Chinese child headache due to air pollution

This website reports on it all the time — cleaner facilities lead to happier occupants. There’s a good chance that one worker toiling around in a messy, dirty office  will not perform as well as a similar employee whose duties are conducted in a clean space. 

In many ways, a building with poor indoor air quality is just as damning as one that isn’t clean. As one CleanLink piece points out, air pollution related illnesses cost more than $150 billion and the concentration of pollutants indoors is, on average, two to five times higher than outdoors. Furthermore, people whose time indoors revolves around having a sharp mind (students and researchers being two examples) perform significantly worse when breathing poor air.

By digesting these numbers one will easily conclude that poor indoor air quality is a harm to business, education and quality of life. Fortunately, changes (some big and some small) can help improve the issue of indoor air quality.

A professor of public health at Havard University, Joseph Allen detailed changes that can be made to any building to make it more of a high-performing space in a report by the BBC. 

For a building located in an area where the air quality outdoors is good, something as simple as opening windows can have a positive impact on indoor air quality, says Allen. Building occupants can also improve the quality of the air they breath by electing to run the structure’s mechanical ventilation system more often or maybe by even altering that system so that dehumidifying and cooling the air that comes in is cheaper.

To read the rest of the BBC’s report on indoor air quality and why it matters to humans click here.