Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
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We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#10.1 - Pawel Wargocki: Defining the Science of Indoor Climates and the Evolution of Air Quality Technology
Pawel Wargocki - was recently promoted to Professor at DTU, Technical University of Denmark.
He’s the Past President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate.
Previously, served as Chair of ASHRAE Environmental Health Committee and the Position Document Committee, Secretary of Academy of Indoor Air Sciences, and currently serving as a Director of the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy.
Hel is an indoor climate scientist and expert, he teaches at undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. level courses, and supervises several Ph.D. and numerous M. Sc. students.
His research has influenced the development of indoor air sciences, and it is hard to overstate the impact he has had in this sector.
He continues to be involved in fascinating research on the impact of air quality on performance in the workplace, health and performance in schools, and the impact of air quality on sleep. He is behind a fascinating standard for assessing IEQ called tail and the list, honestly goes on.
Pawel is one of my favourite people to talk to in this space, he is respected, experienced and sometimes outspoken. But always great value to spend around.
We talked about so much in the episode, including his work on tail, how we are doing a characterisng air quality in general, some of his work on sleep and quite a bit more beside.
Pawel Wargocki - DTU
Linkedin - Pawel Wargocki
TAIL - Indoor Environmental Quality
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Welcome to Air Quality Matters, and this is a conversation with Pawel Wargocki. Pawel was recently promoted to Professor at DTU Technical University of Denmark. He's past president of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, has previously served as chair of ASHRAE Environment Health Committee and the Position Document Committee, secretary of the Academy of Indoor Air Sciences and currently serving as a director of the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy. He's an indoor climate scientist and expert. He teaches at undergraduate, graduate and PhD level courses and supervises several PhD and numerous MSc students. His research has influenced the development of indoor air sciences and it is hard to overstate the impact he has had on this sector. He continues to be involved in fascinating research on the impact of air quality on the performance in the workplace, health and performance in schools and the impact of air quality on sleep. He's behind an interesting standard for assessing indoor environmental quality called TAIL, and the list honestly goes on.
Simon:Pawel is one of my favourite people to talk to in this space. He's respected, experienced, sometimes outspoken, but always great value to spend time around. We talked about so much in this episode, including his work on TAIL, how we're doing at characterising air quality in general, some of his work on sleep and quite a bit more besides. Thanks for taking the time to listen. This Pawel Wargocki. I'm interested, from your perspective, how you think we're doing in the built environment in general at characterising good or even acceptable indoor environmental quality.
Pawel:Well. From my point of view, we are doing actually quite well, although there is a lot of debate on what to be measured, how to be measured, and there is a lot of developments in the measuring sensors and equipment. However, the principle or the fundamental measurements or fundamental parameters have been very well defined. The problem is not in the measurement, I believe the problem or characterising them, the problem is in the application. I would say we can come back to this, but if we start with, what we can fundamentally define is that if we focus on the four components of indoor environmental quality, then we know very well how to describe the thermal environment, how to describe the acoustic environment, although not all the measurements can be performed yet, in a sense that it's easy to do those measurements as easy as it is done for thermal environment, although even there, for thermal environment, there is some complications, not that simple for all the parameters. And then for the visual environment or the light, we can also characterise it very well with the measurements and we know which parameters are responsible for different human responses.
Pawel:We are probably lacking all the information for indoor quality. This is a fairly complicated topic, but even here I would say that we have some basic information that we can actually use in a built environment. So it is not that we know nothing and then we should start from the beginning. And sometimes, when I see the new literature, new scientists, young students or PhD students, postdocs, coming into the field and trying to redevelop everything, starting from the beginning, to do the same measurements and discussing them, I think this is representation of the problem that we are not using certain parameters as a standard, so we are not built up on the knowledge that we have, but try to reuse the knowledge and then try to modify the knowledge that we have without its application.
Simon:Does that go to the heart of science, pavel? That constant balance of wanting to recheck old considerations and perspectives on things but not rehash old work and still break boundaries? It is an observation that was made by Henry Burridge and one of the premises for an indoor air quality observatory in the UK was this inefficiency in academia at the moment, where you have silos of people working on very similar topics and wasting a lot of energy and time redoing old science or doing science independent of somebody doing the same science somewhere else. There is quite a bit of that in air quality, isn't there?
