Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
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
#46 - Michael Don Ham: Future of Living and Working Spaces - WELL Building Standards, Air Quality Challenges, and Regenerative Tea Farming
With remote work becoming the norm and health-focused living spaces on the rise, we unpack the evolution of building standards like the WELL Building Standard and their impact on both residential and professional environments.
Learn how Fortune 500 companies are taking proactive steps to maintain air quality for remote workers, ensuring healthier, more productive workspaces.
We'll explore the intricacies of air and water quality monitoring and the often-overlooked health impacts of common household products.
From the dangers of plug-in air fresheners to the complex world of water contaminants like PFAS, we discuss these invisible threats and the importance of regulations like the Clean Air Act.
Michael shares his expertise on the critical role of filtration, ventilation, and humidity control in creating optimal indoor environments, emphasizing the potential health benefits for everyone, from financial analysts to professional athletes.
Michael also introduces us to the world of regenerative tea farming, highlighting sustainable practices that benefit both the environment and the tea industry. His pioneering approach in achieving Regenerative Organic Certification sets a benchmark for quality and sustainability, offering a blueprint for other industries.
Michael Don Ham - LinkedIn
Repure
Wild Orchid
WELL Buildings
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All great companies that share the podcast's passion for better air quality in the built environment. Supporting them helps support the show.
Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. I believe we already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones, and this is episode 46, coming up, a conversation with Michael Don Ham. We talk a lot on this podcast about a holistic approach to air quality and the health of our buildings, and I can think of few people better at articulating this sense of a rounded approach to building and human health and well-being.
Speaker 1:As Michael Donham, as he puts it himself, his life mission revolves around tea and technology design, two very different yet deeply connected fields. In a recent post, he said through my work, I strive to help extend people's health span and, more importantly, I aim to build meaningful relationships with everyone I meet along the way, whether it's through a conversation about healthy soil, sipping a cup of tea together or discussing about clean air and water, or technology design and their impact on health and well-being. I believe these connections are essential to creating a healthier, happier world. So we have a conversation about health, well-being, air quality and our built environment and, of course, tea. Thanks for listening. As always, do check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.
Speaker 1:This is a conversation with Michael Don Ham. When I was last talking to you we kind of briefly touched on it. But there seems to be this huge crossover between home and work like there's never been before, and we've seen the emergence of this idea of healthy buildings and I was interested to get your perspective on this crossover, this meeting of home and work, and how healthy buildings fit into this space.
Speaker 2:It's a fascinating time because from COVID obviously, that spurred on the work from home or remote work, culture or mindset. And now we hear things like Amazon. I just saw the headline today come back to work or quit, right. So a lot of people I talk to say we're never going to go back to a five-day work week. Right Me, I come to the office five days a week.
Speaker 2:So having the environment healthy and not being detrimental to the health of our workers here is very, very important. But it really depends on what sort of philosophy you have as a corporation. Are you going to kind of retool and try to accommodate your workforce, keep them happy, but at the same time create an environment where everyone is productive? So one of the things that I'm seeing, especially in larger companies some of them that I talked to these are Fortune 500 companies. They're like yeah, we know we can't go back. So what they're doing now is they're creating work from home packages so that their computer system doesn't go down. If there's any issue with networking, the tech team can remotely patch in resolve the issue. But the interesting thing that I'm seeing now is these companies are adding air quality monitoring because they want their workers, even though they're home, to be in a healthy environment. To me, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:So you're starting to see that, are you? That's really interesting because it's something that many of us have predicted is a route that's likely to go down. Is that this healthy buildings in the workplace is going to translate into the home office, and would we see things like air quality monitors finding their way into people's homes? So you're starting to see the seeds of that appear, are you?
Speaker 2:I'm very happy to see the seeds of it. Obviously I don't have the pulse of the whole market, but from what I touch I see the seeds being planted. So that's very positive to see. The other thing that I'm seeing because I'm heavily involved with the International Wellbuilding Institute. I am fortunate as a faculty member I get to talk to and meet a lot of people in wellness real estate, whether it's an architect, designer or builder developer, an architect, designer or builder-developer.
Speaker 2:And so the WELL standard for those who don't know in the audience, it's the widest spanning certification for healthy buildings.
Speaker 2:There are others like FitWELL, living, building Challenge and many others, but WELL is the most popular. They're close to 6 billion square feet certified in the commercial space, or cross 6 billion recently and just this year they started a pilot for well for residential certification. So when you look at all of these things and I know the people at well they're not going to invest all this time and energy to set up a residential program when they don't see there's a market there. So clearly there's more focus on people at home wanting to have a healthy IEQ, indoor environmental quality, and it's great to see and there's no way of knowing what it's going to look like a year from now, but those things are in motion. I actually am in the marketplace. I see developers trying to differentiate their projects with their competitor in the same town and calling their homes wellness communities or wellness developments. To me it's really really heartening to see, because I believe health starts at home. So to see this type of movement kind of sprouting is very exciting for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we must come back to well, but that idea of the workplace starting to take an interest in the health and well-being outside of the workplace is an interesting threshold to cross, isn't it? Because I mean, one of the conversations I had here with the, with the health and safety authority, was around the obligation of employers and they were on record as saying be under no, you're obligated as an employer to provide employees with a healthy working environment, no matter where that place of work is right, in the same way that we have to provide them with an appropriate desk, proper seating, adequate lighting, ventilation is part of that piece. And you get a sense that nobody, everybody's a bit hesitant. Nobody really knows how to cross that threshold. And perhaps environmental sensors and data is the soft way of starting to cross that threshold. Isn't it that we can start to provide users in their own home space with the tools to understand the health and well-being of that environment and then make the right decisions for their, for their own, health?
