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
#74 - Joseph Allen: Communicating science and turning in buildings into health assets
What if the air you breathe at work is silently shaping your performance, creativity, and health? Harvard's Dr. Joseph Allen has become the leading voice connecting building science with human potential - showing how something as simple as better ventilation can transform productivity while protecting health.
In this wide-ranging conversation, he reveals why healthy buildings remain a financial no-brainer, pointing to his research demonstrating that even small improvements translate to substantial bottom-line returns. "If you do the cost-benefit analysis, the benefits are 10x over the cost," Joe explains, sharing how forward-thinking companies leverage building performance to attract employees back to offices.
The pandemic fundamentally shifted how building air quality is perceived, elevating these decisions to C-suite conversations. Today, we're witnessing what he calls a "flight to quality", where buildings with superior air quality command premium rents while others struggle. Yet making these improvements isn't just for showcase headquarters - he demonstrates how modest investments can dramatically improve even challenging buildings.
Allen also shares fascinating insights from his research following the Los Angeles wildfires. As climate events intensify, buildings must increasingly serve as shields against environmental threats—a protection that depends entirely on our design decisions today.
This episode offers unprecedented clarity on the connection between our built environments and human flourishing. Whether you're responsible for workplace strategy, building management, or simply care about optimizing your own environment, you'll gain actionable perspectives on creating spaces where people truly thrive.
Joseph Allen - LinkedIn
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. 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 with Joseph Allen, professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, co-author of Healthy Buildings and a leading voice on air quality during the pandemic, the US wildfires and more. Joseph Allen, for many in the built environment, really needs no introduction. He has been a leading voice in our sector for years and he really articulated for many what a healthy building is for the first time in his landmark book by the same name. But just in case you don't know who he is, he is the director of Harvard's Healthy Building Program and an associate professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He's been a key voice in communicating the science of air quality to the public, appearing on CBS, cnn, cnbc and Bloomberg, and has written many pieces for the Washington Post, new York Times, atlantic and USA Today, covering everything from COVID to the wildfires in the US. And he continues to play a significant part in research on air quality through his work in Harvard and wider partnerships. But, above all else, when you talk to Joe, he exemplifies for me what a good communicator is. He has been able to find ways of framing science and the business case with his co-author, john McCoomer, the value of healthy buildings in ways that have truly resonated. And it all comes from a place of genuine fascination with how buildings work and how air quality impacts health and performance. That is truly palpable.
Simon:I wanted to talk to Joe about how he sees healthy buildings today. What has changed since writing the book and more. We spoke about how things move on from here post-pandemic, how do we better communicate the fundamentals of science and the broader case for healthy buildings and, more recently, what we're learning about wildfires. I really hope you enjoy it. It's a wide-ranging conversation with loads of insight, as you'd expect. Please don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes under their qualitymattersnet. This is a conversation with Joseph Allen. I thought it'd be interesting to ask you forgetting the pandemic and we'll come back to it for sure. But if you were sitting down today to write Healthy Buildings because the pandemic wasn't in that book in that frame, would much of it change, do you think?
Joseph:Yes, that's really interesting. I haven't thought about that. I think I'd write the same book and I'll tell you why. I think what the pandemic did and we can talk about the details there that it raised the awareness, certainly for the general public.
Joseph:But the book already incorporated a lot of the science around what we know around indoor air quality from decades and decades of research and what we tried to do with it and why I partnered with a professor at Harvard Business School was to talk about the economics.
Joseph:So we've been talking a lot about the health productivity, how it influences sick days, it being indoor air quality, and I've been working hard with this business school professor on how do we elevate the conversation to make the pure business case.
Joseph:And so we had started lecturing in each other's classes. He lectures to my students at School of Public Health, my Healthy Buildings class I present to his business school students. We've written a Harvard Business School case study about this and I really wanted to draw that out in this book and really leverage all the great sciences that has been out there. And actually, even without the pandemic, what I've seen is that the book and not just our work but making the business case has really changed behavior in companies that I know and some that I work with, because the business case is just so clear and obvious. When you see the math, when you see the good science and then you see the good business science, it becomes an absolute no-brainer, regardless of the pandemic. Certainly, the pandemic elevated this conversation to a wider audience, but I think I'd write the same book, to be totally honest.
Simon:Yeah, that's interesting and it is that kind of it's the power of a different framing, isn't it? And in your case, with Healthy Buildings, it was bringing in that economic framing the business speak. We're talking to people businesses managing it was bringing in that economic framing the business speak. We're talking to people businesses managing buildings. And bringing in that business terminology and framing it in ways, or trying to reach and frame in different ways, that resonates, is so important and we've all struggled and we're all stood here wondering why nobody listens and sometimes we realize we're just talking the wrong language.
Joseph:Yeah, I mean, I think our field has done a good job, but I also think you know, like all of us, trying to figure out how do we reach new and different audiences, I've been frustrated that all this great science has been on the sidelines. Honestly, I wrote it with an eye towards kind of business leaders. I write a lot for Harvard Business Review. Right, this doesn't count in my academic publishing, but I wrote a piece that just published two weeks ago in HBR, because I know what executives do. They're probably not going to read the book, they're definitely not going to read scientific papers. But, my gosh, they read a three-page HBR article that is crisp, concise, talks about the science.
Joseph:Sure, these are all smart people. But also he makes the cogent business case. Why should I do this? What should a business manager do? What are the three takeaways? What do I implement tomorrow? So, anyway, we've been working hard, like everybody tried to bridge that gap a bit to say here's all this great science, but importantly, here's how you leverage it for your employees' health and also it's good for your business.
Simon:Do you think, from 2020 to now, any of the fundamentals of the financial and business case have changed? I mean, there was such a slam dunk when it came to the 3,3300 rule, you know, and that showing the value of the people within an organization, not just the energy use or the lease or rent cost of a building that was such a profound framing of a solution. Do you think anything at a fundamental level has changed since then? Because we've got work from home now, I imagine that mixes that profile up to quite a degree.
Joseph:Yeah, I think it's a good question on. You know, is there a fundamental change? And I do think the answer is yes, at least during the peak of the pandemic, for many businesses it became existential If my people can't work, maybe they can't work from home. A lot of workers had to be in the office. People were scared, they didn't want to go in, understandably, unless there were controls in place, and so it became something that rose to the CEO's level.
Joseph:Ceos don't normally deal with indoor quality issues. Right During the pandemic they sure as heck did. They were reading the news, like all of us, and they wanted to know what do we have to do? All of a sudden, the CEO is talking to the facilities manager every day, and that elevates the profile. It unlocks resources, but also, more importantly, it unlocks the signal that the building is important. This is something we need to invest in.
Joseph:So it wasn't just about during the pandemic. It wasn't just about hey, you know, people are going to perform a little bit better. They'll be out sick less often. That's good for your bottom line. It's can your business open and run successfully?
Joseph:And we were arguing that, yeah, in addition to the other controls that were out there, we need to think about ventilation and filtration as part of the core strategies to keeping people safe during the pandemic. They should be core strategies all the time, we know this, but during the pandemic that message resonated such that it was about how do you get, uh, if you had to keep your business open and people in person, that you could do this? It has also continued into the. Yes, the work from home is not going away, but also there's a lot of organizations that are having people come back to the office and it's been part of the messaging, at least for good companies that say yes, we know you would be concerned about this, we know everyone knows about ventilation and filtration now and the good companies have said we've also taken care of our buildings in such a way that we're asking you to come back and it's a safe environment.
Simon:Yeah, and I suppose now we would have to deal with the complexity of this mix of permanent working in the office, hybrid home working, how we understand that value chain. In the same way, we're having to do that with sustainability and where embodied carbon and scope three emissions lie and everything else. You know it's a more heady mix than perhaps it was five or 10 years ago but nonetheless, probably some of the fundamentals remain the same and that is the performance of your people will out.
Joseph:Yeah, I think that's right and I see good leaders saying work from home is not going away, but the office is also not going away. We need collaboration, we need in-person, so part of the value proposition. So why do I go to the office? Well, I need to have this interaction. We know we perform better in groups, we know we're social creatures and also, when you have a good building, it's a magnet, it's an attraction. It's no longer oh, I got to trudge to the office. It's oh. Yeah, I'm going to see these colleagues I need I'll be super productive.
Joseph:Air quality is great, I have great lighting, the acoustics are good, I feel good in this space. It looks great, the amenities are all in place and if you look at what's happening at least in the commercial real estate market, that's what's happening. There's a serious flight to quality In the markets where there are good buildings that have good air quality and all these other amenities that are convenient for people. Well, these buildings are full and they're actually commanding good rents. Buildings are full and they're actually commanding good rents and these kind of B buildings that aren't, they're really struggling. So it actually tells you something fundamental about the building again, that it's not just that people want to work from home or not go to the office. It's that people are OK going back to the office when it's an office that's worth going to, office that's worth going to.
Joseph:And for us, in our field of indoor air quality, we think I think part of that mix has to be you are giving people a place that they want to be, that they are safe, healthy, they perform their best, it's inviting, it meets all these criteria we know that lead to better performance, better mental health, and to me, that has to be part of that mix and, to be honest, the good companies are recognizing that and they're including that in the portfolio of how are we going to lure you back to do your best work? Well, yes, we've done everything we can to make sure this is the place where you're the most productive, you're safe, healthy and happy and it's a place you want to come. So I think you're starting to see that split between the good buildings and the bad and the flight to quality in this uh, down market yeah, it's interesting you say that and and that was one of the other questions I wanted to ask you.