Pawel:That's correct. It is difficult for me to say about those silos, but I see that there are groups that are doing more or less the similar thing or basically not doing science. It is basically doing maybe a monitoring or examining or testing some of the solutions that we have. So, for me, developing science in the context of indoor environmental quality, or if we only specifically focus on indoor air quality, is to develop our understanding of the underlying mechanisms, looking for the specific components of this and so on. There is very little research on this and probably the reason for that is also that it's very difficult to get funding for that kind of research. To be honest, fundamental research is probably not that much welcome today as the application of some pragmatic solutions that we are actually surfing around the same stuff rather than going ahead. So if you have a river, we stand in one point and we are just walking around in the same place rather than go with the stream and further develop it or against the stream. So this is something that I observe. It's my opinion, but I think so.
Pawel:For example, we don't have a dramatic change in the solutions on how to improve the environment indoors. I mean, there is a lot of now discussion about involving people in creating the indoor environmental quality. I think this development is good because we can teach people about the indoor environmental quality. Maybe they don't know very little or they know very little about this, but it would be like you know, you try to teach people to develop the cars or artificial intelligence or something like this. I think we it's our obligation to come up with the solutions, not try to delegate the responsibility to the others. So to me it's an important development, but it does not excuse us from developing the methods and technologies here and here. As I said before, I don't see that dramatic change. We talk about general solutions ventilation, air cleaning, and all the time we have that discussion, but with very, very small progress to be honest, or the progress that does not provide solutions that find the applications.
Pawel:They find the applications in maybe specific buildings, but what we are looking for is an application that can be used everywhere nearly with low cost.
Simon:for example, so your sense of it, I'm guessing, is then that, considering where we are today, we know enough about characterizing pollutants and air quality to make a material difference. We understand enough to make a big difference. The questions are the what next questions, the application of that knowledge, rather than there being some unknown out there that's holding us back. It's the application of that knowledge.
Pawel:I think there is a fear that it is costly, it's difficult to apply, it will cost a lot of energy not only economically costly, but also a lot of CO2 emission and a lot of energy that is needed to implement this, and then it's very difficult to maintain and ensure that it will be operational as it should be, and so on.
Pawel:So I believe I don't know where is it coming from. And also there is probably a feeling that if we can delay application of that, or if we don't do it, there will be no big Thank you risk or nothing dramatic will happen. I mean, there will be maybe a few more people who are less comfortable and then maybe there will be few more people who will get sick. Maybe someone will die, but it's not certain. Probably no one in that kind of thinking. So that is probably the reason why we have that reservation of the application and also delegation of the responsibility to people. The example is you know, the governments usually use the excuse and say well, people can, you know, open the window, for example, if they want to control our quality, and this is their responsibility, they don't open the window. But how do they know whether they should open the window?
Pawel:So this is something that we are not discussing.
Simon:And do you think a lot of that is down to the chronic nature of exposure to indoor air quality? That's a disability to defer action because it's a long term thing, an unseen risk.
Pawel:I think there are two reasons for that, and you name them. One is it's lagging time, the effects it's similar with you know all the other stuff that is causing that we are dying prematurely or we are getting sick later in our life. Say you know smoking, if I smoke one cigarette today, I will not die next day, but I may die in 20 years. And the same is with the air quality. If you are exposed to small doses of, let's say, pm 2.5 or any other pollutants today, I will not get sick. Next day. I may if I am especially sensitized to that. But most of us will not. So this is one of the reasons for that.
Pawel:And then the second one is an invisible danger is something that we cannot sense as humans and or we cannot see unless it is truly acute. We couldn't even see the COVID-19, sars-cov-2 actually, but that was an acute effect, so we could see the increasing number of sick people and people who are dying. So this is the case where we have to act very quickly because we see the consequences nearly day to day. We don't see those consequences for quality. This is why we do not act immediately. Also, one of the reasons is that we actually generated this problem ourselves. In a sense, I don't want to blame my predecessors, because they have done a great job in promoting and developing the discipline, but of course the metrics that we use today to examine the effects are maybe out. Call them soft metrics, it's just comfort metrics, which sometimes may not be considered as very that important as, let's say, sick people or people who are not able to perform their job well.