Speaker 2:that's right, simon, and I've heard many guests uh on your podcast say before you can't truly manage properly what you don't measure accurately. So I 100 believe in that as well. So having a ecosystem or system that starts with monitoring, with effective hardware for maintaining indoor air quality and then having the controls. So the easy way to explain that is, if the air quality is green whether it's your particulate levels, CO2, VOCs, humidity, radon and so forth when it goes into the yellow, outside of the green, having an automated control system that will auto-trigger the hardware solution that will bring it back into the green.
Speaker 2:And the way that I explain it is think of your thermostat. We set it at a temperature that we are comfortable at and we don't really think about it. Who goes to the thermostat every minute? Nobody does that. You set it and you expect the system to keep it at that level. And I think air quality is really this. It's a total parallel. We should be able to expect green levels of indoor air quality and have the system keep it there for the majority of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think the challenge, perhaps for employers is where's the boundary of their responsibility? So is this a proactive measure? Is this something they're doing out of the goodness of their ESG heart? You know that they're doing to improve the wellness and situation of all of their employees. Are they doing it because they're obligated? Yeah, but I'll give you a simple thought experiment. Right, um? Is it my employer's responsibility for the environment outside of this office that I'm in at home at the moment that should they be providing air quality for the entire home? Arguably not.
Speaker 1:So where does that boundary stop? And how do we then provide that hardware to provide them for a, for a space that is a good environment? You know, if that's their home office or the corner of the kitchen or the bedroom where they're working, or wherever it is. How would you imagine that kind of manifesting in reality if an employer was going right, okay, we're going to take home health seriously, yeah, and we're going to throw some money at that. What would that physically look like? Do you think in your head?
Speaker 2:so the sad reality is the companies I mentioned before that are experimenting or exploring implementing things in their remote workers' homes are really for full remote workers right, so it's not like they're coming into the office for some and staying home for the other.
Speaker 2:That would be a huge, huge undertaking and investment and I think we'd be naive to think that an employer, out of the goodness of their heart, is going to outfit their employer's whole homes. There's a specific purpose and I think the forward thinking employers that are thinking of outfitting their remote workers with air quality monitors, ensuring the best working environment, is because they see a return in productivity less sick days. It's not just less sick days, it's not just a pragmatic like we want to be the best employer, taking into account the health and wellbeing of all of our employees. That would be an awesome ideal world that we live in. But I think the companies that are doing that they do have data and stats that doing such a thing would provide a return for them and I 100% back that, because the more of these companies that do that, other people are going to look at it and say, okay, we must try to see what they're doing and follow suit right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And you know there are certain knowledge economy roles, particularly, I imagine, higher level roles, that might be taking risks, managing finance.
Speaker 1:You know there's a lot of performance through through the performance of that person right optimizing their environment is going to be absolutely critical, so, and we'll have a payoff, right? Oh, yeah, no, totally yeah, I. There was a conversation I had with the british research uh, the bre british research establishment, I think it is anyway that one of the projects they had to undertake was creating desks for the traders, and these desks have big computers, loads of screens. You know they're, they're optimized, but they spend tens of thousands of euros on these systems, having their own ventilation and comfort systems and optimizing light systems and so on. Because, yeah, the traders need to be working at their absolute optimum, because even just being 10 off is going to really impact your business. And you can imagine, you know certain roles, higher end, home working roles. You're saying, right, we'll throw some money at this because, right, that this guy or gal is making decisions on an hourly basis that impact the bottom line of this business. They need to be comfortable and well looked after, that's exactly right, and I'll give another example.
Speaker 2:So high performance, or professional sports, is a very easy example to understand, because that split second or advantage in rest or better sleep or better concentration or better recovery can lead to, can be the difference between winning and losing, which means tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. So pro sports teams are investing in infrared saunas, hyperbaric chambers. A lot of this stuff is actually going into the athletes' homes. Some of these athletes are investing it in themselves. Lebron James invests over a million dollars on personal health a year, right, so that's just kind of indicative of what these companies that where a lot is at stake, are willing to make that investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really interesting. I wonder what the trickle down looks like. Yes, you're a pinstripe wearing finance person in their four million pound home in their decked out office. We can kind of imagine that. In the same way we can imagine, well, platinum deloitte headquarters in new york, right, um, but for the rest of us, minions out there, um, we're working on our laptop at the end of the bed in the same bedroom we went to bed in last night. Or on the kitchen table with the toddler, you know, making a mess and drawing with crayons at the other end of the kitchen table.
Speaker 1:That, that, that real home working life that a lot of us experience. I wonder how that trickle down works. It'd be interesting to see over time that, because it everybody has to perform right, everybody can be. Everybody can be absent from work, everybody. Even worse, that press, that awful presenteeism where people drag themselves into work half the person they should be not performing very well, making bad decisions. That happens to everybody. So the trickle down from that top tier will be interesting to see how that manifests over time how that manifests over time.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that can only really fill out if there's some more regulations or code requirements, because in the US in the early seventies, we had the Clean Air Act because the air was becoming so polluted due to industrialization and smog from cars and smog from cars, and since then, to the surprise of many, the outdoor air pollution has at least improved here in the US.
Speaker 2:But the problem is there's never been an equivalent for indoor air quality. The good news is 2022, the White House had an indoor air quality summit. There are several congressmen that are putting. They put a bill forward a couple months ago on regulating indoor air quality, especially schools homes. There's no regulation in homes, so unless you have a builder or someone who understands how to maintain good air quality through the three pillars of IAQ, it's very hard for people to even understand how to do it right. So if it's going to be widespread, I think in my mind there's no question there has to be some sort of code requirement for it. Otherwise people are just going to be left to their own devices going to be left to their own devices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's true, and I wonder where that delineation is between those that do recognize it and those that are going to be requiring code to enforce it, and how we bring that line down to catch more people.
