Take a Breath in Your Office and Improve Your Health

We need modern, healthy buildings with natural ventilation

Image Pexels, Skitterphoto

Buildings are often just optimized for one thing: energy efficiency. What a shame! My regular readers know that I advocate systems thinking. A problem is often influenced by more than one factor and a building is no exception.

So if we just focus on energy savings in a building, it will be shut tight and the indoor air quality will suffer tremendously. Result: an unhealthy building. We can do better. And the inspiration can come from Cradle to Cradle and Circular Economy as well as Blue Economy and biomimicry.

Let’s look at some facts:

• In the western world, we spend approximately 90% of our time inside a building, where the concentration of some pollutants are often 2-5 times higher than typical outdoor levels (source: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality)
• Indoor concentrations of some pollutants have increased in recent decades due to factors like energy-efficient building construction and increased use of synthetic building materials, furnishings, personal care products, pesticides and household cleaners (source: https://www.epa.gov/report-environment/indoor-air-quality)
• Costs of a building are divided as…