Indoor Environmental Quality - Standards for Protection of Occupants’ Safety, Health and Environment

Buildings represent a major investment, not just at the design and construction stage, but throughout their service lives because of on-going operational and maintenance. Increasingly owners and occupiers are becoming aware of the importance to maintain an adequate built environmental quality that is attractive and acceptable for the intended occupants. Achieving occupant comfort, including consideration of ventilation, thermal and glare and prevention of adverse health risks can have consequent benefits for occupant productivity and satisfaction, which could maximise the letting/selling potential of the property. Creating and maintaining a comfortable, healthy, efficient and cost-effective indoor environment is a complex task that involves understanding the capabilities and interactions of a range of systems, technologies and building materials as well as occupant requirements. There is a need to form an overall strategy for building design and management to incorporate occupant needs within the concept of ‘sustainable development’. Indoor air scientists have long argued that control of emissions from the building materials and consumer products used in buildings should be an important part of policies and actions to protect public health from the adverse effects of indoor air pollution [1–4]. The response from product manufacturers and regulators in the past can be described as variable and on the whole disappointing. In Europe for example a few countries and some producers have made important steps whereas others have yet to effectively address indoor air quality (IAQ). The issue is now rising up the agenda particularly because of concerns that changes to building design to adapt to the expected effects of climate change could have an adverse impact on IAQ [5,6]. However, there is a continuing need to raise awareness of the issue; for example the UK government’s Code for Sustainable Homes has a section on ‘health and well being’ of occupants without mention of IAQ. Increasingly, buildings are required to be highly air-tight and insulated to meet the ‘‘zero-carbon’’ objectives of governments and this has implications for indoor environmental quality [7]. To minimise the occupants’ exposure risks to indoor pollutants and to enhance environmental quality of buildings, there is a need to consider guidelines [8] and standards for buildings including criteria for ventilation, materials emissions and IAQ criteria for indoor air pollutants such as total VOCs (TVOC), benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, microparticulates and polyaromatics [9], as well as microbial contaminants, for example toxic moulds [10]. The scientific literature contains many reports of IAQ problems arising from the use of particular products that release chemicals causing odour and irritation or resulting in an