Speaker 1:It's a similar question I noted well, I was going to ask you the same thing about well. It's a similar question, I noted. Well, I was going to ask you the same thing about well. Well, without question is the leading well-building, healthy building standard out there. But we've seen even well come under pressure post-pandemic, that that soaring recognition that we saw during the pandemic and just post it has tailed off for everybody, and well are not insulated from that. We've seen them partly diversify as a result, create various versions, including residential well, to broaden the scope, Because I would imagine well V2 has flattened out a little bit Everything's flattened Full fat.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, you're right. It's flattened because the reality for commercial buildings is the work from home they're just people are not going back to the office. Uh, commercial real estate is suffering so, as a byproduct, it's like people aren't coming back. Why do we need to get well certification to bring them all back? That's what I'm hearing on the ground a lot too, but at the same time, there are still a lot of you know there's a mix right. There are companies that do want to bring back people and they want to make sure that their staff understand that they're doing everything they can to create the healthiest environment for them to work in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I think we, regardless employers, have to make the best work environment that they can. Now there's an expectation from people. Even if they don't fully understand what it is, they do understand that work has changed and that the environment has to be improved or better than it was and so. So standards like well and reset and others are kind of leaning on that. So I think they're going to have to do that regardless, and quite how many they'll attract back.
Speaker 1:I was laughing when you spoke earlier about this. There's no going back. You wonder if that's the case. You know when, when you had to put your foot to the floor and insist everybody worked from home. They just got on and did it. They complained for a bit and said, oh, the world's gonna fall apart. Nobody's ready to work from home. And you know, a few months later everybody was up and running and understood what teams was for the first time, or zoom right. So you wonder if big companies turn right and go right. That's it. We're everybody back to work, and if you don't want to come back to work, you can go and find another job. Good luck. You wonder, in a year's time, when they've got everybody back to work where he goes. Yeah, you know, they've just got on with it and got back to that reality. We're quite moldable as human beings. If we get told that's what we're doing, you might lose a few people, but ultimately everybody's going to go. Okay, fair enough, back to the community.
Speaker 2:Well, we're going to see very soon because Amazon made that ultimatum. So we'll see how that scale of a company will get a snippet of what it could look like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a few companies have tried that, haven't they? And there's a hankering, I think, within some organizations for what used to be that kind of dynamics of the office and so on. They were really driving that. Big companies like LinkedIn and Google, and all you know, created work environments that were unique and really you know, work a centric and so on, and all of a sudden that was just obliterated. And all these millennials now working from home and out of cafes. You know, they've got all these fancy headquarters they don't know what to do with.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a different world, for sure it is so do you, do you.
Speaker 2:For luxury residential. We have a lot of builders, the projects that we are supplying, the air quality ecosystem for them.
Speaker 2:And so it's good to see. I like to see that because I truly believe health, from an environmental perspective, really starts at home Number one because we spend the most time at home. It really starts at home number one because we spend the most time at home Our young children when their organs, their brain, is developing. That's the place we want to have, as clean as possible and toxin-free. So there's no hindrance or, you know, deficit, right when it comes to the growth, yeah, development of the children and then, um, it just sets everyone on the right foot, on the right path, as as people grow, from infant to toddler to youth, student and then beyond, when they're ready to leave the home.
Speaker 1:so, yeah, so so you're saying that the some of the work you're doing is the kind of the luxury residential end of things, the residential development real estate people thatle down to the upper mid market and then the mass market.
Speaker 2:And I do see like even affordable housing projects that are really focused on electric only renewables and also good indoor quality. So it's really really good to see. My question is how effective are those systems? My question is how effective are those systems?
Speaker 1:So we really want to continue to find ways that we can serve all communities, all different people, everywhere on the spectrum, regardless of socioeconomic status and regions. And will you do some of those residential projects under the Well residential scheme? Do you think Are they going to be able to afford it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, some of our developer partners are under the well for residential, they're trying to, they're they're in the pilot program and they're marketing their projects as wellness communities or wellness developments and so I think in the next year or so we're going to see where that is compared to others and if it resonates with the market. The studies show that wellness real estate is booming at 16% CAGR. That's off the charts growth, and so I think it's going to resonate with the market. But we'll see in the next year with all of these projects in the pipeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting you say that and I was talking to Well when they were just starting to launch the residential, the Well for Residential, and having a look at some of the systems behind it.
Speaker 1:And the one thing that stood out for me and it was interesting that you said it about the affordable housing For me, the social housing or the public housing is an absolute slam dunk for well residential, because so many of the core things that they have to do well anyway, like the social aspects, the community aspects, the health and well-being, the nutrition, the access to services, all of those things that the private sector it might be a bit alien to in some ways, is an absolute home run for social and public housing.
Speaker 1:You know those organizations deliver that well now and in some parts of the world, like where I am, we're building to a pretty highly energy efficient level anyway. So I was saying to a couple of my friends in that sector you should be having a look at this because looking at the list of things you already do, it seems like an absolute slam dunk. It's a multiplier effect. Yeah, absolutely yeah, and some of these social housing and public housing organizations really have their hearts in the right place. You know they're really trying to develop communities and access to services and all of these kind of things, all stuff that sits really well with well.
Speaker 2:Now, unfortunately, with high performing systems, there's a cost to it. So my vision for the next five, 10 years is that as there's more adoption, those costs start to come down and we could actually service the mass market. You know, holistically welcome speaking to anyone in that arena with affordable housing, social housing to speak about how we can make it healthier and have the unit economics work out too yeah, yeah, and that's the thing.
Speaker 1:Sometimes they're building at scale so that so those unique economics are probably more practicable. So you're obviously doing the consultancy services for those organizations as well, but you do have this ecosystem as well that you offer up as part of your organization. Tell me a little bit about that, because I honestly, I I'm only slightly familiar with some elements of it. So you bring a whole air quality and water ecosystem effectively to the healthy building space, don't you? Yeah?
Speaker 2:So one of the problems with air quality and water quality, as much as people. If you ask them how important it is, they say, of course, air quality, water quality, is important, but then when you ask what they're doing at home for it, they aren't doing anything, and I think that all comes down to it's invisible, so out of sight, out of mind, right, simon? So if you're not really seeing it, you're not thinking about it, and then you're not like, okay, what do I do about this to protect my family? So that's why I think monitoring is so important, and I can say that over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of reports in the news. People are hearing about it more especially post-COVID. People are starting to understand better.