Simon:Interesting point. You're referring there to things like likelihood of discomfort.
Pawel:Yes, likelihood of discomfort If you take an example of a thermal environment. Today we discuss a lot of adaptive adaptation. We can discuss the topic that we will be examining in our studies in the future. Here at the TUU, at our university, we consider these adaptive possibilities of people to different conditions. Of course they do exist.
Pawel:I can survive in 35 degrees when I'm on the holidays, because this is a part of the holiday to experience high temperature. If I have to work or if I have to sleep or do anything else outside this period, maybe my adaptive how to say? Bandwidth is much smaller. Also, I could expect that there will be other effects because our body is certain amount of energy that we can use to act on different stresses that we have. This energy can be used for, let's say, dealing with high temperatures and working and doing other stuff. This is probably the reason why these adaptive theories that we can, of course, implement and they are fine may not always operate and there could be certain barriers where limitations that we have to apply, that's really the reason for that is because it's a comfort.
Pawel:Even slight discomfort or adaptation to the discomfort conditions over a period of time may cause some significant consequences, and we don't know what they are. We have not been able to, how to say, quantify that, or at least I don't know of any ways of quantifying that.
Simon:Yet we know that thermal discomfort can have quite a significant impact on, for example, productivity. So there are acute consequences of having to adapt to a different environment. An interesting and perhaps maybe a rabbit hole to go down would be you might be able to make the same argument for higher levels of CO2. They will have a metabolic impact on you, of raising blood pressure perhaps, or putting you under a certain amount of stress. But it's not clear that a slightly elevated level of CO2 is going to have a negative impact on you at a pollutant level. But we can't say the same thing about other pollutants like formaldehyde. You can't adapt to a carcinogen, can you? So while there's adaptation to discomfort or adaptation to certain elevated levels of temperature or humidity, or perhaps even some pollutants like CO2 below certain thresholds, there are some pollutants there's no adapting to.
Pawel:I fully agree with you and actually the point here is that there's another important problem I would say maybe not a problem, but issue related with our research is that we only focus on minimizing risk. We only consider the conditions that may cause negative effects, without considering that certain conditions can provide benefits which may, from one point of view, may be seen as negative, from the other point of view, may be seen as positive. So we have not been focusing on that positive side and we've been only focusing on limiting the risks of discomfort, sometimes health symptoms, or I would rather call it well-being and cognitive performance. But certain conditions may actually promote health by exposing us to the specific not maybe pollutant, but specific conditions. Certainly there are a range of pollutants if we only focus on indoor quality that we know that they have negative effects on health and those exposures should be avoided.
Pawel:Who has defined the pollutants that have been documented to have negative effects on health.
Pawel:However, I remember last year probably, I think last year or maybe two years ago there was a study, a simulation study published of the scientists from US looking at what are the typical exacerbations of the concentrations of pollutants in different parts of the world that are on the WHO guideline.
Pawel:And even in Europe you have 90% of Europe, that is, of us, living in the conditions where PM2.5 is higher than on on the guideline level. So, you know, we again, we tend to ignore them in a sense, and there are reasons that we've already mentioned cost and some fear of implementing it and whether this is possible. And then, you know, lagging time, the effects that cannot be seen, but also acute effects can be seen, of highly elevated PM2.5, you know Wildfires clearly demonstrated. You know, higher levels of PM2.5 will cause acute effects and we have to protect ourselves from them. So then, in a sense, I'm surprised that we are not converting this into some sort of other information, because if you have a short exposure to a very high level of PM2.5, you get a certain dose that caused the effect that can be converted into the dose that is, you know, extended over a period of time. So the same dose you might get maybe over the five, six years period, but the effects will be probably the same.
Simon:You think so. So that's acute short exposure.
Pawel:No, no, no. This is something that we really need to, because I think it's a dose and the possibility of our body to clear.
