Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
'Thrive in Construction' is the only podcast that delves into the personal journeys of sustainability leaders and innovators in the construction industry across the UK. Our show differentiates by offering unscripted, passion-fueled conversations that go beyond the buzzwords to the heart of what's driving the industry forward. It's tailored for aspiring professionals, seasoned experts, and anyone with a keen interest in the sustainable evolution of construction. We're here at a time when the call for sustainable development is not just a trend, but a societal imperative, empowering listeners to build a career that contributes to a greener future.
Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
Ep. 59 The Silent Killer: Why Air Quality Matters in Your Home and Workplace
In this week's episode of Thrive in Construction, Darren is joined by Simon Jones, Air Quality expert. Together, they explore the long-term impact of air pollution, particularly how poor indoor air quality can affect our health, from hidden chemicals to mould. Simon shares his extensive knowledge on the subject, discussing how air pollution is often overlooked and its critical role in creating healthier environments, whether in homes, workplaces, or schools.
They also dive into the importance of proper ventilation in the built environment, how we can improve air quality in spaces we spend the most time in, and the steps the construction industry can take to tackle these challenges. Simon offers actionable insights and solutions, empowering listeners to take control of their indoor air quality.
Tune in for an educational and thought-provoking conversation that sheds light on a crucial yet often ignored aspect of construction and health. Don't miss out on learning how small changes can make a big difference in creating healthier, safer environments for all.
LINKS
Simon Jones: https://ie.linkedin.com/in/simon-air-quality-matters
Air Quality Matters: https://www.airqualitymatters.net/
Air Quality Matters Podcast: https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast
Darren: darrenevans.komi.io
What people don't really recognise about air quality is quite how profound an impact it has on our health and wellbeing. Air quality in general whether we're talking about ambient outdoor air quality or the air quality in this room here is the largest single environmental risk we face as a human species. So when we look at all of the things that we're exposed to the quality of the air that we're breathing in I mean me and you have been chatting for a while Not once have we thought about the air that we've breathed in. It's something we do instinctively, yet it's the single biggest thing that will have an impact on our long-term health and wellbeing, and that's quite profound. It's a hard one to wrap your head around, so you have to kind of ask yourself why, like why? Why is it so profound? One of the best ways of describing that is and why indoor air quality is so important is if we live to, let's say, 80 years of age, we're going to spend 70 years of our life indoors. I can't. I think it's Richard Causey or somebody in a slideshow says there are whales that spend more time out of water than we do outside of buildings. Um, so a building is a place that we will spend the vast majority of our life, and our home will spend 55 years of that 80 years in our own home. So these, these buildings collectively, are going to have a profound impact on our health and well-being.
Speaker 1:And air is something that we breathe every day, whether we like it or not. You know, if I don't like the taste of this water on the table, I can politely decide not to drink it. I don't know if you've ever tried not breathing for a couple of hours until you find air that you like, but it doesn't work out very well for you. So we've just we're kind of hardwired not to think about it. But we now know whether it's outdoor air or indoor air, and this is another thing the vast majority of our exposure to outdoor air will occur indoors.
Speaker 1:How so? Because we ventilate our buildings, we bring the outdoor air in. Every building is in a constant state of exchanging the air it has inside with air from outside one way or another. And because it's just maths, because we spend so much time indoors, the majority of our exposure to the outdoor air pollution will come from air outside. But we now know that these pollutants, these things that we care about, that harm us, have access to every organ and cell in the body, so there isn't a long term illness or disease, whether it's cardiovascular disease, obviously, lung injury and diseases, things like asthma and so on, but even cognitive impairment, long Alzheimer's, degenerative diseases, cancers all of these things are impacted by the things that are floating in the air, the pollutants and the gases that do us harm. So this stuff's really important and it costs us. It costs us significant amounts of money, like here in the UK where we're talking I think it's estimated it's somewhere around 20 billion sterling per annum is the cost of air quality, the state, Poor air quality?
Speaker 2:And when you say on the state, do you mean directly the NHS?
Speaker 1:poor air quality? Yeah, and when you say on the state, do you mean directly the nhs, directly to the nhs? Lost days to work, absenteeism, ill health medicine, you name it wow.
Speaker 2:So it seems to me as though there are things in the air that we just tolerate because we can't hold our breath for two hours. I have had a number of experiences walking down the street and there has been a particularly smelly car or a bus or whatever coming past me, spitting out all kinds of fumes, and I have held my breath. I remember as a child covering my drink or like hiding my apple, because in my mind it's like that's just horrible. I, I want to hide that, but I can't do that for two hours. So eventually you get to a space where you need to tolerate it. Am I on the right lines there? Is that the reason why we are not so aware of the air we're around? It's just because we've become used to tolerating it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a couple of things going on there. We often talk about tolerable risk. At the end of the day, air quality is a risk thing. We can't eliminate our exposure to everything. It's just not the way life is. Every time we step outside the door or get on a bus, drive a car, we're accepting or tolerating a certain amount of risk, some of it's conscious, some of it's unconscious, and we expect the state or mechanisms to step in to protect us to a tolerable level. So there's this kind of this tolerability question in air quality. What? What's an acceptable exposure to these pollutants, assuming that we can't eliminate all risk? So that's the kind of thing that goes on in the background. But there's also this conscious, tolerable thing that you were talking about this, that I'd rather not walk down that street. I know that's where the buses are and you know, I know it's full of fumes. Or that meeting room is always the stuffy meeting room. I prefer the other one that's got an openable window.