Speaker 2:There's no such thing as clean tap water or even bottled water. They all have some sort of contaminant that harms our health, and so if we can put monitoring in place, that's what makes the invisible visible and people will start to say, wow, I see yellow and red all the time. How do I get this to green? So we've created an ecosystem that can do that. The goal is to keep it green all the time, but certain pollution events happen at home. Right. You can open the window. Pollen can come in and then your allergy symptoms are exacerbated, or asthma, and you start to feel bad. So if you have an outdoor monitor, then you actually know what those counts are and you can open the window when you're not going to be negatively impacted by it. The other thing is, with indoor monitors, if you're cooking, it's going to become very polluted very quickly with the VOCs and especially with the gas range. Particulate levels will climb very high during the amount that you're cooking and maybe even an hour or two after, and so if you have a system that recognizes these particulates that are skyrocketing, let's activate the purification system and start reducing it. Over time we're reducing the exposure to these dangerous contaminants and I always say it's compounding.
Speaker 2:So we breathe in 26 pounds of air a day. 20,000 breaths, that's 2,000 gallons of air. That's enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Imagine if we ate McDonald's every day versus a healthy diet. That's two pounds a day. So even at two pounds a day, eating unhealthy versus healthy will have a tremendous impact on our health. But think of it as 26 pounds a day good air versus bad air. People don't realize how important air is, unless you're being choked or oxygen is running out. So if you think about it in terms of your breathing in 26 pounds a day, you better know what the quality of that area is.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, your family is going to suffer yeah, and I I think one of the challenges, as you pointed out, was the invisible nature of there. I think the other one is is a lot of the things we associate, uh, or many of the things that in the home that are harmful to us, we don't associate with harm. We associate them actually with good homely things. Things like candles, incense, cooking smells, the smell of bacon, wafting up the stairs on a weekend morning and all of these kind of evocative things are actually probably quite harmful to our health, so that there's a disassociation. I think a lot with um, that some of the things that causes harm with with air quality, but I think one of the biggest problems with it is its long-term nature.
Speaker 1:A lot of what we're trying to protect ourselves against is chronic health issues, long-term health issues, and that's the bit we need help with. As a human species, we're actually quite good at sacrifice, sacrificing short-term gain for long-term health gains. It's why we're still around after so many millennia. But, um, we need the clues, and the trouble with air quality is we don't get those clues. Um, and I say it's to being the same with water to some degree. I mean, obviously you'll see turbidity in water, you'll get metallic taste and high level event issues, but water's a lot more complex than that and we need help, I guess, in the same way, to see events that are happening within our water supply, do we?
Speaker 2:we do. Water's a little tougher than air to track all the different contaminants because unfortunately there's no pfos forever chemical monitor or sensor, microplastic sensor. All we have right now is total dissolved solids, so it gives an idea of what's in the water other than H2O and you know if it's below 50, it's considered it's around bottle water quality. But if you know and you get the reading that it's like 100, 200, you know there's some nasty stuff in there you don't want to be putting in your body. So if you have a nice filtration system and you see the TDS before the filter and after the filter it's not exact but you get a very good idea this water is pure or clean. I'm not going to be exposed to so many bad things if I drink this.
Speaker 2:And one thing that you talked about candles, incense. I always try to explain it like this to people. There's definitely a benefit for candles because the sensory aspect it's actually calming you. There's a positive outcome there. But the bad thing is if you light a candle or incense. When we did readings in apartments with incense, we've had some of the worst PM ratings from apartments where people are lighting incense. It's off the charts.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, off the charts. And so I remember vividly going to Manhattan because the mother was complaining that their children had respiratory issues and so when we went in to do testing she had already lit up the incense. So we tested it. It was like 30 million micrograms per cubic meter. It was one of the highest I've ever seen. Just on the street in Manhattan, street level where the cars are, I'm used to seeing about 10 million, but in this apartment that had incense going was 30, 30, 35 million. That is really, really bad. And then I explained to the mother I know this is your tradition, but this is what it's doing to the lungs of everyone in your family. And she was just like, what can I do? I'll stop it, what else? And I just told her use essential oils if you want to have some fragrance in the home, organic essential oils, and just make sure you don't use the incense. And she stopped cold turkey when she understood the impact it was having on her children's lungs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I had a conversation with Priyanka Kolsheta from Delhi and you know they have a lot of challenges over there with sage burning, you know, and again, there's a lot of tradition there, a lot of you know, a lot of well-being benefits, let's just say, comes from sage burning, um, so it is a trade-off. You are asking people to sacrifice habit and tradition and behavior, um, for something that they're not going to see. Well, maybe they would do see a short-term problem with asthma and you know acute conditions, but a lot of the stuff that we'd worry about they may not see for 20, 30 years, you know, until they become vulnerable with something else. And that's the challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally so I I always try to recommend anyone think of it in terms of is it a net negative impact on your health or a net positive? So something like incense. We know clearly that the harm outweighs the benefit. So that's a net negative. And if we have overall net negative in our indoor environmental quality, eventually that's going to translate into some sort of chronic condition, starting from asthma all the way to cancer. So whatever we think about the indoor environmental quality, we really have to ensure we're having a net positive impact within the places we spend the most time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It kind of makes me want to play the net negative, net positive game with you, Michael. Is our plug-in air fresheners net negative or net positive 100%?
