The WELL Air concept aims to achieve high levels of indoor air quality across a building’s lifetime through diverse strategies that include source elimination or reduction, active and passive building design and operation strategies a and human behavior interventions.
The WELL Air concept
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People spend approximately 90% of their time in enclosed spaces1 – in homes, offices, schools or other building environments. During this time, inhalation exposure to indoor air pollutants can lead to a variety of negative short-and long-term health and well-being outcomes that can vary in severity. Less severe symptoms of exposure can include headaches, dry throat, eye irritation or runny nose, while more severe health outcomes can include asthma attacks, infection with Legionella bacteria nd carbon monoxide poisoning. In the U.S. alone, indoor pollution contributes to thousands f cancer deaths and hundreds of thousands of respiratory health issues annually. In addition to public health concerns, estimates by the U.S. EPA suggest that net avoidable costs associated with indoor air pollution amount to well over $00 billion annually with 45% of those costs attributable to avoidable deaths from radon and environmental tobacco smoke, about 45% from lost productivityand about 10% from avoidable respiratory diseases.
The mot common indoor air contaminants are combustion sources, such as candles, tobacco products, stoves, furnaces and fireplaces, that release pollutants, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and small particles in to the air. Building materials, furnishings, fabrics, cleaning products, personal care products and air fresheners can also all emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or semi-vlatile organic compounds (SVOCs) into the indoor environment.
Achieving the goal of clean indoor air requires both professionals and building users to engage not just in the convesation but also in the implementation of adequate approaches. Although indoor air quality can be managed primarily through eliminating the sources of air pollution and through adequate design solutions and human behavior modification, some WELL features require installation of a specific treatment method or technology.
It is evident that the impact of improving indoor air quality is substantial. In a recentglobal burden of disease study, household air pollution was rated as the tenth most important cause of ill health for the world’s population. Furthermore, The World Health rganization estimated that, globally, air pollution contributed t approximately seven million premature deaths in 2012. Around 600,000 of those were children under 5 years old. The WELL Air Concept seeks to implement holistic design strategies to promote clean air and minimize human exposure to harmful contaminants, in order to maximize benefits to productivity, well-being and health.
References
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