Speaker 1:So there are some things that we do that we're conscious about, one of the challenges we have with air quality, and we might even experience it in this room here today. I've got no idea sitting in this room how good the ventilation is. There's no sign on the door. There's no thermostat on the wall that's telling me that it's doing X. We just have to assume that the supply chains that built this space have done it in a way that it's okay. So, as you and I sit here today talking, we've got no clue really, unless there's an air quality monitor or something on the wall telling us what we're experiencing.
Speaker 1:And one of the challenges we have as human beings is we're not very good at sensing a deteriorating air quality and we come into a place of poor air quality at going. Oh, that's not very nice. So I always talk about. You know you're going to your kids bedrooms in the morning like it's walking into thick pea soup. Right, we know that that geez, we can open a window in here. So we're very good at walking from one space to another and going. This isn't very good, but the kid that's asleep in that room where the air quality has deteriorated overnight has no clue.
Speaker 1:And we know this in our own bedrooms, in different places in work. We walk into rooms and we go. This feels stuffy, there's an odor, there's something about this that isn't right and that's us expressing discomfort or dissatisfaction with the air and we've used that traditionally actually to set a lot of the standards that we have today. A lot of the things we talk about when we talk about the ventilation rates that are set for different spaces were based off these old ideas of likelihood of discomfort or dissatisfaction. In simple terms, what they do is basically put 100 people in a room and as long as 80 of them or more didn't express dissatisfaction with that space, that was good enough. Well, and that was the flow rate that was set. So a lot of the standards and things you'll see even in the modern ashray standards that the american society of heating refrigeration engineers that that organization, even still in the language they talk about likelihood of discomfort or dissatisfaction- so.
Speaker 2:So none of the standards, then, from what you're saying, are connected to the impact on your health. It's all connected to what the 80% of people are willing to tolerate.
Speaker 1:In the old days. Yes, because a lot of the stuff that we were doing was about controlling odours in spaces. So the very first standards for air quality came out of trying to control odours in spaces. So that's where it started. But surprisingly, they're pretty accurate. They're not bad. If you apply that approach to what we understand about actually measuring air quality, you end up with similar results actually, and it's one of the things to bear in mind and to use your instincts. If you walk into a space and it doesn't feel right, there's a good chance it's not actually, you know. So we need to lean on our own senses a little bit more than we do. We walk into a space and it doesn't feel very fresh, or it feels chemically or stuffy. There's a good chance it's under ventilated. But we we kind of ignore that often. You know, like we walked into this room today, we didn't kind of stop and go does this feel okay, like? Does this feel like it's a well-ventilated space?
Speaker 2:we're not very good at doing that so interestingly for me, there's a bit of a conflict that goes on in my home. So, speaking personally here, my daughter loves scented candles. When you walk into her room it smells like a scented candle factory. She absolutely loves it. I detest it. To me it feels toxic, it feels poisonous. I can feel it at the back of my throat when I leave my. If I've been in there for a significant period of time my head doesn't feel quite right. I wouldn't say it's fuzzy or foggy, but I I don't feel on top of my game. But she absolutely loves it. To me it feels poisonous. Although the smell when you're talking about odour it's not an offensive smell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know what you mean.
Speaker 2:The chances are it is toxic because it's things like candles and incense and artificially created smells.
Speaker 1:I mean, we understand where that comes from and that would have happened in the past. You know we'd have bought things like lavender into rooms and and sage and and flowers to scent spaces to, because they're associated with outside and freshness and and they cover up and mask some of the more unpleasant odors. So a lot, of a lot of these smells and things that we're used to vanillas, coffees, you know, cinnamons and flowers and floral scents and zest, lemons and pine and all of these things are all evocative of outside, but very often they're very far from the real thing. They're often chemically generated and even if they're not chemically generated, there are potentially side effects for them. One of the most famous ones of that is anything that smells zesty fresh in your home. So you look at your bleach bottle or your floor cleaner or your washing up liquid. Most of those will contain something called limonene. Now, limonene, as the name would suggest, smells of lemons and it's actually part of a family of chemicals that are very closely associated with essential oils in a way, so they're not very harmful as they are, hence they're allowed in all of these products. Another one is pinene. So pinene, as you'd imagine, smells of pine, so forest fresh. So if you've got a floor cleaner that smells of woods, there's a good chance it's got pinene in it.
Speaker 1:The challenge when we introduce all of these chemicals into our built environment is that they react with other things. So, as an example, limonene, when it comes into contact with a very common gas that we'll find in our environment called ozone. So ozone is generated by the sun and tends to be created during the day, but there's also products in our built environment that may create ozone as well. Ozone is very reactive and when it comes into contact with limonene, it turns limonene into some other things like particulate matter and formaldehyde, and we know that particulate matter and formaldehyde are two of the most serious pollutants that we face.
Speaker 1:So these things, these things that smell nice and stuff that we're introducing into our building, often in of themselves may not be very harmful. Although there's some harm associated with them, they can react in ways that we can't control and turn into even more. So we're creating these thick pea soups of things in our built environment. I mean this room that we're in now has got carpets and timber products and and plasterboard and paints, and all of these things are giving off volatile organic compounds, chemicals, into the air that are reacting in ways that we can't control. Some of them aren't very harmful, other than others are very harmful so let's just break this down just a little bit.