Speaker 2:net negative. Over 50% of the chemicals in air fresheners are all carcinogens, so people don't understand their breathing and stuff that's just harming their cells.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's literally like plugging in a chemical factory into your lounge and then superheating chemicals and vaporizing it into the air. What could go wrong? Yeah, yeah, somebody said that about vaping. There was a somebody said that about vaping. They said you know what? What could possibly go wrong with vaping, superheating and breathing in chemicals deep into your lungs? You know what? What? What could possibly be harmful in that?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, the biggest impact, more than anything, is the impact on the brain. Right, yeah, this is who we are pretty much like. Everything else is helping us function, but what we think, what we feel, all is like gut, brain and a lot of those things are destroying the gut microbiome as well as impacting the brain, and that's the last thing we want to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. And so with the I get the sensing element of it. I don't know TD. I know absolutely nothing about water monitoring. To be honest, I know some basic stuff I did with my well AP about monitoring water but, like, honestly, nothing really. It's kind of a, a catch-all number that kind of tells you some stuff is in there. We don't know what, but we're trying to keep that number low and if we see spikes, something's happened. Is that a fair analogy?
Speaker 2:then the tds I think it's a very good analogy. But still, air is way ahead because now you have formaldehyde, you have nitrogen dioxide, you can break it down into several sensors with that tackle chemistry in the air. But air, I mean water, is just that general total dissolved solids, but a very, very appropriate comparison.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but in theory, with water. I mean, one of the things we've always relied on in water is that there should be standards at this point of source. You know that there are regular checks on water quality, that we're covering off the main bases, so, yeah, so the trouble is. Trouble is now we're getting pfas and microplastic, microplastics and all sorts of other things that aren't that detectable finding their way into that water source, aren't we?
Speaker 2:that's right. So the great thing about water it's regulated, whereas air is not. So from the water treatment they got to make sure there's no micro organisms or bacteria that you can get sick from. They have to reduce, they have to filter it. But the problem is the US pipe infrastructure is so old that the water may be pretty good at the treatment facility but it has to travel to the house and, as we know from Flint Michigan, the lead pipes. There was an incident where they didn't put something in the water that had the lead leaching into the water. So pretty much everyone was exposed to lead in the water. And that's that's the danger point. It, once it leaves the treatment plant, you don't know what it's picking up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true, yeah, and you know that's been a battle for most countries, I think, is improving that infrastructure over time. You know the legacy of lead pipes and so on. You know the. You know the legacy of lead pipes and so on. You know the it's where the term plumbing comes from really is lead, you know, right, right, that's interesting. So, beyond then the um, the monitoring, you providing some of the, the hardware to solve those problems filtration systems, ventilation systems, water filtration, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:So it's the full right, the full ecosystem so the for air quality it's really three pillars if you want full coverage of good indoor air quality. Number one is filtration. You got to reduce the ultra fine levels. In a home it makes up 98.5 of all particles and these are the ones that are small enough 0.1 micron or smaller. They get into the bloodstream, they affect every cell in the body, they cause inflammation. They actually not only go one way into the lungs, it actually goes through your olfactory nerve and goes into the brain. So that's why studies taken in regions where there's high level of pollution they have found higher rates of Alzheimer's, parkinson's, dementia, because these particles are causing protein deposits in the brain, decreasing the blood flow, causing inflammation.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that's why I always tell people if you live in the city highly polluted, a lot of cars that's going to have an impact on your health. So it's good to, on the weekends, get away, have your body recover, go into the country, just making sure you have outdoor air coming in, diluting the VOCs in the room. It's outdoor air bringing it in, so you got to filter it. And then the third is humidity control. Ideal for human health is between 40 and 60% relative humidity. So humidity control means in the wintertime, if it gets too dry, you have humidification that brings it up to 40. Sometimes you got to go a little lower if your house is not so tight, because of condensation could cause mold, but in the summer, especially like New York where I live, it gets to humidity levels like 80. You got to bring that down to below 60 or you're causing conditions for mold and once you get mold and you get mold spores, it's very hard to repair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's interesting. So are you, when developers or real estate people are working with you, are you providing all of that equipment, or are you working with partners and things? You? Are you basically the person tying this all together and working with known brands, or you kind of providing?
Speaker 2:the entire suite of products, yeah we're not a manufacturer, we're more we. We see ourselves more as a trusted source ecosystem for indoor air and water quality and we source and we test all of the products out on the market and we choose the best and we kind of bring them into our ecosystem. The easy way to explain it is we created like the Avengers of air quality and water quality and then, because we have monitors, we have the hardware and we have the control, it allows us to automate everything and the homeowner can see it all on the app what the real air quality is right now, what it was the past week, what it was the past year on average. So that's kind of what we're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 2:And the important thing is, you're automating it all for people, that's the key, because even if you have all these things in place, the normal person will not know how to operate everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no interesting. And are you able to remotely keep an eye on those systems for people as well? For those that don't understand them, you can see fault issues and diagnose challenges and things like that. Okay, excellent.
Speaker 2:Right. So the easiest way to explain it is indoor air. I don't know what it's like in the UK, but here in the US they say it's five to 10 times worse than outdoor air. So on average, if you have a real time monitoring and you have indoor versus outdoor, the indoor should be way worse than outdoor. So with our ecosystem the indoor is pretty much always going to be better than the outdoor, and to be able to see that is what gives people empowerment and peace of mind that they have a very clean indoor air environment.
Speaker 1:I'll have you back to the podcast in just a minute. I just wanted to tell you briefly about Imbiote, a partner of the podcast. I came across Imbiote a while ago and in fact, completely unrelated to this was trying out one of their sensors here in my office and with a customer and I was seriously impressed then and remain so. Imbiote are a multidisciplinary team with a common goal to promote healthy and sustainable interior spaces. They manufacture smart indoor air quality monitors and an exceptional cloud platform. I get to use and see many products out there and Imbiote stands out the quality of the product, the innovation they bring with sensors and connectivity options with a platform with some unique approaches to reporting and integration with many of the reference standards out there, like Reset, well and Lead. Their devices can also integrate to any building to control and automate the operation of HEVAC systems, ensuring optimal air quality levels and energy savings. If you're interested in the performance of your indoor spaces and particularly its air quality, they are well worth checking out. Details, as always, are in the show notes at airqualitymattersnet and at inbiot. That's i-n-b-i-o-t dot e-s.
