Modern Building Services

18 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES AUGUST 2022 FEATURE INDOOR AIR QUALITY Stop talking about indoor air quality It is more than five years since the Grenfell Tower disaster; we have had a pandemic driven by an airborne virus and we are now facing a cost-of-living crisis – what more needs to happen to get people to stop talking about making buildings healthier, safer, and more efficient and take practical action? Asks NathanWood , chair of BESA’s Health &Well-being in Buildings Group and managing director of Farmwood M&E Ventilation. T his year’s National Clean Air Day was a high-profile event that showcased dozens of air quality events around the country. It provided compelling evidence of the indoor air quality (IAQ) crisis gripping the country (if more was needed) and the important role played by mechanical ventilation systems in protecting the health and well- being of building occupants. It was also an extremely frustrating day because, despite the increased profile of this issue, there are still thousands of buildings that put people in harm’s way. We have regulations, but people don’t check that their installations comply – and there is too much wriggle room in the way the regulations are written anyway, which means people are still specifying the cheapest option rather than the right one. An air monitoring exercise carried out by the national news website Mail Online during Clean Air Day in collaboration with ventilation company Nuaire revealed potentially harmful indoor pollution in several hospitality, transport, and office buildings around London. Some of the results were described by the journalists as ‘scary’ – with particularly high readings for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulatematter (PM). The findings were analysed during a webinar hosted by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA), which is spearheading a campaign to turn indoor spaces into ‘safe havens’ designed, operated, andmaintained to limit human exposure to airborne contaminants, harmful gases, and diseases. Reluctant We have been talking about this for years, but the pandemic brought home the importance of IAQ to an extent we have never seen before – yet still building owners and managers seem reluctant to act. What more evidence or motivation do they need? Research released by Clean Air Day organiser Global Action Plan established for the first time that air pollution affects every major organ in the human body, but that most people think it is only harmful to their lungs. “49% of people think air pollution is connected to worsening asthma symptoms… and 44% also rightly connect it to poor lung function development, 42% to bronchitis, and 35% to lung cancer,” a Clean Air Day statement said. “However, only 12% of the population associate it with strokes, 10% with dementia, and 18% poor brain development.” INFORMED THINKING MBS has teamed up with the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) to share the knowledge, policy and thinking of the Association. This month, BESA considers the need for action on air quality.