Speaker 2:So so I've got lemonine in my kitchen cleaner. That's a common thing for me to use I think most people as well. And you mentioned about the gas ozone, what has ozone in it or what emits ozone, because I'm really concerned about me creating a gas that I really do not want in my life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, most residential settings, the majority of the ozone that's going to be in a home will come from outside, which is not something that we can really control. So ozone is one of these pollutants, as we'd call it, where often we don't have a lot of control over it, and it will react with some things faster than others, and some things that it reacts with it will create fairly harmless byproducts. Other things it will react with may create harmful products. So some things in our built environment and you're starting to touch on a really interesting point, and that is. Hang on a minute. This actually sounds pretty complicated. Like we've just in the last few minutes talked about chemicals. I've never really heard of reacting with gases. I don't really understand, in a way that I don't understand what the outcomes are going to be I understand formaldehyde.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know, that's really bad yeah.
Speaker 1:So formaldehyde, we know, and it's one of the most ubiquitous construction products ever. You know, it's a wonder chemical. It's kind of the asbestos of the modern age. It's like one of these things that was brilliant because it binds stuff together. So we see it in MDF board and kitchen cabinet. In my office, for example. I've got lots of furniture in there and I have a steady, constant rate of about 30 micrograms per meter cubed of formaldehyde into the space because of all the furniture in the space. So we introduce all these things into the space. Some of them formaldehyde, we know, is harmful. It's classed as a class one carcinogen. But we're starting to touch on a really interesting concept and it kind of goes back to that original point about risk. Is that we're not suggesting for a moment that people shouldn't clean their floors or have furniture in their house? Because that's what I heard.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, right for sure. Or, for example, we know one of the most polluting activities that we do in our home is cooking. So when we cook we produce all sorts of volatile chemicals and particulates into the air that we know cause significant harm. I'm not sitting here today for a moment saying we've got to stop cooking. Everybody on takeaways right. That exacerbates another problem, like one of the big, the second biggest product produced because of all the people ordering food and cooking.
Speaker 1:You know all of those. All of that cooking produces pollutants that are going out of vents and into the atmosphere, so that that's a kind of a white elephant in the room. Problem for london is that one of the biggest contributors of air pollution in london is the activity of cooking. But that's a kind of a white elephant in the room. Problem for London is that one of the biggest contributors of air pollution in London is the activity of cooking.
Speaker 2:But that's not even being spoken about, though.
Speaker 1:No it's a funny one, that one, and I only came across that this year. Actually there was somebody who was presenting a table of the pollution, and people that know London and air pollution know this much better than most people I'd imagine, but for me it was quite a surprise. Actually there's such a big portion of them. I can't remember what the proportion was, but it's significant. It's like the next big problem is pollution from commercial kitchens. Yeah, all that lovely barbecuey, smoky smells we love when we come into town, into the restaurant quarters, that is pollution, right, you know. In the same way, in the countryside, those evocative smells of peat and coal and wood fires, you know, you come into certain towns and it smells like winter, that's pollution, you know that's. That's blowing. All of the WHO limits out the water from an air pollution perspective. But it all comes back to this thing, that of how we manage risk, and this isn't something that we can eliminate. So we just have to break it down into manageable pieces in ways that we understand how to control risk, and the good news is we've been doing that in the built environment for time immemorial hierarchies of control, and this is a an approach to mitigating risk. Where you have a. It's like a pyramid of the, the most effective all the way down to the least effective measures for managing any kind of risk, and it basically goes for listeners that don't know it um, the the most effective way of eliminating risk is to eliminate that risk from the space. So if you're in a warehouse and you're worried about something heavy hitting you on the head, you ask yourself the question do we need to stock heavy things? And you know if the answer is no, then you don't stock a heavy thing in your warehouse, then it can't hit you on the head. The next most effective is to substitute it. Is there a less heavy thing that we can stop? So if it does fall off, it hits me on the head less hard. That's the neck.
Speaker 1:And then we move into engineering controls. So these this is quite analogous to air quality and ventilation. Are there things in our built environment that fundamentally don't need to be there? If they don't, let's get rid of them and then we're not exposed to that risk. Good example of that is the electrification of the built environment. You know when we talk about sustainability quite a lot on this podcast. This electrification of the built environment is removing combustion products from within homes and buildings. We are now not exposing ourselves to the products of combustion when we remove those products from the home. So that's the most effective thing you can do is take a stove out or take a gas cooker out and replace it with a, an electric one. You could argue that substitution, you know, replacing one thing with something that's less harmful.
Speaker 1:But most of my work and what we're talking about generally in the built environment is the engineering controls part of it. And that's where we started to think about ventilation and air cleaning and all of these things that if a risk is going to be in the air, if we're breathing co2 in this space, if this table is going to give off vocs and formaldehyde, if we are creating dust and particles from the carpet, if they're going to be in the air and we're going to expose ourselves to them, what are the right things that we can do in spaces to reduce that risk? And there we're into the fundamentals of ventilation. You know the exchange of pollutants and the extraction of pollutions from spaces before they cause us harm. So I think it's really fascinating is, what I love about this subject is that there's this fantastic complexity out one side, with air quality, from the physics of it, the chemistry of it, the social science and the communication of it. All of this stuff is fascinating and massive, yet we have to condense it through this conduit of a building and within a building. There are only so many levers that we can pull to an effect and outcome out the other side and as big as the outcomes are out the other side, and complex with things like impacts on health, the bit that we're talking about today is this bit in the middle, this bit of the. Well, okay, what do I do in my home? What do I do in an office? What are the things that I can do to day-to-day limit this risk that we know is so important? And the problem that we've had in the built environment is that we've not been paying that bit attention. So, generally speaking, every time we look at this in the built environment and I mean every time anywhere in the world, particularly in places like the UK and Europe, we find massive non-compliance with even doing the basics right, because it's a silent killer, you know. I know you've spoken about things like grenfell on on this show. Um, that's a dramatic response, you know. Things catching on fire, people dying, stuff falling on them. You know those kinds of things elicit a response, and rightly so.