Pawel:Yes, it depends whether it's like the pollution from our body and then because we have some mechanisms that allow us to protect ourselves against those exposures. But remember, if you are exposed to PM over extended period of time, then there are also other influences. You may, you know, eat improperly or be exposed to something else, and so on. All of it will only add to a risk that something may happen in the future.
Simon:And again, this is probably one of the other accusations that can be leveled at academia, that they don't do themselves any favor, that this stuff is made to sound complicated. We tie ourselves up in knots over the detail, which is what academics are supposed to do. I get that, but when you're trying to translate that into outcomes, the framing becomes complex then and that makes it very difficult to create action. You're involved in Annex86, for example, and there's been some really good work.
Simon:I had Ben Jones on the podcast talking about harm intensities and the work of that organization that you're involved in in trying to create metrics at a population level. That simplifies this a little bit, and I wrote down when you were talking just there, that could public health do more? And one of the ways that public health can do more is by having metrics that frame this in a way that they can assess it against other risks at a population level, like smoking and alcoholism and road traffic deaths and other things like that. And that's some of the work that you're doing in Annex86, isn't it? Is that framing of the risk of some of this air quality?
Pawel:Yeah, probably you are also touching on an important topic. Is that involvement of medical disciplines and raising their interest in the topic of indoor environmental quality? And because it seems like it is left out to engineers or exposure scientists and so on, but we do not see that many scientists from medical disciplines that are involved in the research. Although they are involved, there are few, but not many perhaps. So that would be very helpful in promoting the recommendations and also supporting the solutions that we offer from our engineering point of view. And, of course, there is a need for this collaboration because and it has been very well demonstrated during the recent pandemic, where basically, we learned that we speak different languages Although we speak about the same thing, we cannot communicate. Yeah, our dictionary was completely different.
Simon:Airborne, for example, called that single. Those two words, or one word airborne, caused more problems during the pandemic between the two disciplines than almost any other word I've ever come across, because the implications to the medical community of calling something airborne was massive, whereas we knew instinctively as engineers and fluid dynamics people and atmospheric chemistry people that this was an airborne thing. Airosol people knew this was airborne but it was a terminology thing that crazed the massive barrier, didn't it?
Pawel:Right. But I think what we learned also during pandemic that sitting together we can generate something useful and then it turned out that we haven't learned. We could learn from medical sciences a lot and they could learn from what we do a lot, and basically, without this collaboration it will be very difficult to advance our science in a sense that to make an important breakthroughs this is what I mentioned in the very beginning is just that in a sense we reached a certain limit, and I would not call it glass ceiling, but I mean we certainly develop an advance, but I mean this is what we can do within our perimeter of our knowledge and skills and without involving other disciplines we are not able to further advance it. An example is the measurements now of the physiological responses which we, thanks to the development of wearable instrumentation, we can now monitor.
Pawel:A lot of responses, physiological responses. But the fact that we can monitor them, it doesn't mean that we can interpret them properly. So, meaning what does it mean that our heart rate is beating three or four beats per minute more, or something like this? Or what does it mean that we are respirating more frequently under certain conditions or not? Maybe this is a natural response of our physiological system to protect us or to respond to the conditions. So this is something that we really need to learn from each other.
Simon:That comes to an analogy I've been working on recently. Pavel, you're probably like this, but I was saying that indoor environmental quality monitors low cost sensors are a little bit like health wearables. They're useful in that they provide some information on trends and clustering and general conditions of a space. But, as with a health wearable, you probably want to go to your doctor every now and then and get a blood test to check your health properly. And similarly with buildings, indoor air quality monitors are useful, but you probably want a specialist every now and then to come in and actually check what VOCs might be in the air or use a proper PM counter to check particulates or something.
Simon:You know that there's this. Like most things in life, data's not much use without context and things are normally much more nuanced than we give them credit for. And, as with low cost sensors, there's much more going on in building and building health than just CO2 data and temperature data or TVOC data. At some point, you probably want to understand what's going on in a space if you have concerns. Similarly with a health wearable, if you're getting chest pains, you need to go and get an ECG at some point, you know.