Simon:I imagine when you're conceiving of a book like this and you're writing about it and you, you pay some attention to it at one point when you talk about the leaders, that the leading buildings in the field, and and those are now five years on. It'd be interesting to go back and see how some of those are doing, which I'm sure you've done and are doing. But you also expressed a hope at the time about where you thought the market was on its trajectory and you couldn't have foreseen the pandemic when you were conceiving of this book. But what's your general thoughts on how far we've come in in recognizing some of these fundamentals in the built environment? And, and particularly I'm interested in your feelings on the long tail part of the built environment, how we see you?
Simon:I think you you did very, in a very nuanced way, address that in your book that this is something that's going to take time. There are only certain opportunities you get to go into some of these existing buildings and improve them over time. So this isn't something that people are going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly deal with their entire portfolio. But how have you seen that progression in the half decade or so? Where do you see that now, moving over the next few years?
Joseph:Yeah, that's a good close read and it's a good question and it's worth revisiting because right in the book we posit that we were in the early phase of this kind of S-shaped curve where you need the early adopters. I think markets always need an early adopter, someone to buy in, to take that first leap, and I think JP Morgan actually did this with their new headquarters that I've advised on, and it was at the time we were writing the book. And there's pushback when you're saying let's do something different, let's bring in more outdoor air, let's have real-time air quality monitoring, let's improve the filtration, let's do an all electric tower, because it's different. It's naturally a market that maybe is risk averse. It's a slow moving market. But you get some of these good companies who are really care about their employees and recognize the science of how the building can help their employees and they make it happen and we all need that. Not because healthy buildings are just for the JP Morgans of the world, it's so that you have the models out there to say, yes, this can be done. By the way, if you do the cost-benefit analysis, the benefits are 10x over the cost and then others look to it and New York City is a great market. Other developers in there are looking at that building. They want to compete, which is great, and now you see we're moving off that early adopter.
Joseph:And certainly the pandemic accelerated this. Because now, what are the conversations we're having, the ones we need around, how do we just change codes and standards such that all of this science and application benefits everybody? My goal is not just to have, you know, a handful of shiny new buildings out there, be quote unquote healthy. It's just that it becomes the norm, so that my field of this field of healthy buildings, just you know, we're all put out of business. Buildings are just healthy, we design them the right way and there's a lot less sick building syndrome out there. So, ultimately, I think we've actually accelerated faster than I thought because of the pandemic, where now you see schools adopting some of these strategies, entire states have adopted these strategies, california schools adopting some of these ventilation standards. We're really in that accelerant period pace. But to get to that next where it's just everybody, this is where codes and standards come in, in my view.
Simon:Yeah, there's two parts to that I'd like to drill into a little bit. The first part is this step change we saw through COVID and I think everybody is still feeling the pain of this readjustment. Post-covid We've seen very large organisations like Johnson Controls have to readjust their healthy buildings part of their business. We've seen sensor manufacturers come and go News this week. One of the biggest ones globally are probably selling off their B2B market.
Simon:You know the growth that we saw both in the pandemic and immediately post-pandemic is definitely. It's definitely going through a period of trying to figure out where we are. It's the feeling and feedback I get. Certain is still has to ride the coattails of sustainability and the greening of buildings for a little while longer. It doesn't quite seem to stand on its own as a business unit. So it's that it's trying to understand what that trajectory looks like from here.
Simon:And that's kind of why that first question was framed in the way it was. If you were writing it now, how do we get that incremental growth? What does that look like? Another way of putting that question, and this of francesca brady, who ran it a a rated at the time and I said if you were writing the scripts and of course nobody would write a pandemic into the script, you know, because loss of life and what have you. But obviously it had a big impact on awareness. But overall, was it a positive or negative thing for awareness? Did it create a false hump? Is the reset too painful? Have we lost some of that fundamental momentum we were building before the pandemic of the basic business case and it's now blurred with infection control and other things like 241 in the States, for example. It's quite complicated now, isn't it? And that's why I kind of framed the question the way I did. If, from here, what does the right, what does the right pathway look like?
Joseph:Yes. So this is really a thoughtful question and I might have a different take than some people on where we're at. So clearly, the pandemic saw this rise in awareness and I think some people are saying, well, now there's this dip, I'm seeing something different. I think the people experiencing that dip are probably who went all in on just pandemic, just COVID. So we saw new technologies, new companies, new consultants, everybody all in on COVID, right. So when COVID starts to fade in the public's interest, those are the companies saying hey, what happened? My market disappeared, but that was a false market. That was purely based on COVID, I think. But if you look at the long trajectory, yes, interest in COVID has receded, but the good companies and the good messaging is still around. These multiple benefits Look, we could just take the focus on other infectious diseases. So RSV influenza we had a terrible influenza season, measles. We have a paper showing that benefits, certainly vaccine most important, but also additional and significant benefits from ventilation and filtration.
Joseph:This business case argument is still there for sure, independent of COVID and existential. The world's going to shut down, my business is going to shut down. So I think it's those who have not correctly pivoted their messaging to the market and you're still trying to sell on COVID and this kind of stuff. So I feel way more optimistic about where we are in this market and if there's any leveling off, it's probably a little bit of the what's the right word, some of the overage or something on the you'd expect.
Joseph:Right, all in focus, everybody's selling everything, lots of buying pandemic stimulus that goes away. So now you're looking for the sustainable growth in the indoor quality, healthy building space and these good companies are still doing it. But I think there's probably some frustration from those selling products and services who haven't pivoted their message and approach. But that value proposition around why does a healthy building matter goes way beyond COVID and I see it still resonating out there with building suppliers, building manufacturers, technology companies, end users, developers, investors, and so I get that some people are seeing that dip, but I'm seeing the long arc and the trajectory is still very much on the rise.
Simon:Yeah, and I think it's hard when you're in the storm sometimes not to be quite short-sighted. Everything seems to take longer than it should, but actually in 10-year frame the construction is very conservative. It takes a while to change and actually we're moving pretty quickly. I think if you were to look into it periodically from the outside. I mean, you only have to take something like sensor technology. I mean, we're in a profoundly different place than we were even five years ago when you were writing the book, for example, in this field do and you see them.
Joseph:I share an experience recently in a presentation I gave that. So for the past 20 years I've done forensic investigations of sick buildings and some have been quite serious where people died in the building. All of it's serious. Some of it's around a cluster, around people not feeling right in the building. Sometimes it's disease spread. But something happened to me recently when I went out and did one of these. That has never happened to me and it relates to sensors.
Joseph:So I talked to people in the building, try to get an understanding of what's happening, what the concerns are. Of course, look at the mechanical systems, talk to the building engineers. But someone came up to me, a tenant in the building, and I started asking questions about the building, like I always do, and they said I have the indoor air quality mapped for every room in the building already. And I said what do you mean? So she showed me her sensor and she starts telling me about this conference room, that public space, her office. She had mapped out the entire building.
Joseph:That is a first for me and it's interesting because it tells you about this power shift where you now have an employee in a building knows more about the building performance than the building managers and certainly more than the business owners and even possibly more than the building owners. That's really different. And you're right, that is new, that is brand new over the past couple of years, and you're seeing the growth in these sensors, so you have a highly knowledgeable, informed public. Now, because of the pandemic, they've been paying attention and now they have relatively inexpensive tools at their disposal to at least get a pulse for themselves about what's going on in the building. That's really quite different.
Simon:Yeah, and it kind of doesn't matter whether the sensor's any good or where they've placed it is the right place, or they even know what they're looking at. The reality is, immediately you're discussing data and sensor and you need to be able to argue that case or justify it or have an opinion on it, and that's a very powerful position to be in. As an employee and as an employer, you better watch out. I'm guessing now, if you employ 300 people in your building, probably a dozen of them have got indoor air quality sensors sat on their desk. This isn't going away.
Joseph:Yeah, I've seen these sensors everywhere and I agree some are clearly better than others. But regardless, as an employer or business owner, you're going to have to answer that question. Somebody tells you hey, I don't feel right in here and the sensor's reading this. Well, you can't just say that's a garbage sensor. You're going to have to defend that scientifically. You're going to have to have your own, better sensor. You might have to have your own expert come in and test.
Joseph:But traditionally, for those of us who have been in the field for a long time doing this, the occupant complaints have normally been quickly dismissed because without any data, I say, hey, I don't feel right in this space, I'm tired or I have a headache when I'm in the office, you're a complainer. But now I can at least back it up, regardless of the quality of the sensor, and say I don't feel right. And, by the way, I've been reading these studies that say there's whatever the threshold is and my sense is saying it's over that. So it's not just me, but I have some at least independent data that's supporting me. So it requires a different response in terms of the business of the owner, absolutely.
Simon:For the long tail of the sector. What do you think moves the dial there? Is it the stick? Is it the stick of regulations and codes? Is it the carrot of sound business case, or is it a mixture of the two? How do we create the on-ramp for better buildings and healthier buildings for Middle America, for offices above warehouses in industrial estates? You know, not your JP Morgan glass clad headquartered building in New York. What does the on-ramp look like for those guys, do you think?
