BuildingEcology.com - Hal Levin, Editor

Indoor Air Quality for Sustainable Buildings --  BuildingEcology.com for useful and reliable feature articles, for the latest news and events listings. Check out our links to the best information on Indoor Air Quality and Sustainable Buildings on the web. Our "events" page links you to IAQ and to Sustainability meetings and conferences all over the world.We invite your suggestions and comments on our resources related to indoor environmental quality, architecture, healthy buildings, and the built environment's impacts on the sustainability of human settlements.  

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The scientific evidence for a connection to moisture is the strongest. There is some evidence for certain species of mold and bacteria but it is generally far weaker for mold and bacteria. An exception, of course, is Legionella p, the cause of Legionnaire's Disease, but exposure to Legionella p. may not be dominated by bacteria found in the air.  There is increasing evidence that  molds and bacteria are  involved together, not as separate "causal factors." Scientific studies that look for associations between only mold or only bacteria may not find strong associations. Moisture is clearly relevant to the microbial exposures causing the reported health effects.

Quick tip:  What is the  biggest mistake have we made over the past 30-40 years that we should not repeat if possible?

I think it may be the separation of ASHRAE Standard 62 (Ventilation and IAQ) and Standard 55 (thermal comfort). Both IAQ and thermal comfort are affected by and ought to be addressed by the same building design and operational solutions. ASHRAE Guideline 10-2011 tries to get at these connections and interactions for the first time anywhere, well, except for papers I wrote a long time ago. ASHRAE Guideline 10, now available for purchase on the Publications page of the ASHRAE web site, brings together a lot of what we know about the interactions and also discusses interactions with light and noise. There is far less known than we would like, but far more known than we tend to reflect in our standards, codes, and practices. If you know of some other connections, please send us an email. We will be grateful for your help.

GSA Seeks Public Input for Green Building Certification Systems

GSA Press Release
On February 5th, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced that it is seeking additional input from the public regarding the federal government’s use of third party green building certification systems. GSA published a notice in the Federal Register seeking public comments for the next 60 days on how the federal government can best use certification systems to measure the design and performance of the federal government’s construction and major modernization projects. Every five years, GSA is required to evaluate green building certification systems for the government’s use, and this review has been and will continue to be open to an extensive public process.

“GSA would like to hear more from the public, stakeholders, and experts before we develop a formal recommendation on the government’s use of green building certification systems,” said Dan Tangherlini, GSA Acting Administrator.  “This review has been open to an extensive public process, and an additional comment period will assist us in making a final recommendation for the next five years. The federal government has its own building standards in place, and we are seeking input on how and which certification systems can best help us measure performance and operate federal buildings more efficiently.”

For more than 30 years, GSA has worked to make federal buildings more efficient by reducing water and energy use, which saves taxpayer dollars and reduces the impact on the environment. Federal construction and modernization projects must adhere to the government’s own green building requirements, and third party certification systems help in measuring effectiveness and performance.

GSA is currently evaluating three certification systems for green building standards, which include the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED 2009, the Green Building Initiative's Green Globes, and the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge. After the public comment period, GSA will use that feedback and make a recommendation to the U.S. Department of Energy.  This recommendation could be one system, multiple systems, or no system. GSA held public listening sessions last summer regarding certification systems and facts and findings of this review are included in the Federal Register notice.

Presently, GSA uses LEED 2009 for new construction and major modernization projects with LEED Gold as the certification system and target level.

Green building certification systems are just one tool that GSA uses to deliver better value and savings to the taxpayer and meet the Obama Administration’s sustainability and economic performance goals.

Click here for the Federal Register Notice

Microbiology of the built environment

Everywhere we turn there are microbes (living organisms so small we cannot see them without magnification): in our cars, houses, offices, water pipes, and in every nook and cranny of our bodies.  Most are harmless, but some can make us sick or cause other damage.  Some even play a role in protecting us and our creations from the depredations of others.  Most of these microbes are still unknown and uncharacterized.

Over the last 20-30 years scientists have made revolutionary progress in understanding microbes in so-called “natural” systems. We have studied microbes in oceans, soil, and hotsprings, as well as those that live on and inside plants and animals. Little attention however has been paid to the microbes that live in the “unnatural” indoor world around us: in our buildings, planes, trains, and cars, where most of us spend more than 90 percent of our lives.  These are the microbes of the “built environment”. 

Thanks to continuing advances in DNA sequencing technology, and a recent initiative by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, this gap in knowledge is beginning to be addressed. The effort to better understand the built environment has implications for engineering and architecture, biodefense and forensics, and has even produced the concept of probiotics for buildings. 