Pawel:Well, I agree. We can talk about sensors in a moment because I agree with you. We also have a paper recently published which clearly shows that maybe sensing devices or the sensors, especially VOC sensors some of them are good to determine the event that is happening, if we are not seeing this event or perceiving it ourselves, but as it comes to determining the levels and the types of pollutants, they are not very good in discriminating, so to say. We don't know whether, at the fact that suddenly we see the elevated levels of VOCs when we monitor them with the sensors or low cost sensors, it has any meaning to our comfort or health conditions or risks, and it's very difficult to determine this at this moment. Also, we cannot say anything about which pollutants would be responsible for that.
Simon:So this would be a good point to pin you to the wall a bit, pavel, actually, on this one. So let's go through, let's say, the top five or six pollutants that we know we're pretty concerned about. So if we take Annex 86, worker, which is a good place to start or you'll work with the tail, which we'll come on to later we know that PM is a pollutant of interest. Where are we with sensor technology in your opinion, both in the low cost, the medium cost sensors out there and the research grade equipment? Where are we in accurately measuring that significant pollutants of concern at the moment in the built environment?
Pawel:I mean we are able to monitor PM 2.5 with a local sensors. Today. Most of the work it is using the principle of light scattering, not the actual measurement data here the recommendations by WHR based on the gravity metric methods, so measuring mass here, not the numbers. But I think the conversion is now improving significantly so we can convert from those light scattering solutions. I'm not that familiar with how the development is there in that particular area, but I think we can monitor this PM 2.5.
Pawel:The major question will still remain is it PM 2.5 a marker of something else? So you may have an elevated PM 2.5 where you are on the beach because of the salts that is generated. Is this risky for us? Or is you may have PM 2.5 that is elevated by burning candles at home, so that may be. Interpretation of those two measurements is different, and then I think we need to be very careful of not jumping into the conclusions by the fact that we are able to monitor it.
Pawel:I just wanted to make one more point about the sensor technology. I think the sensor technology is very beneficial for us because we are able to deploy the measurements on a large scale, which we were not able to do in the past. But at the same time, the risk is that we will only focus in measurements rather than in advancing on asking questions. Simple question Is this the right measurement that we do? What does it mean, where we should develop, and so on. So the science should not be how to say. We should not in a sense forget about those important questions by the fact that we are able to monitor. And what I'm seeing is that many of us get very enthusiastic about the ability of making those large scale measurements and then just report those measurements, rather than to properly interpret this.
Simon:And you think some of that.
Pawel:So that is the need of the next step, of that, besides, of course, the problems with the low cost sensors, because to me, for example, one important point is we do not discuss this and there is no maybe recommendations or guidelines where those sensors should be placed. And I think, you know, in some studies people place it on the window, on the sorry, on the wall, some people put it on the table, some people put it in the center of the room. And I mean which location is the most important for us, for our exposure or whatever what we want to address by measurement? So, of course, if we want to address the average level of a pollutant in a room, we may probably put it in the middle of the room, but if we want to address the average level, that, our average dose that I get during the time I spend in the room, maybe I should essentially play somewhere else.
Simon:I think you touched on two interesting points there, pavel. I think and they come from it depends on what perspective you take. If you come from the researchers perspective, I think the reason the community gets so excited about low cost sensors is environmental monitoring has just been so flipping hard and expensive for so long. Everybody's just so delighted to be able to get data out of the environment without all of the headache that we used to have of having to go back and collect data loggers or set up expensive equipment. It's becoming incredibly easy to do that and of course, we're thinking like researchers and scientists and about placement and about the quality of data and the context of the data and so on. But there's another perspective, of course, and that's the consumer end of this, where they're seeing this data for completely utilitarian perspective. What can it do?
Simon:For me, and I think interestingly, those two perspectives, where they meet in the middle, have a lot of value, because what the consumer end of that market is asking for is the what next question is asked. It wants solutions. And what's the popular term in that sector? It's actionable insights, a term that's used very often, very rarely delivered. But equally, the research community hasn't been very good at developing the what next question, other than it needs more research for more funding, right, so I think there's a place in the middle, from the two perspectives actually, where there can be a lot of value from these sensors.