Joseph:Yeah, I think it starts with our field really setting a true North Star for what these standards look like and giving the state and city legislators the language, the models and the tools to say well, if you're looking to do something, these are the types of things we think you can do and these are the expected benefits to the school. But the local economy, performance of outdoor, environmental quality related to buildings and energy use. So I think we have to package all of that up. It's been a little all over the place, which I think is okay, as people experiment to see what's landing. So I think there are ways to do this.
Joseph:There's enough momentum right now in the private sector, where they're competing with each other people looking around, how do I do it better related to my buildings and there's enough schools and starting to do this and have implemented some of these strategies that there is momentum behind it.
Joseph:And now it's to be able to go back and say, well, look, it can be done. And this is how we think new standards should be set and this is how they should be adopted into code and practice. Maybe there's economic incentives for businesses to do some of this. That that's been tried, that was tried during the pandemic. So I think there's a lot of experimentation happening, which is good, and I think that also builds towards your. What we've been talking about here is where are we on this curve? And we have a lot of momentum now and it's that getting to that last part, because you're not going to see a market-based approach where indoor quality is improved in all the schools and government buildings just on the road. It's not going to happen until we reach that final part, which is just saying, hey, this is the norm and it has to be done that way.
Simon:And these are the reasons and all the benefits we get if we do it. Where do industrial hygienists sit in this picture today and perhaps compared to your thinking five years ago and 10 years ago?
Joseph:So I'm totally biased. I'm a certified industrial hygienist so I like that certification a lot. I think it's hard and I'm not trying to compliment myself or anything, but I think it's rightfully hard. It requires practical experience and also training in these principles of industrial hygiene, including indoor air quality controls, ventilation systems, how to do these assessments, toxicology, epidemiology, biostatistics. And I think it's important because otherwise it's the Wild West out there.
Joseph:People are seeking guidance on indoor air quality. I have an indoor air quality issue. Who am I going to hire? So what does the public know you hire? You know anybody could open up a shop and say I'm an indoor air quality. I have an indoor air quality issue. Who am I going to hire? So what does the public know you hire? You know anybody could open up a shop and say I'm an indoor air quality specialist and there's lots of great people doing that. I think the certification actually helps.
Joseph:I'll tell you where I've seen it actually play out recently, maybe a little surprising to me, because actually I've been a critic of the name industrial hygiene. Like who wants to be an industrial hygienist? The public doesn't know what an IH is, so it has a branding problem. In my view. I don't lead with it because nobody knows what this is, but certainly it's respected in the field. But where it has really caught my attention is I've been doing a lot of work related to the LA fires and trying to help the community in any way we can with this 10 plus university consortium and I'm on the team that's doing the exposures. So what's in the air, water, soil, dust, and a lot of homeowners out there and people live in apartments are hiring their own contractors to do testing of lead and soil or testing the indoor air quality. And I'm seeing the reports come back and, my gosh, it's all over the place in terms of quality. And I'm seeing the reports come back and, my gosh, it's all over the place in terms of quality. Some people are using the wrong thresholds, there's basic math mistakes and people are making decisions about their health, their kids' health. Should I live here? Do I remediate? Do I get insurance Based on some of this shoddy work?
Joseph:But I have heard a lot of people saying I was on a meeting with schools the other day providing guidance on schools and a couple of people said, yeah, I've hired an industrial hygienist. So that community has realized that, oh, I'm looking for a certified industrial hygienist to do the testing, kind of like nobody really knew what an epidemiologist was until the pandemic. And then everyone said everybody in public health is an epidemiologist. Well, in that community that's been hit really hard, totally devastated. It has now permeated through that. What you need to do is look for a certified industrial hygienist to help you figure out these questions of what's in the air, water, soil, how do I remediate it, what controls should be in place. So I'm a big fan of it. For that reason I think the certification is good.
Joseph:I think there's some obvious challenges. I mean, as of just a couple of weeks ago, niosh. I think there's some obvious challenges. I mean, as of just a couple of weeks ago, niosh National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health doesn't really exist in the United States. They have been a big supporter of industrial hygiene and they do their own health hazard assessments. So I think the field is going to have some challenges there, like we're seeing across the US, to be honest. But I still think there's an important role for certified industrial hygienists in this. Healthy buildings, indoor air quality space.
Simon:Yeah, I've been having a couple of conversations around this topic recently. We've had some industrial hygienists on the podcast, some of them who specialized in air quality as well, which there's not that many who've done the kind of the air quality module and I'm a big fan of equivalences or analogies to to other sectors. And we were kind of talking around this theme of an industrial hygienist really being your general practitioner in the medical world. And you know, indoor air quality sensors are a bit like health wearables, you know. They give you those you've put in your book, they give you the pulse of the building. But at some point you're going to want to go and take have a blood test with your gp um. You're not going to rely on your garmin to tell you whether or not you've got diabetes or not, right? So at some point you go to the gateway of medical practitioners um to to either give you the right advice at the right time or direct you to very particular specialists for conditions that they think or consider you may have. And for me, industrial high genius are a little bit like that in the building world. The question is, where's the access point to them? Because we're seeing a lot of that sector move in the other direction. You point to this in the book and I think it's a very good point that a lot of weight is being put on the health of the building through very light roles like accredited practitioners or APs and so on, and even less actually in a lot of cases, as you put, people just set up as air quality people or manufacturers that make gear all of a sudden are air quality specialists. So there's definitely a hierarchy appearing and I'm interested on your thoughts of where the appropriate level is for industrial hygiene, because I think you lay out very clearly in the book the value of that role and it really turned my eye to the value of those kind of practitioners, and one of the things the pandemic did also showed you that people involved in managing risk in buildings, which is what industrial hygienists really do at the core are very good at working their way through complex and nuanced problems, because there's no such thing as zero risk in our environment. So they've operated in this world that's perfect for air quality to a very high level.
Simon:But it's not clear where those gateways are to those practitioners at the moment and in fact we see the likes of wealth standards and stuff moving in the other direction. You know they now allow non-annual checks of the building. You can do it almost completely digitally with low cost sensors, which to me seems to be broadening it in the opposite direction somehow. And again you point to this in your book that there is going to be this settling of the market over time and we'll, and perhaps just that's the way it will be. There'll be a very large low-cost sensor, low-skilled part of the market. There'll be some people with some extra expertise in certain areas, and then you'll have industrial hygienists and perhaps some very, very specific specialists beyond them. But I just don't see at the moment where that clear doorway is, for now is the right time for a hygienist. Yeah, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on that where you think it is and where you think it. Should it be somewhere else? Is there a gap somehow?
Joseph:Yeah, really interesting. I think we need to have a big tent and I think there's plenty of room and there's a need for all of this expertise. I'm a fan of as many people getting as much training at all different levels around what's into air quality like architects getting training on this topic and also I think a lot of that work is about how do you administer some of these standards and certifications, so you need people to be able to say I know how this works. I do think there's an important role for certified industrial hygienists or others with that kind of expertise, and here's why I think it's critical and I make this point in the book and I think it's really serious and people need to pay attention to this carefully.
Joseph:When you're making decisions about the building and health, you're making decisions about health of the people in that space and you're ultimately making risk decisions for the organization. So something as simple as what should the threshold be for PM 2.5 indoors be Well, we could have five people on your show and debate this and you'll get every answer. From nine microgram per cubic meter, the current standard for annual standard, you'll get people saying it should be 35, the US-based 24-hour limit, you're getting people correctly saying, hey, the evidence shows it could be eight or even lower. You'll have people talking about the WHO standards of five or 15. All of it is quote-unquote right. So these are nuanced decisions. That's an easy one, and you can't get it wrong in a building when you're talking about people's health in their life. I think I share the story in the book about you know, if you're talking about a green building and I make a mistake on my energy calc, it's not great. But also, you know, no one's health is at risk. If I make a mistake on my choice of thresholds, how I monitor it, where I monitor it, how I interpret that data, then someone's life could be at stake. Ultimately.
Joseph:I've seen and been part of lawsuits around this kind of stuff. People get sick in buildings all the time. I get emails every week from people who are sick in buildings looking for support or help. So this is really important and this is where I kind of make the distinction in the book about the different levels of expertise. We need general practitioners, we need experts. We need deep, deep subject matter experts. When it's something specific hey, there's a formaldehyde issue. Who's the formaldehyde expert? It's a ventilation issue. It's a radiation issue. Let's get the radiation expert in. So I think it's really serious and I think it's been simplified and I actually think some of the.
Joseph:I love the technology, the sensor companies, but I think some of these thresholds, when I see them, I don't agree with them and I think this kind of red, yellow, green banding isn't always right. Sometimes it's overly alarmist, unnecessarily, and sometimes things can slip through. So I think this is where it is and I do talk about the book. It's starting to shake out. So we're starting to see this. As sensors become more popular and common, then the companies are need to grapple with these questions.
Joseph:I wrote an article in Harvard Business Review on this topic. Every company should be monitoring the air, indoor air quality, in real time. In that article I talk about what's measured, co2 particles, why they matter, how you might interpret that data, but also the end of the article, I hope, are some useful tips to say. That's just the beginning. That's just the beginning.
Joseph:You actually have to think about well, who does the data analysis? Do you have the right expertise? Who's setting those thresholds? When does it escalate to the building manager? When does it escalate to environmental health and safety? When does it escalate to the C-suite? Who's making those decisions? How should things be corrected? What's the right sensor density? All of these are really important questions. I think I've seen it in practice, but I think they get brushed over a little bit. I think that's the point I'm trying to make in that book about why I bring in certified industrial hygienists, the risks that's out there and the importance Ultimately it comes down to when you're making decisions around a building. You're making decisions about people's health and you cannot cut corners and you need the right expertise when you're making those decisions. Otherwise you're putting people and a company or a school at risk.
