Dust Piles Up

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Dr. Mahowald said, without even pausing to consider my hypothesis. Her study didn’t measure dust from human sources, like our burping tailpipes and pilling sweaters, she explained. “Dust is such a vague term. I’m being very particular here: soil particles suspended in the atmosphere.” Dr. Mahowald seemed to have her hands full figuring out what all that dust might do to the earth’s oceans and climate. Academia can be petty that way. So I compiled my own advisory panel of lay experts. They were people who live in white apartments and people who collect books by the myriad. The future is looking like a dustier place, I said. What can we do to prepare? We could start by closing the windows, said Jane Novick, who lives on the fourth floor of a prewar building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. The buses and taxis crawl by all the time, she said. Except, that is, when they are idling. “My husband tries to open the window,” said Ms. Novick, 62, who volunteers at a pediatric hospital in Manhattan and is active on its board. “I say, unh-unh.” When dust gets inside — and it always does — it’s easy to spot. The Novicks have been working with the designer Vicente Wolf for 25 years. And his pale palette can create a blank canvas for dust. The 4,000-square-foot apartment isn’t all white. There is some cream and beige, too, Ms. Novick said, and a celadon-colored couch. But even worse for camouflage is the herringbone floor, which is stained ebony. “You clean constantly, but not crazily,” Ms. Novick said. Granted, one person’s constant is another person’s crazy. “Maybe I have more DustBusters than other people,” she added. “I usually have a DustBuster in almost every room.” The Novicks employ a regular house cleaner, she said. But “I must DustBust every day — that, I will admit. Sometimes a couple of times a day.” All that cleaning can have an unintended consequence: Oddly enough, it actually breeds dust. In fact, cleaning is one of the three main sources of household dust, according to research on indoor particles. Cooking is the second; movement is the third. Every step disturbs tiny particles of dirt, fiber, soot, pollen, paint, food and dead skin. In common parlance, it’s all dust, said Richard Flagan, the chairman of the chemical engineering department at the California Institute of Technology. As soon as these motes lift off a carpet (or a TV remote or a ukulele), “you induce air currents” that propel them around the room, he said. Several thousand particles of this stuff will waft in any cubic centimeter of air, a space the size of a sugar cube. We travel through life emitting what scientists call “a personal cloud” of dust. The only alternative is death, which is actually worse — what with the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing. Ms. Novick has learned to live with her dust. She has edited her possessions: the books, photos and travel mementos. “You scale down as time goes on,” she said. A clean house is easier to clean. THE Brooklyn-based design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg makes the case for cleanliness in aesthetic terms. “Dust is not a problem for the minimalist,” she said. Working under the name “swissmiss,” the 37-year-old graphic artist favors plenty of white space. The same rule applies to her condo in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which Ms. Eisenberg shares with her husband and two young children.