Simon:But you're right, we still have to be. We have to know what questions we're looking to answer. Just random deployments of little white boxes is just going to lead to people looking at little white boxes on walls in two years time going what did that ever do for us? Did that ever provide any value? And then you lose that opportunity of having that data down the road two, three, four years down the road, because it didn't provide the value that people thought it was going to. So it's an interesting space in that sense, I think.
Pawel:There is also the third problem it's so called lump post effect is that we will be only focusing on those parameters that we are able to measure on a large scale now and forget about other parameters that may be important, and we it's.
Pawel:I don't want to sound negative here. I think these are great developments. 20 years ago, you know, having a CO2 sensor was, you know, a dream of many research groups. Today, any one of us can go to the market and buy a CO2 sensor right. So and this is slow cost, I mean, it's not very expensive. So this is a huge and important development, but it does not take responsibility from us scientists or researchers to ask those difficult questions and to make a proper interpretation of what we are measuring with those sensors. So for the public, it's an important method, but I think it is an extremely important tool or instrument for communicating our research to the public, and probably we are not doing it sufficiently well, but I think we should be using this basically, and it's more and more research coming that tries to establish this information and communication.
Simon:I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right. And a little bit of this and a little bit of the way that sensors have developed or standards have developed, I should say has been that just because we can doesn't mean we should, and with a lot of the threshold parameters that we've been given, it's been because we happen to have a sensor that's now capable of doing that rather than what we really want to know. But I think, if I go back to my question about the pollutants that we know we're interested in, I think from what you're saying and you're absolutely right PM sensors if I was to have asked you this even five years ago, it probably would have been a different answer. But now we're pretty confident. Certainly the main brand PM sensor manufacturers, optical sensor manufacturers they're the very least be able to tell you an event is occurring of a reasonable significance or tell you that you've got elevated levels of.
Simon:PM 2.5. My question on the PM 2 and you may not be able to answer this is do you get a sense that those optical counting particular sensors are capable of telling you that you're at the levels that W, h, o Are interested in the lower levels, that they're very good at telling you there's a dumpster fire outside your building or there's a wildfire, but will they give you accurate enough information at at five and at 10 micrograms per meter cubed PM for you to be to rely on that yet?
Pawel:Do you think those kind of sensors I hope there is a developer in the direction. I don't know literature that well, but I believe that our groups that are actually examining this against the laboratory great sense sensing device or instruments.
Simon:So what else are we concerned about then? If we go to something like annex 86 or tail, certainly we're interested in things like for maldehyde in the built environment. Where are we with measuring for maldehyde from your perspective? When it comes to actually, if we take the view that we can't manage what we don't measure, where are we with measuring for maldehyde, you think, in the built environment?
Pawel:I think we are not that developed as the in case of other sensors. Again, it's probably not my area where I can say, but I think those sensors are still quite expensive compared to the other types of sensors. If we talk about the OCS, for example, which use the metal oxide, this is basically metal oxide sensors. I can make a digression we had a project that was called what's called, I forgot, I will recall it later. A long time ago, in the early 2000, we had a project with few other groups in Europe where we were developing the electronics notes basically. So we were looking at different types of sensors in order to be able to put them in a sort of a setup or an array of sensors that can mimic the human response of the nose. We, of course, and not of course, but we did not succeed to develop this, but at that time we already could understand the performance of metal oxide sensors. Of course they were more expensive than they are today, and today they have the same problems as they had at that time. But they are available because of the reduced cost and then they can monitor the signal in a similar way as we were measuring back then, but it's the integrated signal of the sudden organic pollution that is happening in the air, or some pollutants in the air, without discriminating those pollutants. So this is we learned from the research that metric as such as TBOC or total volatile organic compounds, does not provide a good correlation with our human responses.
Pawel:Basically, what is the research at that time showed that TBOC did not correlate with human responses.
