas, carries significant health and environmental risks.

Manufactured homes are houses built in a factory and then moved to their site. The team based its breakdown on a single affordable model sold by Northstar Systembuilt in Minnesota. To get the full materials list, the researchers rang the manufacturer while posing as buyers. The tactic points to how hard it can be for an outsider to learn what is inside a finished home.

Three fossil-fuel plastics turned up again and again. They were polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, widely known as PVC, and polypropylene. Kitchens and bathrooms held the majority of them. That matters because those are the rooms people scrub, steam up and touch most each day.

The lab's own project page adds scale to the picture. It says a typical manufactured home can hold more than 1,400 kg of toxic ingredients across its materials. It says the wider research looks at indoor air quality, the air people breathe inside, human health and embodied carbon, the emissions locked in by making and moving materials. Healthy Materials Lab

Jonsara Ruth is the executive design director of the lab. She said petroleum-based plastic materials are now widespread in new American homes, not only in manufactured ones. It is a short sentence. It widens the question from one housing type to the whole market.

The study also names alternatives for builders to consider. It proposes linoleum flooring, made largely from natural materials such as linseed oil, in place of vinyl flooring, a plastic sheet made with PVC. It proposes wood finishes, coatings and surfaces made from timber, instead of plastic finishes. The lab developed the research with the Lower Sioux Indian Community.

Northstar Systembuilt did not respond to a request for comment on the study.

What makes this stick is the ordinariness of the list. Floors. Paint. Cupboards. The study suggests the path to healthier rooms starts not with new technology, but with older materials used in a different way.