Is the air in your office or home making you feel sick?
A world-wide problem,
with a simple natural solution...
Just as health care professionals diagnose a patient’s illness and prescribe appropriate treatment, so too are a growing number of building professionals diagnosing how buildings affect human health, and the environment while prescribing strategies to minimize these impacts. This is in response to mounting evidence that buildings through their life cycle are significant causes of human illness and environmental degradation. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its Science Advisory Board (SAB), indoor air pollution is one of the top five environmental risks to public health in the World. On average, people in the US spend over 90% of their life indoors.
Reasons to Have Air Ducts free of germs and other pollutents
90% of homes have shown indoor air quality issues*, and the EPA ranks indoor air pollution as one of the top 5 health risks. In addition, there are 55 million allergy and asthma sufferers in the U.S. With growing concern about the air we breathe indoors, more and more homeowners and building managers are looking to make improvements.
Many common construction materials can emit dangerous compounds and harbor infectious molds, fungi and bacteria. For people confined indoors due to illness and particularly for those with depressed immune systems, the consequences of any of these impacts can be significant. As well, facility staff and visitors in business, schools, hospitals and institutions are susceptible to a range of potential health effects of poor indoor air quality, including asthma and other respiratory health problems, cancer, reproductive and developmental impairment.
'
Putting in workaholic hours amidst these contaminants is bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that, unlike at home, most of us can't even crack open a window at the office. Instead, we breathe yesterday's air and work in monotonous, uniform spaces. For those with robust immune systems, this may not matter much. But for 20% to 30% of the office population, the problems can range from the mild--headaches, nausea, dizziness, short-term memory loss, irritability, itchy eyes and throats--to possible damage to the nervous and respiratory systems. Doctors also link the doubling of asthma rates since 1980 to bad indoor air.
Although we can not always cure these disease and allergies, we can take away some of the air pollutants contributing to there condition, that the EPA calls indoor air quality one of the top five environmental health risks of our time.
Amazingly, the federal government has no effective standards for indoor air quality in offices. The Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA) has standards that are supposed to protect workers against individual contaminants. ''The OSHA standards don't always protect you from various exposures that people are having at the office,'' says Elissa Feldman, EPA's associate director of the Indoor Environments Div. ''There is no federally guaranteed protection from exposure to unhealthy air indoors.''
Office air ''is a complex mixture that we just don't know that much about and no one has set standards for,'' adds Feldman. ''We're not [always] sure of the health effects.'' This, despite the fact that we spend 90% of our time inside--and more than half of that at work. What's also scary is that pollutant levels indoors are two to five times, and on occasion 100 times, more concentrated than outdoors, according to the EPA. .
Blamed in part, on the energy crisis of the 1970s. That's when office buildings began to be built as tight as tin cans, padded heavily with money-saving layers of insulation and equipped with hyper efficient HVAC's. In many cases, these systems, run by operators looking to shave costs, suck in only five cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person. ''That is almost enough to keep people alive,'' quips New York architect Robert F. Fox Jr., whose firm designs environmentally friendly skyscrapers. Indeed, to save money, some operators shut down the fresh-air intakes altogether. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating & Air Conditioning Engineers recommends that HVAC's pump in 20 cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person--a level below which symptoms increase. But there is nothing compelling building operators to do so, says Mark J. Mendell, team leader for the indoor-air-quality research effort at the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH).
Stagnant office air also circulates the residue of as many as 350 VOCs which are potentially emitted by building materials, furnishings, and office machines. For example, most office paints contain solvents that can cause everything from eye, nose, and throat irritation to digestive and central nervous system damage. Carpeting sometimes contains PVCs that give off the carcinogen dioxin. Furniture is often made of particle board that is bonded with resins made with carcinogen-containing formaldehyde. That's not to mention the pesticides and cleaning products swabbed over offices that, according to the EPA, may also contain carcinogens that can be discharged into the office air.
U.S. companies could save as much as $58 billion annually and an additional $200 billion in worker performance improvements by creating offices with better indoor air, say researchers William J. Fisk and Arthur H. Rosenfeld of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. The researchers also found that the financial benefits of improving office climates can be 8 to 17 times larger than the costs of making those improvements.
A world-wide problem,
with a simple natural solution...