Simon:And perhaps that's just a reflection of where the market largely is, in that so far, largely the green building and the healthy building movement has been really just incremental changes on buildings that were probably pretty good anyway. You know, these are brand new buildings, headquartered buildings, buildings where there's a lot of investment. Very few people are taking their worst building in their portfolio and going right. We're going to get this to where it needs to be. Mostly it's window dressing, mostly in the sense that these buildings are already good. It helps with the design decisions and so on. So you can get away with placating kind of statements on healthy buildings because probably you're not going to do a lot of damage to most people. But that's not a lot of built environments out there. There are people still working in 60s 70s offices with low tile ceilings and bad lighting and formaldehyde reeking off everything still and probably off gassing and plumes coming up from God knows where, and they're a very long way away from a Chase Morgan and a JP and a LinkedIn headquarters in Dublin and so on, and that's where the risks sit, the big risks sit for health and it and it's. It's interesting where all this sediment settles to what this picture ultimately looks like how businesses look at the healthy building movement and go right.
Simon:Who are the right people and when to be talking to for the right buildings? And at the moment most most of the money is in the easy stuff, is in the new buildings and the primary buildings. But when we're getting into middle american schools and industrial facilities and so on, hygienists have got to be at the center of that. I can't see any other way unless there's another profession pops up that can can deal with it somehow. But then you've got a skills and labor thing. It's not an easy qualification to get. As you say, it's got a marketing problem. Who wants to be an industrial hygienist? As you quite rightly put, we've somehow got to attract, I would imagine, lots of new good people into that sector and show that it has value to be one of these people.
Joseph:Yeah, I think that's right, and in my class at Harvard I teach on healthy buildings. I actually introduce a lot of industrial hygiene principles, but I don't mention that phrase industrial hygiene to about three quarters of the way through the semester. By the way, this is pretty much worker health and safety. We've been doing IH in this class, by the way, for anybody looking for a career opportunity, my students who are trained in industrial hygiene eventually go on to become CIHs. They never have a problem landing really good, well-paying, stable jobs. I get emails all the time too, with good companies asking me, hey, do you have any IH students coming out? With good companies asking me, hey, do you have any IH students coming out? We're looking to hire Because some of this is regulatory.
Joseph:A lot of IHs go into traditional environmental, health and safety roles or actually in industry, so there's a big need for it. I just think there's a need for an expanded market where it's not just industrial hygiene. I always thought maybe CIH could be rebranded as certified indoor health and you keep the CIH branding because that's ultimately what it's doing. But there are people doing heavy industry true heavy industry environmental, health and safety. But also I agree with your assessment that we're going to need a bigger expansion of this. Look, it doesn't have to be every SPS, cih, but they could be directing these teams. There are a lot of these certifications, like the certified safety professional has an associate safety professional building towards the full credential. But I agree, I think there has to be a lot more of it.
Joseph:And to this point you made earlier about the buildings that need the most help. One thing I want to add to that is I agree, and I've done a lot of these sick building cases in bad buildings, and what I've also learned is that it doesn't take much to take a not great building and turn it into a great, healthy building really very low levels of investment. It's just that usually when it bubbles up as a problem and somebody's sick, by then it's too far gone. You've used the human as the sensor. That's dangerous, but it's just been due to years of neglect and not paying attention to some absolute basics about how to keep a building functioning in a way that keeps people safe.
Simon:Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and one of the biggest things we can do is break this run to failure culture within the HEVAC sector that systems only get looked at when they start making a noise or dripping on your desk. You know that somehow this is seen as an important role. As the fire safety person that's coming around checking the the smoke detectors that you should expect to see people in the working day coming around checking you're still getting the right amount of air into your office and your working space. That that becomes the norm, because at the moment most ventilation systems out there only get looked at when something stops working or makes a noise. You know that's the hard reality of it.
Simon:One of the interesting things that Brad Prezant said was that there's a nuance to healthy buildings within occupational hygiene or industrial hygiene, because a lot of industrial hygiene is like the safety of industrial hygiene, because it's all about big thresholds and very known protocols and you go in and you test and it's either above or below a very defined line and it's good, chunky, solid work and the challenge with a lot of the healthy buildings work is you're going into sick buildings.
Simon:There could be any number of things. It's there's confounding factors, it can be quite a an intense and nuanced environment to working and that suits some people, you know, and doesn't suit others. So even within industrial hygiene, not everybody's kind of suited to working in the healthy buildings. It's a bit like he made the equivalence of the fear that general practitioners have going anywhere near alternative medicine, that sometimes when you move into the positive elements of things, the things that improve well-being, into the positive elements of things, the things that improve wellbeing, it all becomes a bit fluffier and grayer and all of a sudden makes it much harder for you to stand over the things that you're saying.
Joseph:I think that's fair, I think right. A lot of the classic industrial hygiene has been around these kind of thresholds and it's more nuanced and sophisticated. But I agree, you're right, and this kind of you know, this recognition that health is just not the absence of disease but it's about flourishing, feeling productive, feeling well. And how do you then capture that? And then you're going from things like what is a risk-based threshold to one that's what's moving towards health optimized. And I agree, a lot of people feel less comfortable in that space. But that's also where we were trying, and others are trying to give the tools and the science to say, hey, we're seeing some of these benefits that aren't captured in, you know, gross outcomes like someone's out sick, but actually they can think a little bit clearer. And therefore it's not just about a risk based threshold, but it's how do you actually create these thresholds that are helped optimize these targets that we should be chasing and building.
Simon:So it's not just acceptable but actually healthy and productive spaces segwayed into one of my other questions which was just about that actually was about since writing the book, has there been any substantive new science from your perspective on the, the well-being and the productivity benefits? Because at the time of writing you at the early days of the cog effects study, or certainly the first tranche of it, but there's been lots of work by lots of others as well since then on looking at things like performance and cognitive impact and well-being in various different spaces. Have you seen some new stuff come through that that really makes builds on that foundation that you were looking at five, six years ago?
Joseph:Yeah, so there's a lot of great evidence before our research on cognitive function. There's great evidence since and I think what? In all of these studies, by the way, I think for us what we call our CogFX series. I think we've had seven or eight. The last two just got published in the past two months and when I look across groups doing this work around the world, what I see is a really consistent story that each new study that comes out is really telling us a consistent finding across kids in elementary school, kids in high school, university students, office workers, older adults, university students, office workers, older adults, airplane pilots no matter where we look, even with the intricacies of different methods, different approaches, we are seeing that when people spend time in these better spaces, better indoor air quality, they're performing better on these tests of cognitive function. There's lots of nuance out there. In every study there's lots of discussion about what are the different factors, what are the right thresholds, but I think it's important to take a step back and look across all of the studies over decades, including the newer studies, and see that they're all aligning on some of these key findings. There's still lots of scientific inquiry endless on specific parts of this line of research, but it's telling a consistent story. And so what?
Joseph:I think one of the most important changes I've seen since the pandemic is I'm starting to see alignment across many scientists on a couple of different things. One, finally, I think a recognition that the current standards are unacceptably low. The science is really clear. Two there have been many people writing including we jointly authored a piece in science promoting or proposing we use health-based standards for things like ventilation rates. So this 15 liters per second per person or 30 CFM per person, you're starting to see a coalescing. There is widespread agreement, disagreement on the specifics, but when I was the chair of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission's Task Force on Safe Work, safe School and Safe Travel had excellent collaborators in there Rich Corsi, lindsay Marr, lydia Maraska, many others, shelley Miller, on and on. I shouldn't have started naming people. I should name everybody.
Simon:Yeah, it's a big list, those open letters. It's a big list.
Joseph:God forgive, but we had good discussions about this and we all agreed that, hey, the floor was too low. There was massive benefits to raising that floor. Yes, that hey, the floor was too low. There was massive benefits to raising that floor. Yes, there are disagreements on what the exact number should be for ventilation rate. There's also disagreements on what's the right metric. Is it air change per hour metric? Is it volumetric flow per person, volumetric flow per area? Lots of pros and cons to all of these, but actually to me anyway, I felt like we had grinded to a halt trying to figure out the exact number, while the public is like give me an answer. We kept saying, hey, we need better air quality, more ventilation rates, and people are like what's the number? And it's all over the map.
Joseph:So I think that was probably the biggest value of that report we put out on proposing these health-based ventilation targets is we kind of took an approach, said here's three different metrics. People like here's a good, better, best, Most important thing is you start doing something to get off the floor of these minimum, unacceptable standards. So you asked about how the science has changed. I think the science has just reinforced the message of the many benefits, including around infectious disease, cognitive function, many health benefits of indoor air quality. You're starting to see alignment on big picture fundamentals, while there's still disagreement or scientific nuance to be worked out on what's the exact right number, the best metric. Let's look at the pros and cons of all. So I feel like to me that's been one of the biggest fundamental shifts in terms of the scientific literature being published on our field since the pandemic or during the pandemic yeah, and god love scientists and their, their consensus in disagreement.