Speaker 1:Now Back to the show. And how did you get into doing this? What was the? What was your kind of journey into healthy indoor spaces.
Speaker 2:So, um, yeah, I remember very vividly I never thought about air quality all my life until I moved smack in the middle of Manhattan and I had my first child, so my son. We had him in the apartment. We had to put a gate so he didn't just walk around anywhere and hurt himself. And that's when I first thought what is this environment doing to him? So that's when I bought my first air purifier, and whenever I go into a subject I go very deep. And that's when I first understood oh, my goodness, it's not just food and exercise and sleep. The air and the environmental factor is so important to health and I wanted to make sure my son had the best environment. So we only lived five, six months in Manhattan and then we decided to move to a more natural setting and ever since then I was like obsessed how do we create the healthiest environments for people?
Speaker 1:And from that blossom this idea of this business to to kind of provide this ecosystem effectively of air quality and water, and why water nutshell. Yeah, why water particularly? Is that the link to the purity of water for the tea side of your business as well? Is that where the two kind of segue in some way?
Speaker 2:Oh, it definitely converges there, because if you use water that's not pure with the tea, you're not going to get the true taste of the tea. So definitely there's that convergence. Convergence, but the tea company I started with my co-founder because I just wanted to bring access to high, high quality teas directly from one source where the farmers are dedicated, on a tropical island, and I wanted to teach or educate people that you can incorporate certain rituals in your daily routine that'll elevate your health, give you opportunities to invite people for a cup of tea and deepen your relationships, make it real and also, by knowing how your food and your drink, how these things are grown, to make more conscious decisions on which farms to support, which brands to support, because that has a very high impact on what happens to our environment. Like who we support has a huge impact on what's happening to our environment, not just only our health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now I can see the link. All right, you know if you've got the passion for produce and sustainability and the circularity of that produce and its impact on the environment, how that is analogous to the indoor environment as well. So, like, how do you describe what you do? Basically, is it is, is it all wrapped up in human health, ultimately, and well-being?
Speaker 2:that's the single driver behind it all well, I studied when I did, when it was time for me to decide on my major in college. Um, my number one thing was how do I be of value while I live on this earth, whether I live 60 years, 80 years years, 100 years? And I was very active as a young person, playing sports, so it made sense. I decided to major in kinesiology. I wanted to teach people how to have fun moving and, in turn, have that positively impact health. And then I decided to minor in nutrition because I knew that you are what you eat, and so it's all about elevating the human condition where we understand we can take care of ourselves, take care of the people around us, and then really understand every day what's important in our lives.
Speaker 2:And I think today we just live too fast without thinking about these things. Everything is now now, now fast, fast, fast, and days go by where we're not even thinking about. Did I call my dad? Was I of service? Did I actually was I of service? Did I actually benefit somebody by taking time out inviting them to a cup of tea or coffee and ask how they are? Like, our society is just way too fast. So yeah, in a nutshell, the work that I do is all about and I'm prone to that always, too. Sometimes I catch myself oh my goodness, I just spent all day on working, right, but it's great to be in this field. Air quality it's also. You are what you breathe is another thing that I say. Right, so it's great to be in this field. I've just met so many wonderful people all over the world, so this job affords me to travel, meet great people that are aligned and I. That's the value and beauty of uh of the work, I think yeah, that's really.
Speaker 1:I know I'm laughing at the man talking about mindfulness that runs two business says that like there's a contradiction in terms. Right there, isn't it?
Speaker 1:I imagine at certain days of the week certainly yeah, it does make me wonder, though, because I'm a big.
Speaker 1:I'm a big fan of how we communicate this challenge of air quality.
Speaker 1:You know, I think both of you and I are on the same soapbox, really, on the, the importance of, of air quality and health and sustainability, and I I think one of our big challenges has been how we communicate ventilation, because it because, as you say, the world's so busy and in such a rush, but also, I don't think the community helps itself.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it's so wrapped up in the scientific the, the chemistry of it all and the physics of it all and the engineering of it all, all of which are completely alien to the vast majority of people that this matters to. So we have to find better ways to communicate the importance of this and how to give people the agency to drive a better outcome for their own health and well-being. Like, like you say, with those conversations with those people around incense burning and so on. Like, if you can find the white frame for people, it's amazing the impact that you can have for them, and I wonder if there's some things to learn from your experience over that, that mindfulness, the, the centering it on the human, you know, both from a nutrition and movement and um product produce perspective. Are there things that we can learn? Do you think in the air quality community on how to better communicate this challenge of air quality?
Speaker 2:I think that's something we don't do a good enough job of. As you said, we're too scientific. We're very passionate about sending out the message, but one thing I learned through the tea company is that there's a limit to what you can say. Tea is good for you, for your heart, for your teeth, for your eyes, for your so forth. You have to say it in the form of a story. That's really the best way to resonate with the general public, because people relate to stories, they latch onto stories.
Speaker 2:So when it comes to air quality, when I just have a general talk with even students, I don't go into the specifics and the science. I talk about why air quality is important, right, and why is it different now than a hundred years ago. And the story that I tell is 100 years ago, even 20, 30 years ago, when I was a kid, I always remember going outside in nature and playing with my friends and being able to develop those connections and relationships. Being able to develop those connections and relationships, whereas today it's all the screen we're spent. Because we're on the screen, it's keeping us inside more Like. How many times do you just spend outside in the sun? On your screen? It's mostly indoors because the Wi-Fi is indoors, right.