Speaker 1:The challenge with air quality is it's this long-term esoteric risk, this thing that we can mentally kick into the long grass. You know I joke often with people that ventilation doesn't leak and drown a building and cause physical damage like plumbing does. It's not like electrics. It doesn't spark and cause a flame and burn a building down. You get ventilation wrong. Nobody knows anything about it for 65 years until you end up with lung cancer or dementia or something else from an accumulative exposure to pollutants. That's the challenge.
Speaker 1:Outside of things like carbon monoxide poisoning and things that have an immediate response, the challenge we have is that this critical pillar of the built environment, which is ventilation, is something that nobody's paid much attention to, and no more so was that brought home than during the COVID pandemic. As Kath Noakes, who was one of the prominent voices in the uk she was part of sage and the teams that were looking at how to manage the risk of covid in the built environment one of the things she's on record as saying was that what covid asked us was much less about what is the current impact of our buildings on our exposure to covid. It was asking us the fundamental question of our buildings, on our exposure to COVID. It was asking us the fundamental question of what do we even know about the performance of our buildings? And the answer to that was sweet F?
Speaker 1:All we just don't know. We don't know how our classes are ventilating, we don't know how our hospitals are ventilating, our offices, our homes. And every time anybody looks in in any way whatsoever, we don't like what we see. And every time anybody looks in in any way whatsoever, we don't like what we see. So unfortunately, that's the starting point of our conversation here in a lot of ways is like where are we? The result is not in a good spot actually when it comes to ventilation.
Speaker 2:So, since we spend so much time in buildings, you've mentioned 55 years if I live to 80. What is it that I can do now from listening to you? What action can I take to have a better understanding of the air quality of the buildings that I'm in frequently? And then, after that, what action can I take?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good question and I think there's a couple of answers to that. The first one is awareness. You know, once we start thinking about this and recognizing the problem for what it is, we can start to view it in a better way. So that's the first thing is to get educated on why this might be important to you, because a lot of the things that we've assumed might be something else might actually be ventilation. Those recurring illnesses you get, that asthma that your kid's starting to develop, those allergic reactions you're starting to get those chronic illnesses, may very well be your exposure to air pollution and not what you thought it was.
Speaker 1:So there's a connection between eczema, asthma, to air quality and everything else, but we don't, as somebody said to me the other day, the the challenge you have in the medical community and, like everybody experiences this. We tend to build up a list by the time we go to the gps right, because of ourselves.
Speaker 2:You mean, yeah, it could be. Yeah, what it?
Speaker 1:could, because when we finally get a gp's appointment and it costs us money usually there's something fairly serious going on before we go there and you only get ten minutes to talk about what you're happening. Now the GP is going to be really interested in the stuff that might be associated with you dropping dead and you know blood pressure and heart attacks and things like that, and we very rarely get down to the bottom of the list of general ailments that we have. If we tied those together might actually build a picture that goes why isn't this a good story for your home environment or your work environment? Are the things I'm seeing as a GP actually a symptom of exposure to environmental pollution in some way exposure to mould, exposure to chemicals, something but we very rarely get to have that conversation actually GP. So the more awareness the better.
Speaker 1:The second big thing that we can do is recognize that just because a standard exists doesn't mean that we've got what we've paid for. So understanding that the ventilation systems that we have in our built environment, there's a higher chance than not that they're not doing what they should do. So how do do we check that? How do I in my home? How do I in my office. When was the last time your listeners were in your office and you saw anybody going around maintaining or checking the flow rates of the ventilation system in your office? Chances are somebody's been around and done the air conditioning systems right, checked the F gas and all that kind of stuff and cleaned out the air con, but I you know most people will never have seen anybody go around an office actually making sure you're getting the fresh air that you need. So we need to start thinking in terms of that.
Speaker 1:This is an important pillar of performance of buildings that has an impact on our health. How do I know we're getting what we paid for? Because most of us are paying for this in one way or the other. We either bought a house or we're paying rent or leasing an office space or whatever. We're paying for adequate ventilation and I'm sitting here today telling you there's a higher chance than not that you're not getting it. So there's a big swindle, really, and this is something you're supposed to have got. So somebody's not doing what they're supposed to have done. So so somebody is not doing what they're supposed to have done so often. This isn't a cost that you even have to bear. It just needs to be important enough that somebody checks in.
Speaker 1:And the third thing and this is where the built environment is going much more generally is that we're able to see the performance of the spaces we occupy in ways that we've never been able to before.
Speaker 1:You know, you could have an air quality monitor in this room with a nice screen on it telling you exactly how the air quality is. We weren't able to do that really five years ago, 10 years ago, so we're in a position now where there's no excuses really. We can see the quality of the air, generally speaking, in every space that we occupy, occupy and if the built environment recognizes that, probably within the decade, maybe even less, there won't be many spaces that we're in where there isn't some form of environmental monitoring happening and that changes the narrative and has impacts all the way down the supply chain, because you live and die and be judged and your brand reputation will be based on the ongoing performances of the spaces that you design and construct and manage. It won't be about whether you complied with regulations when it was built or not and you can blame somebody downstream who didn't do their job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because no one will care. No one will care, you will see, it's as simple as that.
Speaker 1:In the same way we see with cars, we have information coming at us from cars that tell us how they're performing, what the real world performance is. You'll find tables popping up of good air quality in schools and poor air quality in schools, because we know schools has an impact on scores. These kind of you know. That's the world we're looking into, because this technology, this connected world iot and sensors is here now and there are very good ways of us understanding the performance of those spaces, and that changes the narrative.