Simon:You know that it's um. Anybody that doesn't understand scientists can't understand why they never agree on anything um, but can have a consensus in a general direction. And I think from outside it and I sit largely outside it you can see there's been a a shift, I would say, in looking at ventilation through the lens of health and recognizing much more need for interdisciplinary approaches and recognizing that we can't let perfection be the enemy of the good, that actually what the industry needs is answers and that again it goes back to my experience of working in some of these groups during the pandemic the people that are brilliant at getting answers are the ones that are used to working through the lens of risk that there are no perfect answers. You've just got to give people something to work with and something to aspire to. You know that's how risk works and you can see that in ashrae, you can see that in sibsy, you can see that in these organizations and you've seen a real. I think it's unfair to say it's a change in direction, because there's always been people promoting health within all of those organizations, but they have a bigger voice now. I think and recognize that we can increase airflow rates.
Simon:I'll have you back to the podcast in just a minute, but I 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 the podcast had been trying out some of their sensors here in my office, which I still have here today, and with customers. I was seriously impressed then and remain so. Imbiote are a multi-disciplinary team with a common goal to promote healthy and sustainable interior spaces. They manufacture smart indoor air quality monitors and an exceptional cloud platform. Look, I get to see and use many products, as you can imagine, and Imbia stands out here the quality of the product, the innovation they bring with sensors and connectivity options, and a platform with some unique approaches to reporting and integration with many of the reference standards in the sector, like Reset, well, lead and others. Their devices can also be integrated to any building to control and automate the operation of HEVAC systems, ensuring optimal air quality and energy savings.
Simon:Details are in the show notes, as always, and at airqualitymattersnet and at INBIOT. That's I-N-B-I-O-T dot E-S. Now back to the podcast. There was perhaps a cheeky question, um, and that is is co2 a pollutant when it comes to cognitive effects. What's your stance on this at this stage? Is it, is it the confounding factors and the company that it keeps, or is your feeling that you see direct impacts from CO2 and we can use that as a direct marker for some of these performative outcomes?
Joseph:All right. So I think my answer is going to really surprise you. I think it's one of the least interesting questions in indoor air quality science. I've studied it, written about it, Many others have. I think it's been a little overemphasized as like the key question that everybody's trying to chase or debunk or prove and honestly I think it's not that interesting from a practitioner Like what does it actually matter to people's health and buildings? I'm not saying it doesn't matter, I just think it's certainly not where my head is. I don't think about this question. To be honest I don't. We've studied it. It's not on my roadmap of the next 10 pressing questions I think our field needs to answer. Certainly it's not on my roadmap for my team.
Joseph:I don't have any studies planned on this specific question about CO2 as an independent pollutant, but I'll answer the question based on what I think I suspect it is. I think what you see in a lot of the different studies is like what we see in the early days of any topic that we study in the field of environmental health or indoor air quality. Different studies are finding different things. Some are finding a relationship between CO2, maybe with one test. Another test is not showing it. There's different sample sizes, different study designs. I suspect it is based on what I see, on the science not saying the studies that are showing a null finding are good studies, but I just suspect it is. And I think what our field will eventually work out, or those who are interested in pursuing this, will be to work out actually how much of a pollutant it is.
Joseph:Right, I mean, it's parasols, it's the dose that makes the poison. So anything can be a pollutant, certainly at very high levels. We know about CO2. And the question is are these lower levels interesting? I think there's certainly compelling evidence that that's the case, Whether or not it holds, or there's compensatory responses, or it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, like maybe some of these results are statistically significant but not meaningful enough to see an impact. Statistically significant but not meaningful enough to see an impact. But we know CO2 is very useful as an indicator and a proxy to study related to occupancy and ventilation. So its utility, I think, is unquestioned. And if I'm managing a building, then this question of is CO2 a direct pollutant is not all that interesting because we know the relationship between CO2 a direct pollutant is not all that interesting because we know the relationship between CO2 and other pollutants.
Simon:And there's other stuff to worry about.
Joseph:to be frank, I'm telling you honestly, it's not anywhere on my list. People might be surprised, because I see the debates happening, I see what's out there, I see it all and I just I don't feel very passionately about it because I think there's other. There's bigger, more important questions, Not that it's not an important question. I think there are other things I'm personally driving towards understanding and I think this question ultimately get worked out. So where is it? Do we see an effect? If it's cognitive function, which I suspect is real which parts, which test is a show up in or not? Is it a subtle effect? Are people compensating? Is it these questions of you know, bio effluent, and so I I think those are interesting, but it's just not something that I'm driving towards. Certainly, we're using CO2 in our studies and as we think about occupancy and ventilation and the relationship between some of these health outcomes, but that independent pollutant, I don't have any studies planned on that right now.
Simon:No, fair enough. And I think when I asked this of Andrew Persily a while ago bless him, he's been looking at CO2 since time immemorial. And oh god, why are you asking me? I'm fed up with talking about it. Um, but you know, the trouble is the fact remains co2 is one of the fundamental markers that we use out there as a way of understanding performance of building. So, although perhaps sometimes we get sick to death of it, sometimes this is the first time people are hearing about it or they're getting misinformation about it, and it's an interest. It's interesting in that sense in that it's a known met. It, particularly since the covid pandemic, has become a known metric, one of the few that people understand, and it gets tied into things. So it's it's interesting in that sense, but very dull in the scientific sense that there's just been so much done on it.
Joseph:Um, yeah, so let me. But let me clarify something too, because I don't want you to cut a snippet on this. That's like I don't think co2 is important, or something I promise.
Simon:I promise, I won't edit that bit as a snippet either. I know, I know but you're right.
Joseph:But your specific question was like co2 is a direct pollutant. So I think it's important People are studying it, but I didn't mean to be so glib about it. But also the it's unequivocal that CO2 is important to understand and I still think there are important questions out there. So I don't want people to come away with the impression that none of us in indoor air quality think that CO2 is important. It's been studied a lot, studied to death in good ways. But this question of direct pollutant, I think it's an ongoing scientific debate and you know there'll be some. I'm sure there's a lot of good studies underway that we'll learn more about it. I'm curious to see, but I just don't. I'm not diving any deeper into it personally.
Simon:Yeah, and I think you make a very good point that its utility has proven to be unbelievably powerful in automation of spaces understanding air change rates, co2 decays. All of these things have been really useful in this bigger data. Particularly as we've got more trust in the sensors, their algorithms and logic. Its utility has become a very integrated tool in managing a lot of spaces which again five years ago I mean I remember even 10 years ago NDIR sensors being a fairly new thing and struggling to find power outputs for them and, like all of us running around with data loggers, it's just changed out of all recognition you know, and enabled us to see buildings in ways that we've never been able to see it before.
Simon:It's an interesting one On a similar not on a similar subject, but on this kind of positive well-being part of it. In one part of the book you talk about very well the kind of the health performance indicators and the quadrants of how you look at performance of spaces, and one of them that is tied to that performance end of things. The bit that I took away from it was the bit where you say luckily the academics have already done this part. We've already assessed the performance impacts of air quality on cognitive performance and well-being and so on, so you don't have to. Is that likely to change? Do you think over time, are we going to be in a position where we can move from relying on studies to demonstrate the importance of something an academia to real time or practical ways of seeing performance from a healthy buildings perspective for business?
Simon:As you, you know, as you put over and over in your publications, businesses don't like reading academic papers. You know they want tools and metrics and kpis and so on to be able to understand if something's having an impact, and that that's one of those quadrants of the healthy performance indicators that we can't do currently very well. Do you see that changing? And if it does change, where will that come from? Do you think Will it come realistically, from health wearables or assessing big data of performance of keystrokes, or something that we're not expecting?
Joseph:So I think there's always going to be a need for this basic science and indoor air quality happening, because we're always surprised, otherwise we wouldn't be scientists. I think we're always trying to advance the science and I think I'll be surprised, like everybody else, about new things. Who knows what we learn in the next 10 years that will ultimately inform practice? I think the point I'm trying to make in the book is years that will ultimately inform practice. I think the point I'm trying to make in the book is that we have enough evidence right now to do things to the building or with the building that we know ultimately drives human health and performance. And that part of the book, for those who aren't familiar with it, I was adopting, or co-opting, the language of business. Talk about KPIs or key performance indicators, and so we write about HPIs or health performance indicators, and I split this into quadrants left and right, leading and lagging indicators. But the most important thing is the horizontal split. So above the horizontal line is human health things we care about. Are people out sick, are they feeling well, are they performing their best? Below the line is what the building can do. That we know influences the top line. I make the case in the book with my co-author that the top line is actually hard to measure. You're not going to go around measuring people's cognitive function, how productive they are. You can measure sick rates, illness rates, you can do that. But the point we're trying to argue in the book is that I know, based on all the great science, that if I manage the building I am automatically influencing that top line performance. We have study after study showing cognitive benefits, reductions in infectious disease transmission. You don't have to measure it in your small office to prove it. Air quality influences. This HPI discussion is that it feeds information that's below that horizontal line around the building factors that matter most lighting, acoustics, air quality. What the new science is telling us about, what it can inform and improve in terms of employee health, safety and productivity In the middle, at the bottom, is well then, how do you measure that, the building performance?
Joseph:And this is where we talk about these real-time indoor air quality sensors as a way to keep the pulse, like a doctor would keep the pulse of a patient. How do you keep the pulse of the building? Well, you have real-time indoor air quality monitors. And to your question, this is where I see a lot of the innovation happening that moves the science into practice. Because, as we know, right now the indoor air quality measures monitors are measuring a handful of good indicators, but it's not everything we want to look at. But we know that investments, for example, like through ARPA-H and even private companies, there are new sensor tech in development right now and sometimes in academic labs that will in near future measure things like actual virus concentrations.