Speaker 2:So we live in a totally different world, and so my message is go out into nature more. Then you'll start to appreciate living things. Right, you'll start to appreciate living things. You'll start to think about where did that come from, where did I come from, what's my purpose here? And then you start to talk to people more. So air quality is important, but why is it important, right? Why is it important? In the very end, like we could talk about the technical stuff You're going to be healthier. All that is good and it resonates with some people, but we got to personalize it for people and we have to make it more relatable for people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting and I wonder who we have to engage with to do that, to do more of that. Um, my experience is the people that are communicating that at the moment at that level are the marketeers for the products, and that's not necessarily a healthy outcome. You know that, don't get me wrong. There are some good products and some good marketeers, but there's also some pretty rotten ones with some pretty bad ideas, and, left to their own devices, they can send us down some pretty horrendous holes. Is this a public health communication thing? Is it a community thing? Is it a a community leader champion thing? That? How do we start to resonate with people and start to get people to stop pause?
Speaker 1:I I always say this to people that it's amazing, quite amazing, how sensitive we are as a human species. Actually, if we stop for a moment and think and experience our surroundings and I said, most of us can come from outside into a building and if we just think about it for a moment, we'll know whether that air is healthy, that space is healthy. You can sense it. We're pretty good, as that's why we're still around is we've developed pretty sophisticated ways of judging risk, but you have to be open to it. You have to be switched on to it and we're so busy we forget to be switched on to it. And it's amazing. You see light bulbs go on in people's heads.
Speaker 1:I said you know, you talk to maintenance people and housing people and others and say, look, you all know, you know what the smell of damp and mold is. You know what stuffiness smells like. You know what fragrances and over bleaching and over cleaning smells like. You know. Just stop for two minutes when you're walking into a building and just think is this space healthy? Because if it isn't, you'll probably know and that will help you make the right decisions for that space. But we run around filling in our forms and checking our boxes and doing whatever it is we're doing in our work. We don't stop and have a think and be led by those instincts.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I think that's the biggest problem of today's society and the biggest challenge. We have to stop, look around in our surroundings and figure out what's best for you and the people closest to you. I think we're far too divisive, at least here in the US. It's a total division, right, polarized society. And that's the message. If you stop and look and you have a mind to take care of your that one of my most treasured mentors, he said stop, look around and just focus on taking care of your immediate surroundings, whether it's the person next to you, the nature around you. As long as you do that and you inspire and encourage others to do that, then it's what you talked about. You start local and then it starts spreading global right.
Speaker 1:Was it you that was telling me the story about the guy washing the sink in the bathroom. Was that our conversation? No, wonderful conversation. A guy walks into a bathroom and they're using the urinals the usual kind of not looking at each other, some blokes just finishing off having a wee. He goes and washes his hands in the basins in the public toilets. He takes a couple of towels and he starts cleaning the basin area, wiping it down, doing the mirrors and so on, and just packs it out. And the guy comes out of the the bathroom and asks him sorry, I have to ask what were you doing? And he said well, my mother always taught me to always try and leave a place in a better state than I found it, and I live by that.
Speaker 1:So whenever I can, I'll always just try just a little thing, just try and put this back up, put that back right, just tidy that, help that person. Just try and leave the world, day by day, in just a little bit of a better state than you found it. And if we all did that we all took a moment to stop and do that, take like you say, take care of our immediate surroundings it's probably amazing what the compound effect of that would be I thought that was a wonderful story, you know totally totally, whether it's true or not, but it's a great story.
Speaker 2:I'm sure someone does that and I'm sure more than one person does that, and anyone that thinks that that's not possible, I just tell them look at what happened to covid.
Speaker 1:It reached every single part of the earth, but why can't we do it in a good way yeah, yeah, very true, and you, you follow a little bit of that principle with your tea company. From what I remember talking to you about it, michael, is that you really, in the heart of what you're trying to do with the tea business, create a business that is genuinely sustainable, aren't you? I mean, it's something at the core of what you're trying to do with that. Maybe explain that again to me a little bit and also for the listeners, because I found that really fascinating, because air quality, as you imagine, particularly in the built environment, is getting caught up in this conversation of circularity and sustainability a lot, and I thought it was really interesting some of the ideas that you bring from that organization to sustainability and circularity.
Speaker 2:Yes, Simon, thanks for bringing that up. So our T's are regeneratively grown and so I think more and more people are starting to hear the term. But the way that I explain it is everyone knows the word sustainability. The majority of people have heard it somewhere, whether they know the depth to what it means or not. But the way that I like to explain sustainability, sustainability pretty much means let's not make it any worse, let's sustain it. It's a net zero. So often with energy and sustainability we talk a lot about net zero, making sure it's not negative, just keeping it the same.
Speaker 2:But if we look at the course of the last hundred years, cancer rates were 0.5% a hundred years ago. Now it's one in two for men, one in three for women. We are at the worst time ever for human health, not in terms of life expectancy, but in modern times. Right, it's continuing to get worse and worse and worse. Life expectancy is getting shorter for the first time ever, right? And the environmental crisis, the climate crisis, is the worst ever. So sustaining is not good enough anymore, because that means we're going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. We need to be net positive, we need to regenerate. So that's the platform for our tea company. We regenerate the soil so that it's always making things better. That's what regeneration is net positive. It's building the ecology, biodiversity, the soil microbiome. There's greater organic life, organic matter in the soil, more nutrient density coming up into the soil, coming up into the soil. And then the other thing about tea is it's been around 5,000 years.
Speaker 2:But if you look at the way tea goes from the farm to the store, there are so many middlemen. There's the exporter, the importer, the broker, the distributor, the retailer Everyone in the middle makes money. The farmer doesn't make money. That's a broken system. So in tea, a lot of the farms around the world now, because they have to face climate crisis, the droughts or the flooding, they're losing their farms. The younger generation doesn't want to do what their parents have done because they see the suffering with no monetary return. So tea farms are shutting down all over the world and the value of tea is so low because it's become a commodity.
Speaker 2:And so what we're trying to do is create a new model direct from the farm. Value the farmer that they're growing the tea the way it was done thousands of years ago, so you can taste the purity of the tea. You're tasting tea like the people hundreds of years ago have tasted it right, and so we want to be successful because we want this model to grow. We want to have the tea industry grow. We want people to take pride in their work so we're still very early on, but we're fortunate. Have the tea industry grow. We want people to take pride in their work, so we're still very early on, but we're fortunate. We're like in some of the top. We got into Whole Foods this year, Wegmans some of the top retailers where we've won 24 medals at the top tea competitions globally. So I think we're on our way to fulfilling our vision but yeah, we still need a lot of support.