Speaker 2:I think so. Two things far enough in my mind now. One of them is like this is great, we can see the condition, I can act, I can demand, I can create this group of people that says we're not going to tolerate this. Go to someone that can affect change and make change. Another side of me is like this could be a royal nightmare, because cars and pedestrianized zones are going to just conflict with one another, all of the schools and office buildings and homes that are in such close proximity to polluting veins of transport hubs and and so on and so on. That, then, is going to be a nightmare for me to get anywhere. So I've got these two sides of me. One side of me now is great. I can now start to feel fresher. Maybe my head is clearer. My any uh ailments that I've got will will stop anything from my children or grandchildren. That will be completely fine, but this other thing of convenience now feels like that that is put at risk. How do you see those two blending together in the future?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's kind of a. In a way, it's a bit like the sustainability tropes, isn't it Of the? What am I giving up to achieve this? The thing is, with air quality, a lot of what we've been talking about is what we should have had anyway. This isn't about some net zero 30 year goal thing that people will question whether or not it's possible. The engineering solutions exist now. The standards that often we're talking about are the things that we're supposed to be meeting anyway, and this is stuff that in the vast majority of the cases, we've already paid for. We just haven't got. So there's very little inconvenience in achieving decent air quality inside. And even where it does get complex, where you get these interfaces of, you know, classrooms being close to high streets or busy streets and things like that they're just engineering solutions. You know we don't need to fix the world to fix the air quality in a classroom. We can put a box in that room that does that job for us while we're waiting for the outside to sort its game out. Right?
Speaker 1:We know, in urban areas we're slowly improving air quality, right, notwithstanding the challenges that we have it is getting better in a lot of parts of the world, particularly where we are, but we can fix these problems in our buildings. This is a built environment problem, you know, and a lot of what we're talking about, a lot of our exposure to these pollutants are being created because we're just simply not getting what we've paid good money for. Quite frankly, you know the and this is the hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, I think is just understanding where we are. I think most people that know construction know how poor it can be and the long journey it needs to take, but they also know that construction and the built environment is very capable of doing that. You know, we've seen methodologies and approaches within the built environment change on a dime and improve within very short periods of time. Once they know there's no excuses right, and hopefully we'll see some of that out the likes of the grenfell reports and building safety acts and so on. We're seeing it with things like Arabs Law and damp and mould in homes. You know, we know when we act, we can get very strong reactions out of the sector and they can move.
Speaker 1:So a lot of this stuff is about just saying look, enough is enough. You know we're paying for adequate ventilation in this office space. When was the last time anybody checked if we actually are getting adequate ventilation or not? I'm not asking for gold standards here. I'm not asking when was the last time anybody checked if we actually are getting adequate ventilation or not. I'm not asking for gold standards here. I'm not asking for a platinum air quality building. I'm just saying who's responsible for the ventilation in the building and can I see a document that says that it's doing what it's supposed to do and if not, why not?
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's as simple as shifting the narrative to am I getting an outcome that we expect rather than a specific. I call it specification by product, where you walk into a room and go well, there's a grill there, that means we've got ventilation, or there's a fan there, that means that we've got an extract, and saying, actually, can I see evidence that it's doing what it's supposed to do? And when we shift those narratives, often quite subtly, can have very profound impacts on our built environment. It's just that we don't ask that question. We don't ask that question in our own home. What does the cook hood actually do? Does it do 30 litres a second when I turn it on? What does the bathroom fan do In the same way in our office environments. Does that mean We've all had been in an office where everybody knows that meeting room right, that everybody falls asleep in and you, once there's more than two people in it, it gets stuffy, and so on? And somehow we seem to just accept that, that that's the shit room, that, whereas actually the question should be how many people do we expect to be in this room regularly and does the ventilation meet the requirement to provide adequate ventilation for that many people? And can somebody provide a document please, evidence that it's doing that? And it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1:Whose responsibility is that? It varies from place to place. You know, if you're a school, it would fall to the, the board of governors or whoever manages the building or the facilities. If you're in kind of. There's this whole split incentive thing in much bigger commercial buildings. Is it the landlord, is it the leaser? You know who has responsibility for the plant on that particular floor, but somebody is responsible somewhere for the performance of ventilation on those spaces, because it doesn't matter what standard or piece of legislation or regulation. You look at all of them, whether it's education or health care or residential care or something, all of them somewhere will have a bit of plain english in it that says it's my responsibility to provide adequate ventilation to the occupants of this space, and that word adequate. Behind that adequacy are a bunch of numbers written in standards, whether they're guidance or building standards or whatever it is. There's a number somewhere that says that's what that room, for the majority of the cases, in normal conditions, this is the number that room should be doing to be adequate.
Speaker 2:And these standards you're saying cover new buildings as well as existing buildings and buildings that have been up for many, many years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, largely. I mean it depends. Obviously regulations and standards are an evolving thing so that they might have improved or changed over time or may not have even existed in some areas. But it's very hard if you're, say, managing a, an office building that was a bit like the one we're in now. You know an old industrial zone that's been adapted and changes. Usually there's been a material and enough change of that space that at some point it needed to require to meet a standard.
Speaker 1:And the reality is is standards on things like ventilation haven't actually changed that much over 10 or 15 years. So, like you're not going to be far off, even if you get it to meet an old standard, it will still be doing probably much of what you need it to do. The problem is, is not we're not missing it by five or ten percent. The problem is when we go and check these buildings we tend to run them to failure like that. That's how we run spaces. We wait for something to start rattling or smoking or smelling funny before we replace it a bit like our health right yeah, yeah, totally yeah as opposed to actually doing annual checks to say are we still doing what we need to?