Just as health care professionals diagnose a patient’s illness and prescribe appropriate treatment, so too are a growing number of building professionals diagnosing how buildings affect human health, and the environment while prescribing strategies to minimize these impacts. This is in response to mounting evidence that buildings through their life cycle are significant causes of human illness and environmental degradation. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its Science Advisory Board (SAB), indoor air pollution is one of the top five environmental risks to public health in the World. On average, people in the US spend over 90% of their life indoors.
Reasons to Have Air Ducts free of germs and other pollutents
90% of homes have shown indoor air quality issues*, and the EPA ranks indoor air pollution as one of the top 5 health risks. In addition, there are 55 million allergy and asthma sufferers in the U.S. With growing concern about the air we breathe indoors, more and more homeowners and building managers are looking to make improvements.
Many common construction materials can emit dangerous compounds and harbor infectious molds, fungi and bacteria. For people confined indoors due to illness and particularly for those with depressed immune systems, the consequences of any of these impacts can be significant. As well, facility staff and visitors in business, schools, hospitals and institutions are susceptible to a range of potential health effects of poor indoor air quality, including asthma and other respiratory health problems, cancer, reproductive and developmental impairment.
'
Putting in workaholic hours amidst these contaminants is bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that, unlike at home, most of us can't even crack open a window at the office. Instead, we breathe yesterday's air and work in monotonous, uniform spaces. For those with robust immune systems, this may not matter much. But for 20% to 30% of the office population, the problems can range from the mild--headaches, nausea, dizziness, short-term memory loss, irritability, itchy eyes and throats--to possible damage to the nervous and respiratory systems. Doctors also link the doubling of asthma rates since 1980 to bad indoor air.
Although we can not always cure these disease and allergies, we can take away some of the air pollutants contributing to there condition, that the EPA calls indoor air quality one of the top five environmental health risks of our time.
Amazingly, the federal government has no effective standards for indoor air quality in offices. The Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA) has standards that are supposed to protect workers against individual contaminants. ''The OSHA standards don't always protect you from various exposures that people are having at the office,'' says Elissa Feldman, EPA's associate director of the Indoor Environments Div. ''There is no federally guaranteed protection from exposure to unhealthy air indoors.''
Office air ''is a complex mixture that we just don't know that much about and no one has set standards for,'' adds Feldman. ''We're not [always] sure of the health effects.'' This, despite the fact that we spend 90% of our time inside--and more than half of that at work. What's also scary is that pollutant levels indoors are two to five times, and on occasion 100 times, more concentrated than outdoors, according to the EPA. .
Blamed in part, on the energy crisis of the 1970s. That's when office buildings began to be built as tight as tin cans, padded heavily with money-saving layers of insulation and equipped with hyper efficient HVAC's. In many cases, these systems, run by operators looking to shave costs, suck in only five cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person. ''That is almost enough to keep people alive,'' quips New York architect Robert F. Fox Jr., whose firm designs environmentally friendly skyscrapers. Indeed, to save money, some operators shut down the fresh-air intakes altogether. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating & Air Conditioning Engineers recommends that HVAC's pump in 20 cubic feet of fresh air per minute per person--a level below which symptoms increase. But there is nothing compelling building operators to do so, says Mark J. Mendell, team leader for the indoor-air-quality research effort at the National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH).
Stagnant office air also circulates the residue of as many as 350 VOCs which are potentially emitted by building materials, furnishings, and office machines. For example, most office paints contain solvents that can cause everything from eye, nose, and throat irritation to digestive and central nervous system damage. Carpeting sometimes contains PVCs that give off the carcinogen dioxin. Furniture is often made of particle board that is bonded with resins made with carcinogen-containing formaldehyde. That's not to mention the pesticides and cleaning products swabbed over offices that, according to the EPA, may also contain carcinogens that can be discharged into the office air.
U.S. companies could save as much as $58 billion annually and an additional $200 billion in worker performance improvements by creating offices with better indoor air, say researchers William J. Fisk and Arthur H. Rosenfeld of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. The researchers also found that the financial benefits of improving office climates can be 8 to 17 times larger than the costs of making those improvements.
''If any CEOs have half a brain, they would start to pay attention to the fact that their employees are their main cost-and-benefit center,'' says McDonough, now a consultant with Herman Miller and Steelcase. ''They can't afford not to do this.''
''There are offices in America that I've been in that were probably more dangerous to my health than a Superfund site,'' says William McDonough, former dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture.
As recently stated by Dr.Gordon Emcroft, " Improve your indoor air quality and you can improve your life."
There is a simple natural solution,
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