Speaker 1:We're still very early perspective. So at that part, from cradle to gate, you're able to kind of I don't know if certifies the right word but you're able to measure, validate that regenerative aspect to it.
Speaker 2:No, I just wanted to say that I respect a lot of farms that don't have the money to certify yet. They do it the right way. They deserve all the credit in the world. But we live in a marketplace where people need to see some sort of third party verification, and so, maybe close to a decade ago, maybe under a decade ago Patagonia, dr Bronner's Rodale Institute they formed the Regenerative Organic Alliance to create a regenerative organic certification. So today it's regarded as the highest standard for soil health, animal welfare and farm worker fairness.
Speaker 2:So it's not just organic. You have to have organic as a base, but you add all these other elements that create a holistic farm environment. That is the most vital for producing the highest and most nutrient dense and pure crops, the way that it was done in ancient times. So regenerative organic certification um, there's I think there's like a hundred brands now that are certified in all different categories. We were the first to be in tea uh, thankfully, and we're part of that and uh, it's a growing movement, so it's really exciting to see and, if recall correctly, there's also a really solid carbon capture element to tea as well, like it's a net contributor to carbon capturing tea, right.
Speaker 2:So when you focus on the health of the soil through regenerative principles like cover crop, having a living root all year round, you're actually creating conditions where the soil is thriving. The microbiome, the organic matter, the life under the ground is a huge network and the root is where the activity of life processes happens, and so it's actually pulling carbon from the air, because that's the food source of the soil and that carbon is converted in the soil through a lot of exchange into nutrients that get taken up into the root. So if you have regenerative organic products or products grown from those principles, you're getting a higher nutrition value and it's going to be more pure. So, without all the bad stuff and um and for our farm we did testing and for every kilogram of tea we produce, uh, it shows that we're sequestering 380 kilograms of carbon from the air into the soil.
Speaker 1:Wow. And is there an impact to end of life for tea? That's like positive or negative from a carbon perspective or a regenerative perspective?
Speaker 2:So that's a great question and a lot of people don't think about it. But most people, if they brew their tea leaves, they just toss it out. And of course, if you toss it and it turns into compost and do something good, then it's great. But people don't realize that 90% of the EGCG, or antioxidants, they're locked in the tea leaf. So if you have a high quality tea that you know is nutrient dense and doesn't have any chemicals, is organic, and you throw it away, you're throwing away like 90% of the antioxidants.
Speaker 2:So I always recommend you keep them. You put it in your blender when you make a smoothie or you put it in your salad, because it's not going to be overpowering in taste, so it's just an additional element to your salad. You can grind it up, put it into your soups, but then you get all the benefits of the antioxidants. So we created a movement called Eat Tea and that's the way to eat tea, and there's nothing better in terms of circularity than going from seed to tea tree, to you, to the cup, cup and then, after you brew it, you actually eat the tea leaves yeah, it's the drinking the tea bit in the middle then, just becoming a bit of a wasted time.
Speaker 2:You better have just no, no, no, no the drinking the part is a way that you can invite somebody have a nice conversation over time, and you still do get a lot of benefits from the liquid as well. It's just that a lot of the antioxidants are still locked in the leaf, so you want to capture all of it. You want to maximize everything that tea has to offer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find that absolutely fascinating. Never thought of that at all. Actually the repurposing of the tea after you've finished it, but then I suppose you've got to be using free leaf tea. That you, that's easy to. Yeah, do you dry it out? Is it something that you can dry and use? Yeah, sometimes I dry out and I actually use it like a snack, like it's crunchy.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, there's many ways you can do it, yeah yeah, I need to get some decent tea to be able to do that. To be honest, I'm not quite sure that works with my barry's irish brown tea, but I'm going to send you some of our tea yeah do, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's it. Where's it? Where are you distributing your tea to these days so um?
Speaker 2:we're talking to someone in the uk for distribution. We're in germany. We have UK for distribution. We're in Germany. We have a distributor there.
Speaker 1:Norway we have a distributor Talking to people in France and Italy, but right now we're mostly in North America, in the US and I suppose back on topic a little bit the air quality business, I imagine, is fairly local to you, is it? Yeah, that one?
Speaker 2:is mostly US US and some Canada but I may go to Barcelona next February for a show where we may be looking for partners in Europe.
Speaker 1:Oh interesting, yeah, europe. Oh interesting, yeah. I'll put links in the in the show notes for for both companies, because I think they're both really interesting to dig around in there and it's a. It's a really fascinating convergence and a great topic for conversation, if nothing else tea and air quality.
Speaker 2:Air quality there, oh that's I like that play.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've just I've just figured out what the title of the podcast is going to be michael. That's brilliant listen. Thanks so much for taking time to talk to me today. It's been brilliant talking to you. Um, I think we covered loads in that and I think it's been really interesting to get your perspective, from somebody that looks at the built environment so holistically and human health so holistically, to see where this is all going. You're a great communicator on the subject and I love following your posts on social media, so I'll include the links to that as well in the show notes so people can hook up with you and keep an eye on what you're doing, because I think it's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:Thank you, simon. I've always enjoyed listening to your podcast and when I first listened I was like oh, I hope sometime in the future he'll invite me. So the day has come and it's been a true pleasure speaking to you and look forward to meeting you in person someday in the near future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, give us a shout when you're heading over to Barcelona. Any excuse to go to Barcelona, for sure. Thanks for listening Before you go. Can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed this podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with 21 Degrees, lindab, aeco, ultra, protect and Inbuit all great companies who share the vision of this podcast and are not here by accident. Your support of them helps their support of this show. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet.