Speaker 1:bearing in mind, as I said before, the narrative is going to change pretty soon.
Speaker 1:It won't matter whether that thing was serviced in the last two years or not.
Speaker 1:You're going to have a little box on the wall that's telling you what the air quality is in the space, and so that room is going to be judged on the outcome, rather than whether the fan is doing 50 liters a second or 60 liters a second. You will be judged on the outcome in the space and, believe me, it's a much more uncomfortable place to be if you're providing those spaces to be arguing over data that's saying this space isn't performing than getting on top of the stuff. You're going to have to do anyway now, and that's service these systems properly and get them working. So the best thing the industry can do now is kind of cop on a bit, start getting these spaces working properly, because, whether they like it or not, they're going to have to do it soon, because the space will tell you. That's the harsh reality of it. Because this stuff is not expensive. You can stick a CO2 and PM sensor in a room for a couple of hundred quid and that will tell you for years how that space is doing.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about your podcast, Air Quality Matters. You started it up just about a year ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was kind of October last year and a bit now I suppose. Yeah, it was a funny one. You know, I was at a conference and I was sat down chatting to a group of colleagues who I've since had on the podcast, and it was Max Sherman, yela Laverge, I think it was Corinne Mandin, and I came away from that conversation thinking, wow, you know, I've just been sat down talking to three really prominent people in their fields of academia and epidemiology in the built environment. How lucky am I. That was two hours of talking shit, you know, just about stuff and a meandering conversation. And I came away from that thinking I wish more people could have heard those insights that you know had that kind of conversational experience of talking to deep, deep sector. You know I'm a jet and, as I said, an expert generalist, but these people are real experts and they and I'm, as I said, I'm lucky I sit in this kind of middle ground where I get to have these conversations and I suppose, a bit like you with your podcast, you realize that these conversations should be heard. Like, how do we break them out of these echo chambers? So, like a lot of people, I umdenard about over it for about six months going will, I won't, I will, I won't, I said. I said, look, I enjoy chatting to people, let's have a go. So I gave it a go and I set myself a goal of doing it for a year, doing one a week chatting to somebody and seeing how it went. And that was really the.
Speaker 1:The origin story of the air quality matters podcast was just me talking to the people I'm lucky enough to get to talk to, often in a format with time, most importantly so, typically an hour and a half, two hours of conversation, where we get a chance to unpack some of these nuanced and technical conversations in a way that there's no other format that I know of that enables you to talk to a Max Sherman for an hour about the origins of air quality standards. That doesn't happen in an editorial or in a radio interview or in a talk where Max has got 20 minutes to talk about something. So I'm really lucky in that sense that we've been able to do that and I think people have seen value in it. So it's just, it's just grown steadily that and I think people have seen value in it. So it's just, it's just grown steadily. There's there's a very deep well internationally, of really interesting people to talk to. So I'm talking to people from india, from north america, from canada and increasingly going out on the road now and actually going to these events and sitting down with people and recording these conversations live from those spaces. So I feel very lucky.
Speaker 1:Actually, I think, like a lot of people that do podcasts, that they that are doing them for the right reasons, they enjoy the conversations. Anyway, you feel very fortunate to have these two-hour relationships with people to really talk about something you're passionate about. Um, so yeah, like I love it. I think it's absolutely brilliant and I have a current list of about. I think at the moment it's about 25 guests deep of people lined up to talk to, and we haven't, you know, I've had a couple of people back on I had previously, just because some big news thing that they were dealing with we wanted to talk about, but so far I don't think I'm gonna be running out of people to talk to very soon. So it's brilliant, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:And I love the fact that you're giving a gift to the world. It's something that people don't need to pay for. Someone can come and get educated. And it is a very, very niche area air quality but extremely important. Like you're saying, there's a silent killer element that you speak about. It really is a silent killer, but it but it's over a period of time. It's not rapid, is is not immediate, it's over a protracted time yeah it.
Speaker 1:I mean it can be dramatic. Obviously, like I said, things like carbon monoxide or if you, if you're very sensitive to certain pollutants, you might have allergic reactions or it might exacerbate asthma. So it can be quite acute in certain circumstances. But most of the damage that we're talking about at a societal level is a kind of an epidemiological problem. It's a long term chronic health issue and it's just so complex. The challenge has been historically it's been very difficult to draw straight lines from a particular example to a particular health outcome, because there are so many confounding factors that might also have impacted that condition that it's been very difficult to join the dots. So a good example would be I live in a mouldy home and I've got asthma and I think that the mould in my home is exacerbating my asthma. But what's my journey to school? Is it on a polluted street or not? What's my school like? What's my socio-economic condition? You know what? What genes have I inherited? You know there's all these different things that might be impacting asthma.
Speaker 1:So at a case level it can be very hard to say this home or this environment with these pollutants is causing this problem.
Speaker 1:But when we blow that up to a population level and to a grander level it's what basic epidemiology is is starting to join those dots and saying look, we see outcomes of x when we have people in these environments that are too big to ignore. It's like like the old smoking question Everybody had a granddad who made it to 75 smoking 40 a day that never killed him. We can always find a reason at a case level that that's not the case, but eventually the science becomes so overwhelming that smoking causes lung cancers that even if you can't say precisely that Derek got lung cancer because of the fags that he smoked, not the coal pit that he worked in, we can say at a population level that it's a problem. That's kind of where we are with air quality now. We know very certainly that this is a significant health burden on us and it affects everybody. Nobody escapes this. People in certain parts of the world are more affected. There are parts of the community that are more affected, but none of us escape this. That's the reality.