Pawel:It's not a good predictor of health conditions, of discomfort or health risk or discomfort. In some cases it does, in some cases it doesn't. It will show that there is an elevated level of pollutants, but it will not always be the case that it may predict that. So, coming back to formaldehyde, the issue about the formaldehyde is that we are now at least as I understand and read the literature significantly reduce the exposure to formaldehyde in dose, and the reason for that is that we were it is not because of any other act than reducing the emission from products that we put into the buildings, and this is the area that we really need to probably better support, and again, it's it's something that is difficult to implement, in a sense, but has been implemented, meaning that the easiest way to control enduroquality is by reducing the emissions from whatever we put into the space Rather than act on the result of what we've done. We can act before it has happened, so in the late 90s and early 2000 we have seen the gradual decrease of emissions of building products.
Pawel:There are programs like IKEA has programs that you know they actually reduce the emissions of specific pollutants that are coming off the building products. But we cannot control everything and we cannot tell people what they should buy and what they shouldn't buy. So we need to have some solutions that will first inform people that there is a risk and then inform people how to act on this exposure. And in some cases formaldehyde can be high. So we need those formaldehyde sensors. Formaldehyde sensor is in the tail, is it? I think it is.
Simon:I think, it is.
Pawel:Yeah, yes, it is in the tail and it's just the representation of the building product emissions, and also because it is on the list of WHO. If I had a different type of pollutant that is on the WHO list, I would probably put it also in the tail, because I know that this is something that we should go after. We don't have a TVOC or accumulated exposure to volatile organic pollutants or accumulated concentration of volatile organic pollutants, because, again, there is no evidence that it would be comparable. So one group measuring this level, the other group is measuring the other level, although the concept as itself is not that bad, because it actually indicates to you that there is some elevated levels of some pollutants that you need to act on. So, for the information, if I have a POC sensor and then it tells me it's very, very high level, I should do it. It will not do something about this, it does not tell me what pollutants I should act on, but at least I should do something to reduce those levels.
Simon:Have a think about it.
Pawel:It is an interesting again. It's good for the public to inform them, but it does not mean that we should stop here and not further try to understand what is inside that we should be acting on.
Simon:Yeah, and I think that's the interesting thing with low cost sensors, particularly as we're seeing an expansion in what they're measuring and what they're saying they're capable of measuring, Whereas previously perhaps it was focused more on proxy pollutants or conditions that may be indicative of poor ventilation, CO2, temperature, humidity, those kind of things.
Pawel:Well, we still use sorry, Xamon, we still use proxies. Yeah, and the two proxies that I use is ventilation and CO2. And because we don't have a better proxy.
Simon:No, I agree and I get this sense. Whoever I talk to about TVOC's, people are instinctively quite torn with that metric because they see some value in it. But anybody with enough experience of research also understands the risk in that metric as well. And the reservation seems to be how we translate that for people, and we've even seen some manufacturers like Censirion start to actually tell their customers not to use the part per billion metric from the TVOC sensor because it's not a useful metric, that you're better off using some kind of algorithm that will give you a score of risk rather than saying X is good or X is bad, because we just don't know what X is. That's the reality. We know there's something going on, but whether that's just because you open a bottle of wine or an orange, or whether it's because you've got elevated levels of formaldehyde in the space, who knows it's? The interesting part of this data is the application of this data, answering the what next question, because to answer the what next question, you have to know what question you're trying to answer. But you also have to have faith in the data that you're looking at and an understanding of the context of where it's coming from to be able to do something useful with it. And that seems to me to be the same with TVOC, as it is PM, as it is many of the others, because pretty much all of them outside of, when we look at the pollutants of interest, say, of annex 86, it's only really NO2 and formaldehyde that perhaps are radon, that are specific pollutants that you could pinpoint and say there's an actual impact toxicologically or epidemiologically. All of the others are effectively proxies, because PM. We don't really know what's in that PM. We're just saying there's PM in the space and it has an impact on health. Tvoc is the same, co2 is the same, even ozone to a degree, like there is a health impact of ozone, but we're more interested in what ozone creates, not in what it is. So all of these pollutants aren't actually necessarily drawing a straight line to a health outcome. They are having an impact or keep bad company of some description or another.
Simon:But it comes back to and I've said this a few times on the podcast ultimately in the built environment. There are only so many levers we can pull in a built environment to get a better outcome and they are background ventilation, local exhaust ventilation, source control, education, maybe some air cleaning. There's only so much you can do and, depending on the space, you may only have one or two of those things at your disposal. So, as complex as the air chemistry and building physics is, ultimately the outcomes, the what next questions are often quite straightforward.