Joseph:Well, that will then start to change practice, because now you have new information and you know we write for a business audience in that book too. So it's the classic business maxim what gets measured, gets managed. So now we know the building influences human health, performance, the above the line part, and we actually have tools now to measure it, some indicators in real time. We we actually have tools now to measure it, some indicators in real time. We'll have new tools coming in. So now you actually have a business case for improving the building and improves employee performance and productivity and you have a way to measure it. And because you can measure it, it gets managed, it can get invested in, it can get quantified. So that's kind of how I see that part of the book, kind of weaving in. How do we take basic indoor air quality science, feed it into the business discussion, including about how you're going to measure and monitor and where this field is moving, and we'll kind of add to these extra dimensions. We can start to measure inside buildings.
Simon:As so much of that basic principle is leveled at the 300 of the 3300 rule and I'll put some notes on it in the show notes people that don't know what we're talking about rather than us explaining it, but it's so much is based on the value proposition of the, the performance and of people in a space. What we're asking of people, though, in that framing, is to trust us on the performing bit right ultimately and as you say, you can't manage what you don't measure. Now it might be easier to measure performance of a business at a big scale, but if we're trying to reach into the longer tail of the built environment and smaller and smaller companies, do you think asking business to trust us is enough, or will ways of quantifying and measuring that incremental performance of people in a space as a result of healthy buildings have to come to play in some way? Do you think?
Joseph:I think measuring performance is going to have to come into play, but I also think that ultimately, that trust factor comes in, even with the measurement of performance. So it's not just trust me, this is good for your employees and do it. You have to defend that with good science. Just like we had greenwashing, there is the danger of health washing. So it's got to be trusted. Good science, good studies that say if we do this, you also need good science to say, if we measure it, that these are the right things to measure. There's good science on what are the thresholds, good science on what are the averaging times. You should use questions like that. So ultimately, it does feed into this. You're still going to have to have that trust factor, but I think where you're maybe getting at is around the trust. It's like you're verifying performance.
Joseph:So it's no longer the case you design a building hey, we set it to these specs. You told us no. On top of that, we want you to measure the performance and verify that it's designing the way it was designed, and you can do that a couple of different ways so we can deploy some of these relatively inexpensive air quality monitor networks. That's not going to measure everything. I'm a believer also in being sure you're testing the air and water in the building using some of these lab-based methods where we can actually look at the actual VOCs that are in the air or the actual constituents in water biological, chemical. So I think all of that to your your point.
Joseph:I think that's where you're getting, that there's. There's an opportunity now to verify performance, because in the past, as you know, we have a lot of these design standards that are not performance standards. Oh, we design this beautiful building, we forget about it. Performance slips over time. No one's measuring it. Uh. So with these new tools and even some of these old tools, these lab-based test methods, we can actually verify, but they're ultimately still going to have to trust that science.
Simon:To still man that trust argument a little bit. If I've pitched a capital spend on improving a building to a business on the basis that look and as you point out in your book, to a business on the basis that look and as you point out in your book, there's a double-digit potential of performance on your bottom line of the business by improving the performance of your people. And we improve EVAC and we put sensors in and the building's performing and the ventilation's working and the business doesn't see a double-digit growth on its bottom line for all sorts of confounding reasons. I mean, you know, the state is going through quite an interesting time at the moment when it comes to tariffs and things. So all of a sudden you're in a position where you've got to quantify the performance of people, that the benefits of a healthy building have transpired.
Simon:That's been a large part of the pitch of a healthy building and at the moment it seems to me to still man this argument a little bit that we're basing a lot of a big chunk of the sales pitch of this on something that we're saying no, you're going to have to trust us. The academics have done this. There is a performance gain from being in a healthier air quality space, but we can't really measure it. Well, we could come in and do some surveys and questionnaires at the end of the day and so on and try and measure it in some way, but there's a lot of trust. We're asking there for what is effectively a big part of the pitch, aren't we?
Joseph:Well, I think so and this is where I think you rely on good science and this is why we. You know, there's a reason. I co-authored it with a Harvard Business School professor who teaches real estate finance at Harvard and it's like look, we walk through the performance. Anyone can interrogate this, interrogate our numbers. In fact, we have a Harvard Business School case study where we actually give the Excel tool to the students and say play with this. And we invite them to say what assumptions have to be right. What's the CapEx spend to have a healthy building? What's the OpEx? What do you think the productivity benefits are? Do you think all this science is BS? Well, change the number. You don't think it's 1%, make it a half percent, make it a quarter percent. What do you have to believe as a business owner? We do this with business students every semester what do you have to believe to make that investment? And I think ultimately there's a couple of skeptics, but ultimately most come away with something that a business executive once told me after he saw me present on this. He said if your math is off by two orders of magnitude, it's still worth it. He's right in one way the math isn't off by two orders of magnitude, but it spoke to the value proposition, and the cascading and multiple benefits of having a healthy building so far outweigh the initial investment and operating costs that you and I would model it differently. You had a hundred guests on everyone modeled this slightly different. Ultimately, though, big picture, we come out with the same answer that this executive saw. Even if you're wrong, it still makes sense because when you're talking about human performance, productivity out sick less often, regardless of which study you choose, which collection of studies, these incremental improvements lead to these big benefits. It gets down to that 330-300 rule, so I'm glad you'll post the link to it. We talk about it in the book, we walk through the business pro formas and I encourage anyone to interrogate it. Tell us where we're wrong, do it, do your own math, but I think if you start modeling the nuance, even if you disregard you, choose a different number in the model, I think you come out with the same answer here and I think that's really important as part of the message. It's not like trust this one study, trust this. It's interrogate the numbers and what do you have to believe? What assumptions to say? It's just worth it. In addition, you also have the massive benefit of risk reduction in terms of the threat of people getting sick. So we can argue on the productivity benefits. We know that it's linked to these decreases in respiratory disease transmission. We also know that bad indoor quality is linked to these other sometimes very serious problems in buildings and when you do the math on the numbers, it becomes an absolute no-brainer that this is a benefit. I do think there's really good opportunity. Talk about where the next opportunity is here.
Joseph:I wrote about this in Harvard Business Review as well about how do you merge the argument around green and healthy buildings. This has been this unnecessary conflict. It's been a wrong dichotomy, in my opinion, for too long. But it starts to speak to how can you show all the benefits at once. You're gonna save energy. You're gonna save money, people will be more productive. They're going to save energy. You're going to save money, people will be more productive, they'll be safer, happier. And you just make it a decision. That is a dumb decision not to do it, but that involves linking together a couple of threads. Sometimes the arguments I've seen out there get too simplistic, which sometimes you need different levels of messaging. I get that, but I think that's the challenge and ultimately why I wrote that article is to kind of head off this argument that you can't have both. I think it's a false argument. You can't have an energy efficient building. That's healthy. That's nonsense. But I think that gets to how you sell it and package it up too.
Simon:Yeah, I mean there's inherent complexity in a scale of a challenge and if you combine sustainability and green buildings with healthy buildings, that's quite a lot of stuff to get through. But it doesn't mean they're in opposition to each other. And you know don't get me wrong, joe, I'm you're pushing on open doors with me, but it's it's uh, it, it's an interesting idea. This proving the business case and I've had this conversation in air quality as well is you get caught up in the nuance. But the reality is it's such a slam dunk that it doesn't really matter if we're off by a bit, if something's that harmful or something has that much of a benefit. What are we worried about? You know, there are all these co-benefits tied into it.
Joseph:This is why I like your show and how you do this, and I tell you like this is why any of us, I think, like doing these. Is that out of this discussion. That's going to stay with me. So I hear these challenges, good challenges out in the world, and to me it tells you where the roadblocks are and then to me that informs okay, I know how we can remove that roadblock. This is the study, or set of studies that are needed. Simon's raising a good point here. You're hearing it from the market. Hey, I can't sell my whatever that value proposition. The question I keep getting back is prove it to me in my building. So what other studies, case studies, articles, lines of evidence are needed to then hit that roadblock? So appreciate that. That's something I'll take from this meeting. I already see it lodging in my head like okay, this is a roadblock. People are hearing how do we remove that roadblock? What's the line of evidence that's needed to help?
Simon:And sometimes in air quality and I've had this conversation quite a lot recently is sometimes I think we've seen these problems as an engineering problem or an economic problem to solve, and sometimes we're talking to completely the wrong people and framing it in completely the wrong way. Air quality and health in buildings is a human-centered challenge and sometimes it's about storytelling and culture and habit and resonance and things that aren't engineering based it. We, we know a lot. You've done the site, as you say. The science is there for a lot of this stuff, but sometimes the key to unlock stuff is in how we communicate and tell the stories, and that's why books like yours have been so valuable in telling that story, because it opened it up to a whole range of practitioners that never saw buildings in that light before, and now we've got to open that conversation up to a whole new group of people, and sometimes they're not who we think they are, and that was a question I noted down here from something you were saying earlier Today.
Simon:Who is the person in business or persons in business we should be having the conversation with about healthy buildings? Is it hr? Is it facility management companies? Is it the, the leases of buildings and the real estate sector. Where does that? I imagine you see it from a different, because I imagine you get quite a lot of inbound leads and interest in making my who do I go to for a? From a different, because I imagine you get quite a lot of inbound leads and interest in making my. Who do I go to for a healthy building? I know I'll, I'll talk to joseph allen and harvard um, but if you're an outbound person and you're trying to convince and create a market for healthy buildings from your sense of it, who are the key figures in the built environment that this should be resonating with or we should be talking to?