Speaker 2:It's a bit of a recipe, isn't it? It's part of the recipe, of the. The health issues, as you're talking about, air is, is part of a number of other factors that go in, and often what we look for is okay, that what's the one thing that's going to solve the problem. Okay, air is probably not going to show its head that far above the parapet to be the one and only factor, unless it's carbon monoxide poisoning or the lack of air, as an example. But the thing that I just want to emphasize, or that I'm taking away from the conversations I've had about air over the years, has been that it is a key part of a recipe that often gets overlooked, and this is about changing the recipe so that you get a different outcome, not saying there's just this one thing that makes this outcome. It's not, it's too complex in order to do that, and that's good health as well as bad health yeah, and the beauty of air quality is that there's so many co-benefits to this.
Speaker 1:I was having an amazing conversation on the podcast last week with a lady called plum stone who is an advocate for air quality as an accessibility right. There are huge swathes of the population who can't access parts of the built environment because of chronic long-term illness and disease Cancer, patients undergoing chemotherapy, autoimmune diseases, long COVID a whole rack of society who are very sensitive to exposure to infection in the built environment. So for them it's an accessibility right. In the same way that somebody in a wheelchair can't access a bank if it doesn't have a ramp, there are sections of community that can't access a bank or a classroom because their dad's got an autoimmune disease and they can't risk going into that classroom and bringing an infection back to the home. So it's a fundamental human right air quality and if we view it through that lens, fascinatingly enough there's all these co-benefits. So, for example, if we make classroom air quality a priority, we suddenly open up accessibility to all of those classrooms. But we also have the co-benefits of improving SAT scores and education scores and absenteeism and making it less of a risk for teachers that are working in those spaces. They become better spaces.
Speaker 1:A classroom, for many parts of society, is an environment that's going to be the best environment that that child sees in a 24-hour period. It might be the only warm place they go to. It might be the only safe space they go to. It might be the place they go to, might be the only safe space they go to. It might be the place they go to where it's the only place they get food. So schools can be really important to people and by improving the air quality in those spaces we improve it for not just the kids that are struggling from an accessibility perspective, but we improve it for all of the other kids and the students and all the families at home that have to have to miss days of work because their kids have brought bugs home and have to come home and things like that. The co-benefits of getting air quality right can be absolutely enormous and I think that's the advantage here is that there's no very little downside here to this stuff and often, as I keep repeating ad nauseam, we're just trying to get those buildings to do what they were supposed to flipping do in the first place. That's the best starting If we can get there like most risk.
Speaker 1:You know, when you fill out a risk form it's like what's the unmitigated risk look like? What does it look with the current mitigation and what's the gap and what do I need to do to improve it further? That's kind of where we are with the built environment. I need to do to improve it further. That's kind of where we are with the built environment. But we're in the unmitigated risk bit at the moment. It's a cluster, whatnot out there. In a lot of cases We've got to get it to where it should be. Should have been pause, have a look, see what the outcomes are, and then we can tweak and improve and move it on. But at the moment we're not really at the starting line and look out of the vast ways of our built environment and they're just not where they need to be. So it's a good lesson for people in that, I think, is to start asking those tough questions of the spaces that you work in. Is it doing what it should do?
Speaker 2:well, we're at a point now in the podcast where we can go to the demolition zone, where we talk about a myth and then you start to destroy stuff. Brilliant, are you ready? Yep, absolutely, let's do it. Okay, we are in the demolition zone and you have created a, a simple I wouldn't even call it a structure. To be honest with you, I would just say that it's uh, nine blocks equidistant from one another, all the same color. What does it represent?
Speaker 1:yeah, I'm conscious that some people might be listening to this rather than actually seeing it on video. So one of the big myths we have in the world of ventilation and air quality is that we I think as it, as a species try and uniform everything, formalize everything into a simple solution or a simple answer. When we think about air quality and ambient air quality, if we look out of a window, we see and Henry Burridge beautifully put this in a conversation I had with him that when we look at the horizon out of our window, at ambient air quality, what we see is the air in front of us, the space in our visual perspective as one. There may be some differences with hills or impacts of streets or certain topography, but we're looking at it as one homogenous zone. But when we look out at that same environment, what we see are hundreds, if not thousands of homes, and each one of those homes or buildings is super complex. It's got different layouts of rooms, different types of people living in them, different numbers of people living in them, different uses of those spaces. But our standards and our regulations and our purchasing patterns and the way that we set up our policies in organisations tends to view our built environment, a bit like what I've laid out here and that is these uniform blocks of buildings that somehow one solution or one approach will fit all spaces and air quality and ventilation couldn't be further from that. So when you're asking me to visually kind of present that, that these kind of nine blocks all exactly the same color, all exactly the same shape, if you, if you're a housing provider and you look at your ventilation strategy or your, your purchasing policy, that's kind of what you're seeing, that I can somehow pick a fan for all bathrooms and somehow that will be the right choice for those buildings.
Speaker 1:So my demolition really is to take away the uniform nimity here and represent that one of those blocks might look exactly the same. It's different color. You know, this building is exactly the same as the building next door but has two more people living in it and he's under a different type of pressure. The building next door might be retrofitted to look like that brown horse there. Hopefully not, but could be have a completely different use. One building could be absolutely massive compared to those little blocks, have much more volume, have to deal with pollutants in a different space. Another building might have a different wall makeup, have been, the air tightness might have been improved or the the that block there is blue. That might indicate that that home is struggling with fuel poverty and is unable to heat its home in the same way as the property next door has four people living in it, the same as the one next door is exactly the same type of building, but the ventilation and air quality impacts are going to be fundamentally different.