This website is produced by the microBEnet project and is intended as the web hub for information related to the microbiology of the built environment.

A great new web resource! - www.microbe.net will connect you to the field of microbial ecology and its application to understanding the indoor environment.

Building Ecology - A short course

It is common to assume that buildings are simply inanimate physical entities, relatively stable over time. This implies that there is little interaction between the triad of the building, what’s in it (occupants and contents), and what’s around it( the larger environment). We commonly see the overwhelming majority of the mass of material in a building as relatively unchanged physical material over time. In fact, the true nature of buildings can be viewed as the result of a complex set of dynamic interactions among their physical, chemical, and biological dimensions. Buildings can be described and understood as complex systems. Research applying the approaches ecologists use to the understanding of ecosystems can help increase our understanding.[1]  “Building ecology “ is proposed here as the application of those approaches to the built environment considering the dynamic system of buildings, their occupants, and the larger environment. Read more...

Feature Articles

Moving Beyond TVOC - Reasons to avoid the use of TVOC as Pass/Fail criterion for assessing VOC emissions from products

by Al Hodgson, Co-founder and Research Director, Berkeley Analytical Associates

 

Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC) has a long history as a metric for determining the acceptability of the emissions of VOCs from building products and furnishings. The first significant program to rely on a TVOC criterion was the Carpet & Rug Institute’s (CRI) Green Label Program that evolved out of the Carpet Policy Dialog between the carpet industry and the US EPA. The TVOC criterion was later incorporated into the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating systems and was adopted by the commercial furniture industry. More recent VOC emission test method and acceptance standards have focused instead on individual VOCs that may pose health hazards to individuals at low concentrations. Examples of such programs in North America are the California Department of Health Services' Standard Practice (a.k.a. Section 01350), which recently was revised to Standard Method Version 1.1, and CRI’s Green Label Plus program. TVOC values are still reported, but pass/fail determinations are based on the emission levels of individual compounds of concern. There is an urgent need to expand such determinations of acceptability beyond a select number of individual VOCs to encompass the broader range of chemical emissions that may impact health. TVOC is again being proposed to fill this gap and may be appealing to many because of its presumed simplicity. In my opinion, we should avoid this temptation and move on the more difficult, but certainly achievable, task of focusing on the toxicity of individual compounds. The following are my primary arguments against the use of TVOC as a Pass/Fail metric.  Read more...

 

	Energy Principles in Architectural Design By Ed Dean was published in 1981 by the California Energy Commission to provide a basis for California’s licensed architects to learn about energy. The California State Board of Architectural Examiners was considering a continuing education requirement for license renewal, and it was thought that the guide could be the basis for the exam.  Read more...
	Ozone, Filters, and SBS symptoms If outdoor ozone levels are related to SBS symptom prevalence in a building, would it be wise to install filters to remove the ozone entering the building? If using synthetic fiber filters further increased SBS symptom prevalence as outdoor ozone levels increased, would you want to use some different material for your building's particle filters? Recently published research on the results suggest that it may reduce SBS symptom rates if you reduce ozone remove ozone from outdoor air.

Target Resources and Emissions Budgets for Healthy and Sustainable Buildings - slideshow Sustainable buildings are more than an assortment of "green building" features. Building design and actual performance must be compared to benchmarks or targets for a truly sustainable environment in terms of resource consumption and pollution emission.

Feature Article - California Greenhouse Gas Tool for Buildings

California's Greenhouse Gas (GHG) tool for California is now available on the web -GHG Tool for Buildings in California. The tool is publicly available and free for download.

This is a major step forward, the first tool that provides time- and weather-resolved GHG emissions calculations.   Read more...

Feature Article - IAQ and Plants

The idea that plants clean indoor air is a sad, continuing saga fed by bad science, commercial interests, and wishful thinking. I published an article in the Indoor Air Bulletin on the subject in 1992 (available on this web site) that provides some details. Take home message: 1.   Don't use plants to improve IAQ. They don't. If anything, they pose risks to good IAQ. 2.   There is no credible scientific evidence that plants improve IAQ. The planting media has been hypothesized to be responsible for pollutant removal in some studies. The planting media alone can be expected to contribute to a limited reduction in some airborne chemical concentrations. 3.   Most advocates of indoor plant use have been funded by or are themselves providers of plants or supporting systems. 4.   If plants are used indoors for aesthetic reasons, there should be extra care to avoid moisture problems or problems with fertilizers and pesticides, all known sources of indoor air quality and health problems. Read more...

 

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