Joseph:Yeah, it's a really good question. So the easy and hard answer at the same time is everybody. But let me expand on that a bit and tie it into your last comment In the book. I think one of the most very helpful chapter that people will, I think, find useful is the one that talks about the whole value chain around buildings. And I mention that because when I take my healthy buildings class that's made up of public health students and architects and designers we go to Harvard Business School. We go to Harvard Business School my co-author, john, this is what he talks about in the beginning because you have to understand the ecosystem of buildings, to understand where the levers are and where the money flows are happening.
Joseph:And for each organization it's slightly different of where your entry point would be right. So sometimes it's classic environmental, health and safety. Sometimes it's people doing sustainability, they're thinking about certifications. Sometimes it's from environmental, health and safety. Sometimes it's people doing sustainability, they're thinking about certifications. Sometimes it's from the lender's perspective hey, I have to future-proof this building, certainly. If you can get to the C-suite, great. Sometimes the entry point is earlier on in the general contract or sometimes it's at the architect making these decisions. So John maps this out. He led a family big construction business in New England for 100-year construction. He knows this space and I see my students' eyes light up and their wheels spin when they see this because it's like, oh, I want to sell healthy buildings to a company.
Joseph:Okay, this question. What's the point of entry? Well, if you don't understand the landscape and who reports to who where the money flows are going, then you don't understand where the levers are and then your message has to change for each audience. The lenders care about something different than the insurers cares about something different than the architects, the owner, the occupier, the building supplier, any of the subs, the sheet metal sub all the way through the HVAC sub. So you have this complex landscape. But I use that as a roadmap for where to target. Sometimes it gets to marketing communications. If you start getting to how you're going to lease and sell this place, sometimes it's all of it. So, anyway, that's probably not a satisfying answer for somebody who's looking for like, hey, you just got to go in through environment and safety and you're all set. Your product's going to land. You know, you'll be all set. It's just not that that. I know people know it's not that simple, but it was a loaded question.
Simon:In that sense I'm sure you guessed um, because it you know. Often I get asked the same, you know, is it what I'm trying to speak to hr and they just don't seem to care about the health of their employees. And and you, you describe very well there the complexity of the sector and not only needing to understand how it all stitches together but the cultures and language and pulse of each of those different parts of it. No-transcript. The podcast joe is fires you. You, particularly in north america, you've seen a real impact on people understanding the power of a building to protect, to protect you from external environments. You talk about it in the book also about security as well, that there's real value in a building offering shelter isn't there. I mean that's a core human instinct, both from a security perspective but also from a protection from the environment. That's something you've seen a profound move on, I guess, over the last few years, as we've seen some pretty significant fires or smoke spread across North America.
Joseph:Yeah, I, you know we've been doing this work for a long time, like many others, and we responded. When the wildfires hit Maui, responded right away. When the wildfires hit LA, and certainly when the skies in New York City turned orange from the Canadian wildfires, that woke a lot of people up. Wildfires don't happen on the East Coast. We're not impacted in a place like New York City. But the reality is, of course, wildfires are happening everywhere and smoke travels hundreds and thousands of miles. So everybody's impacted by this and I think so. I'll start with that. New York.
Joseph:When New York skies were orange, I remember pinging Aaron Burnett, who's a host on CNN, and saying I think it's urgent you get me or somebody like me on to talk about what people can do to stay safe, because the messaging that's out there is good but incomplete. It's a New York City mayor saying go inside, you don't want to breathe that outdoor air pollution Great, and you need to be sure you're moving into a place that has good levels of filtration. This is obvious for all of your listeners, but it wasn't resonating. That message wasn't getting out. This idea that we're breathing outdoor air pollution indoors like that doesn't sound right to people, but it's true, and so I forced my way on to kind of make this point. Similarly, when Maui happened, we had an NSF rapid grant and we were one of the universities doing, you know, and we were one of the universities doing you know support for the community there, some people testing ecological impacts. You know water quality. We were the ones doing indoor air quality assessments, recognizing that this was an indoor air quality issue. Same thing out in LA Lots of outdoor air quality modeling. That's really great and important. We are doing the indoor air quality assessments. We have a 50 home study. We're modeling every single residence across California for infiltration rates.
Joseph:To drive home this point that, when we think about these longer-term health studies, we're doing there too. It's critical that we don't just rely on an outdoor air quality monitor but we actually understand what's happening in people's homes where they're spending most of their time time and that's going to require understanding that building interface with the outdoor environment, which is our field, has studied this for a long time. There's great models out there. It hasn't always permeated through government response when they think about responding to threats. We did some work around mold in homes that were impacted after a hurricane and, again, mold in homes that were impacted after a hurricane and again, it's a little bit of an afterthought the lingering indoor air quality impacts.
Joseph:So ultimately that's what we're trying to do, but the premise is exactly right and I agree with you that buildings have the potential to be these places of refuge in the face of environmental threats, or they can clearly exacerbate problems. There's indoor sources and that's a whole separate point. But when we think about outdoor threats, they can actually really disentangle that or provide that barrier from outdoor threats coming from under the building, outdoor air pollution or they can create these false sense of security like hey, I'm indoors, I'm fine, and we know that's not always the case yeah, and I think that's fascinating that you know these spaces that we build for ourselves can both be a risk and a place of refuge.
Simon:And there's some very powerful storytelling to tell within that that there's such a bandwidth between protection and risk and that they can have such a profound impact. And I think you know we can tell that story both people seeing a risk from covid for the first time. Actually, buildings can present a risk to me in the short term and buildings can actually present a refuge and as place of safety to for me in the short term. And I think that's because often our conversations around air quality is so long-term and esoteric. You know, long-term chronic lung disease, cardiovascular disease and so on and so forth. It's very hard to translate that to people to communicate those longer-term risks. It's a bit like diets and smoking and so on. They're big public health complex messages. Diets and smoking and so on. They're big public health complex messages. But these tangible in the moment ends of the spectrum I think are fascinating from a storytelling perspective.
Joseph:Yeah, and I think it's new for people. But ultimately they get it kind of like the public got it during COVID that you know I think it was Lindsay. I first thought it was brilliant. Hey, this travels like cigarette smoke and it's like, oh, okay, we did that thing for New York Times where you could see the tracers filling up a room from people's lungs and it's like, oh, once you see that or get the visual, you can't unsee it. I think the same thing happens when we think about wildfire smoke.
Joseph:Honestly, when you tell people, hey, you know, smoke penetrates inside. You're breathing most of your breaths indoors, so most of the outdoor air pollution breathe can happen inside. First it's like a, that can't be right. And then they're like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. Now what do I need to do to? What could I do about it?
Joseph:I have found it resonates and it becomes intuitive Once people are like, oh yeah, that's obvious, right, the wall doesn't just stop everything. Some of that air pollution is getting inside. So I want to be sure whatever's inside I'm taking care of. I see the same kind of magic happening and the. You know people are really smart and they get it. But the message you know, I think I talk about the book. If you look about any story of outdoor air pollution, wildfire smoke, the accompanying picture is someone outside. It could easily be someone inside and that's where you're breathing most of that. You can be breathing most of that air pollution, but it never shows up in a news article about what you need to do inside or that outdoor air pollution, wildfire smoke is an indoor hazard.
Simon:Very rarely does this show up in an article. No, that's true, and there could be another podcast on that concept alone. I'm conscious of time here, joe, because I definitely want to talk to you about what you're learning from the wildfire smokes, particularly because I know there's some really fascinating stuff coming out of that, and the risk is that I assume everybody knows you. I think a lot of my listeners will do and will have read your book and know your work, but perhaps there are some people that don't know the nuts and bolts of what you do and how you got here. Could you perhaps just give me a quickish run through of how you found yourself in this space of air quality and ventilation in Harvard and the kind of stuff that you're now working on, because you're doing some fascinating things, from the wildfire smoke stuff to nine foundations, to a whole range of things. You're not here by accident.
Joseph:Yeah, in some ways I am. I think I accidentally stumbled on the field of public health and it was the best accident ever. You know, I studied biology. I was interested in environmental science. I was enrolled at Penn to go into an environmental science master's program and I happened to get a job as a research assistant at the Harvard School of Public Health and I didn't even know public health really existed. And as soon as I got into that environment I was like, well, this is what I've been looking for. It's actually the combination of environmental science and biology which I've been studying. Uh, but it's about environmental health. And so how do how do all these places that uh we spend our time influence our health? So I went on and studied, got a master's degree, got a doctorate, um, but it but the uh. But my training didn't really do much in the space of this kind of uh.
Joseph:Where I am now, I went out and did consulting for many years where I was part of a great company and I was part of their forensics uh team and we would do these investigations of sick buildings, and so half of us were kind of like industrial hygienists, toxicologists, environmental epidemiologists, biostatisticians. The other half were building scientists, engineers, and we'd link arms and ultimately solve these problems. And that's a little bit where my frustration came from with the field, like seeing all these things go wrong that are easily addressable in buildings. And so a faculty spot opened up. I had a research appointment at Harvard at the same time doing stuff on air quality and airplanes, but a full-time tenure track faculty spot opened up and I went for it. I decided to flip the script a little bit. Stop chasing sick buildings all the time. Create the Healthy Buildings Program, start adding to the body of evidence with other people who've been doing this for a long time and try to contribute and maybe try to bring in some of my practical experience, some of this business world thinking, into the communications. But that's been kind of that's how I got into it and ultimately I'm still a practitioner.