Speaker 1:So when what I'm trying to show here is is that we have to see our built environment for the complexity that it is and understand that when we're developing strategies and policies and purchasing strategies, that it can reflect the diversity of those spaces, you know, and I think none more so do we see that in these grand retrofit schemes than when we're trying to scale stuff, our instinct is to try and simplify it, because with scale, the simpler it is, the easier it is to go faster and harder. But retrofit is complex and what we recognize very quickly is that every home we go into is different and every home has a different expectation of what they are going to expect. So that's my kind of visual demolition more of a construction actually I kind of tipped it on its head a little bit, but just to recognize that we have to throw out this idea that we can look at an estate of homes and think that one purchasing decision is going to be the right approach to every single one of those homes.
Speaker 2:And I love that. One of the things that frustrates me when dealing with the large property builders or house builders is their insatiable desire for standardization. They just want everything the same, and the reason they want it the same is because they want to go to a manufacturer or to a service provider and get bargain bottom prices and call it efficient, and that's the way that the organisation is set up. But what you're speaking to there is exactly right. There is no house the same as the next house on the same street or in the same area, because just what you were saying when you put that red block down, is it that the number of people living in the house is completely different?
Speaker 1:And it's one of the things that optimisation and I forget what the house is completely different and it's one. It's one of the things that optimization and I forget what the word is where we, where you, we're constantly reducing prices the whole time. But what we're not very good at, in particularly in ventilation, is building in capacity as part of the engineering solution. Ventilation is an engineering solution, right, and in almost no other form of engineering do we allow no redundancy or capacity in our provision of those solutions. So there's that old trope or joke about engineers that they precisely work out the load-bearing capacity of a wall and then they'll double it just to be sure. Right, but there's a truism in there is that it doesn't make any sense to precisely figure out what a building needs and allow no redundancy for failure in the supply chain, deterioration of a product over time, change of use of that building or some unintended outcome that you're not aware of. You build some meat on the bone to give you some flexibility downstream to adapt and manage different scenarios. So in this example here it might be, except for the really big block all of these different scenarios that we've now created could be delivered by the same product, but only if we've put a product in that's got the capacity to do 20% more in this home, 5% less in this home, work a little bit harder in that room on that home than it does have to work in that home. But we don't do that. We often design our ventilation systems to meet a minimum standard because that's the thing we know we're going to get pulled up on if we do get checked on something. But any time you design a process to meet a minimum, any failure in any chain of that supply chain, the default position is going to be inability to meet the minimum right. Whereas if you design capacity into the equation so that the fans and the ducts and everything are capable of doing more than the minimum might not mean you have to set it to that, but at least it has the capacity to do it if you require it. If there's a failure in any part of that supply chain. The installer was having a bad friday and wanted to go home, so they didn't quite tighten a duct the way they should have done, or it happens to be a slightly lemon product, or this home that it's going into ends up being quite full. You know how much of our society at the moment moved into a little one bedroom two bedroom apartment as a young couple started having kids and can't afford to upgrade and move into a bigger property. So now a home that was fit for purpose for one or two adults has now got two adults and two growing kids in a little one or two bedroom apartment. That would be fine if we built in the capacity within those systems to deal with more than the minimum, and we don't see that enough in systems so often.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying here is it's not that we need to do something dramatically different, that there needs to be a different fan and a different ventilation approach in each property, but if we see the properties for their uniqueness or the potential for their uniqueness at the beginning, we can design in solutions that have that ability to do a little bit more than they need to. And often when we see specifications where, where is this kind of optimization and race to the bottom, we find that what's specified is the cheapest, smallest thing that I can get away putting in to meet the minimum, because that that was five quid less and it doesn't give you that capacity for change in circumstances. Which is why when we go out and do studies on air quality and ventilation performance in the built environment. It doesn't matter whether they're new, build or retrofit. The level of non-compliance with even minimum standards averages around 75 percent. So 75 percent of homes that we go into or buildings that we go into are not meeting the minimum. And it's natural if you think you only have to get a couple of things wrong If your goal was the minimum. You get one thing wrong and now all of a sudden you're not meeting the minimum and so is it a surprise.
Speaker 1:So it's a subtle shift actually, and I work a lot with social housing providers where we're saying look, you're a social housing provider. You know your home is anything but going to be normal. It's going to be put under pressures that perhaps no other homes would be put under. Why would you specify something that's only capable of achieving a minimum? That property could be in a fuel poor household in a year's time and be underheated. How's the ventilation system going to cope in that circumstance? What happens if that home is over-occup, occupied or the use of that property is overused? There's hot bedding going on in bedrooms where people are working shifts to make ends meet and that room doesn't get a break. How is the ventilation system that you're specifying going to meet these extra demands? It won't be through meeting the minimum, it's by recognizing the individuality of buildings and making sure we design solutions that are capable of meeting that bandwidth, that spectrum of use it's been great having you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate your wisdom and uh, having you on as a guest is is fantastic. I I am encouraging all of my listeners to uh to come and listen to the air quality matters podcast. We've got a link um in the description down below. But thanks very much.
Speaker 1:It's been an absolute pleasure and I really appreciate the invite. Thank you, and back at you. You're one of my favourite podcasts. I think the guests you have on are really interesting and it's a really interesting take on this sector. So I'll include your link in my show notes the next time I have the podcast up. Thanks a million for the invite.