Simon:We've got quite good in the workplace environment at building a big business case for better air quality, because there's enough evidence and you've been involved in a lot of this around the cognitive performance, the performance of people in spaces on outcomes, but less so in other spaces. How do we, how do you think we, bridge that gap longer term in building up and I made a note of this we're very good at pointing at risk, but we've not been very good at building the benefits side of research. And the one area that we have done that well at is in business, because business looks for benefits. But so how do we expand that to other parts of the built environment, like the residential sector or education sectors or public buildings? How do we start building that business case out into the wider built environment, you think?
Pawel:Well, there are different methods of doing this, but I want to come back to the solutions that we use in buildings. I think the limitation here is the standards. The standards recommend specific parameters that need to be dealt with and usually standards regarding their environmental quality, talk about ventilation and CO2. Very seldom they speak about the pollutants that need to be dealt with, and that also has a consequence in developing the solutions for this, because then you develop the solution to basically comply with the standard and then, if the standard talks about PM 2.5, maybe then R, formaldehyde or ozone, you will develop the solutions to reduce the ozone levels. But since it doesn't speak about this, we don't have that progress and we have quite, I would say, crude solutions in a sense and then no further development because there is no how to say need for doing this. Coming back to your question is I agree completely, although even with the case for the offices and even schools, where we documented clearly that there is a connection between inter-environmental quality and learning and working, there is no efficiency, and it's not even us, our group. There have been other groups that documented this independently of us. There have been even analysis that were performed by economists to indicate that there is the analysis that was done in the United States in which they looked at the ambient temperature levels and results of exit exams of students in the United States and they clearly documented with elevated ambient temperatures there is reduction for the specific groups of students of the results and the exit exams. So there is enough evidence to act on, but still I do not see that it creates a significant change. For some it does, for some it does not. And again, the same problems that I mentioned before. And additionally, one of the issues is the fact that we can have troubles to document that what we implement will provide that effect that we expect. So if I buy a new car and the dealer tells me that I will spend less for the gasoline, then I can measure that and see that I spent less for the gasoline compared to my old car. But if implementing some solutions in offices and in schools may not, it may be very difficult to actually document that the outcomes, or at least we don't have emitters that will allow us to do that, and this is the area where also we lack a development to some extent. I don't think that we need those, but it seems like maybe this is one of the reasons why we do not implement this information.
Pawel:But the other business case for the other environments, for the residential environments I think we have started the research on this it's a sleep quality I think research that we have done and sleep is something that is specific to every one of us. So there are people who work in offices, who work not in offices there are not. Everyone goes to school, but everyone has to sleep. So here this is the very good case that can be built on on why it is important to create conditions that support sleep. And here clearly we see that there is evidence from sleep research, independent of our evidence, showing that sleep is important for our health and that is being documented very well by different discipline. And what we need to make sure is that we are not cause disturbance to sleep by creating the environments where people spend most of their life, so our residences. This is where we spend probably 60 or 70% of our lifetime is in our homes. So that will be a great case here to further develop this, but we need to again communicate this information to the general public. I'm not sure whether we are prepared to do this at this moment, but this is something that I believe will happen in the future. So, yes, there are methods of creating the similar arguments for other types of environments.
Pawel:A positive, of course, positive thinking for me is that I think we don't like to talk about negative. We prefer to hear about positive. So I give an example that if we go to the fitness room, we do not think about the potential risks of getting infected from the other one who is actually training there, or maybe there are other risks so maybe we can break our leg or maybe, you know, over train and have some problems. We only think about the positive is that if we train, if we go to fitness, we develop muscles, our health conditions will improve, and we forget about this negative. Whereas we talk about internal environmental quality, we talk usually about the discomfort, health risks, and then, rather than we say, okay, it will create that positive that will help develop I mean improve our health or improve our learning, improve our working efficiency we talk about minimizing the risks, as I said, or discomfort, and probably this is the way how we can start talking about internal environmental quality that may bring a huge change.