Joseph:I don't necessarily think of myself as, like a pure academic. I still advise, I help people respond to buildings where there are issues, where I'm advising good companies like JP Morgan on this great new building. Really it's an incredible building that really takes to heart these best of sustainable green building principles and healthy building principles really magnificent in all ways. Designed by Lord Norman Foster I've become friendly with. I teach in his institute, this great architect. So that's ultimately how I ended up here.
Joseph:I think I'm maybe my head I don't know exactly how I'd label myself but I'm in the private sector, trying to put this great science into practice. I'm trying to influence policy and standards. I'm trying to do the basic science that I think is important. But ultimately, you know, I'm in a school of public health. My background is in exposure and risk assessment.
Joseph:I'm called the Healthy Buildings Program, but really I'm in the field of exposure and risk assessment and so just trying to help people where we can, running towards problems, trying to. You know, sometimes it's acute problems like the wildfires in LA, but sometimes it's this problem that is all. Buildings are not designed for health. How do we ultimately help create the evidence base that ultimately will change codes and standards and practice everywhere such that we no longer have sick buildings out there? So a little bit of my kind of quick story, but also maybe a little bit of the philosophy of what I'm trying to do with. You know, really terrific colleagues I've had the pleasure of working with at my institution, but also really across the world but also really across the world.
Simon:Yeah, and if I may say one of the things that I, Beyond the actual detailed research that you're doing, that your ability to articulate the meaning behind this work has been very important.
Joseph:I appreciate that.
Simon:The more people that we have that are able to do that, the better, because, at the end of the day, if these trees are falling in woods and nobody can hear them fall, we don't know it's happening. And likewise, we've got to find ways of communicating this really important subject matter, which is air quality, because it's it's a a big impact on our long-term health and well-being and we've yet to really see that resonate.
Simon:We we've made big steps during covid, but, um, we've still got such a long way to go. So the more people you know so thank you the more people like you out there that are are able to well articulate it, because it is complex.
Joseph:Yeah, Well, put the thanks back to you. I mean, I think, like scientists, we're trying to find outlets. I think you do a nice job of kind of speaking across the industry, speaking in plain language. Clearly you know this topic well, but you're also drawing out some things you know we don't have. You know, I talk to the media a lot or write for the public in the Washington Post, New York Times, but you don't always have the chance for a long form discussion to kind of dive into the thinking a bit. So I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show, but I also appreciate you doing on the other shows. I'm not a part of job of kind of lifting these discussions and giving an outlet for us scientists to kind of communicate to people who are into this topic in a bit more detail than you'd get in a soundbite or a snippet and a little more human-to-human conversation than you'd get from a scientific paper.
Simon:Yeah, thanks, I appreciate that. And sometimes, yes, it is complex, but ultimately I was saying this recently that often all of this complexity, we're shoving through the conduit that is a building and ultimately buildings are often quite simple beasts. There are only so many levers we can often pull to affect an outcome. So, as complex as air chemistry is and fluid dynamics and building physics and stuff is, sometimes, as you very well put, all you've got to do is improve the filter in the hevax system and make sure it's delivering enough fresh outside air and and like sometimes, the basics can make very meaningful differences to outcomes. So, as much as we get caught up in the interest and the excitement of the detail, sometimes the levers we have at our disposal are very effective and not that complex, so we just need to understand its importance to say, well, okay, it's worth the spending, a bit of money, fix it. And that isn't just big buildings, that extends all the way into housing and education sectors and healthcare sectors as well.
Joseph:You know that sometimes, actually, this stuff isn't that hard that you know that the detail is, but sometimes mitigating risk isn't I think all of us in this space we like the detail, right, we're into it, um, and it's great, and then it's, then you're right. How do you then make it simple without being dumb, uh, but simple to implement, and actually so there's another report from our Lancet COVID-19 commission that ties right into this. So at one point we sat down during the pandemic and said what's the basics we'd like everybody to do, and we wrote a report called the first four healthy building strategies every building should pursue. And what's number one? It's the easiest, and I talk about it in terms of giving, like giving your car a tune-up, give your car a tune-up, giving your building a tune-up. It's commissioning the systems, just honestly, making sure the building is performed the way it was designed, and then you can find opportunities for improvement. But honestly, you're right, some of these things are so simple If we just commission our buildings, making sure they're performing the way they should, because everybody who's a practitioner has seen just sometimes silly mistakes, having filters installed the wrong way, like really kind of basic stuff that slips over time.
Joseph:Understandably, the facilities managers are often overwhelmed or they don't have the money to do this kind of work, but ultimately I think that's one that would have a lot of benefit. You bring the buildings back up the way they perform. It improves energy efficiency. So there's some wins there on the energy and dollars in the pocket too. But yeah, that's an example of a simple strategy that's super effective and I think everyone in our field would probably like that to be happening giving our buildings a regular tune-up, like we do for our cars.
Simon:Yeah, interestingly, here in Ireland, where I live, we had a code of practice for indoor air quality in the workplace that stemmed from the pandemic.
Simon:They realized there wasn't actually any national level guidance on how to manage buildings and one of the simple things they had there was every building should have at least a record, at least once every two years, of the performance of the ventilation in the building.
Simon:And it seemed like such a simple line in the document. And it seemed like such a simple line in the document. But then when you go out to the environment, to the building sector, you go can you show me a document in the last five years that says how the ventilation system is performing? And I haven't come across one building yet that has records of the performance of flow rates and ventilation into spaces. It's just never even been considered as a thing. So something even as fundamental as that, a simple line in a standard, can all of a sudden the industry? Now, if a health and safety inspector turns up at that building, they're going to say can you show me a ventilation inspection document please? They might not have it until that happens, but from that day on, every two years, who'll have to come around and measure the ventilation, and that could be a very profound thing for a lot of the built environment.
Joseph:I agree it gets into our conversation earlier about having codes and standards and then that verification and trust piece, so you can once you have a standard or code, then they have to live up to it. You can then think about enforcement or the right measurement protocols. I think it then unlocks this kind of accountability piece, which is really necessary yeah.
Simon:Now look before we run out of time, because we will, and I always knew we would. The last time I spoke to you, you were doing some really fascinating work for the California wildfires and you were learning a lot. You're part of a big cohort that's looking at this. You're looking at everything from indoors to outdoors to exposure to soils. You're really learning some things there, aren't you? About wildfires. What are some of the kind of more profound things that's popping up for you and standing out in that work so far?
Joseph:Well, so I'll share a couple things. Yeah, it's been a privilege to support the people of LA through this crisis. It's just absolutely devastating. And doing what we can and working with so many great scientists from the great California universities but really all over the country, and the goal is just to set. What we're trying to do is I'm on the exposures team essentially trying to understand air, water, soil, dust, when and where, what to do to stay safe, and then that's feeding into a larger health study because, believe it or not, we know a little bit about wildfires a lot, but not really we have never had an opportunity to understand them like this, this scale of a wildfire next to this dense urban city. So I tell you, you know, what's interesting, I think, is that one of the most interesting things is during the wildfires there was a. During the active fires and smoke, there's a continuous monitor in downtown LA that was doing continuous metals. So we don't have this everywhere, so there's only really one around there, and we saw a massive spike in lead concentrations during the fire, and this is currently where myself and others are really focused, outside of the. You know, now it's a couple months later, but it turns out that a lot of the soil testing is showing elevated levels of lead and we know the ash and soot were elevated in lead. So you have this urban wildfires. Many of the homes the vast vast majority of homes in Altadena and even the Palisades were built pre-70s have a lot of lead-based paint, have a lot of other legacy toxics and we saw that. We saw that in the plume and now we're seeing it in the settled soot and ash.
Joseph:And there are these really outstanding questions. Talk about our discussion about risk. What's the right threshold? How do you measure it? Who's defining risk? You have a million consultants out there defining different risk levels. Fema is not testing the soil after they do property cleanups, which is a break from how they've done this in the past. So there's politics involved and the insurers don't want to insure a new property or give a new mortgage for a new build out.
Joseph:And so you start to see the linkages between the basic science. Yep, we've done the air pollution modeling, we've seen the soil testing to this thresholding, to a policy question, to how does this influence business decision making? How does this influence lenders? How are people keeping their kids safe at schools and at home? And it becomes really complex, but it ties into our earlier discussion about the role of science and scientists, which is never in isolation of these other factors. It's easy to measure air quality. It's easy to measure metals and soil.
Joseph:It's tricky to answer some of those questions about thresholds, cleanups, these money dynamics, and so that's ultimately, I think, one of the interesting but really challenging aspects of this. And you have all of these dynamics and some people have lost their homes, some have not. You have areas that are wealthy, areas that are less wealthy, and it's all coming to bear on these questions of how do we build back better, how do we even clear our property so that we know it's safe and what is safe and who's defining it, which is? These are the questions we've been talking about since I've been on this podcast about indoor quality. Same things exist after the wildfire, so I find that particularly interesting from a you know, how can our field help communities? And these are the types of questions that come up that I don't always think we're prepared to answer or influence, but they're absolutely critical.
Joseph:The other thing I think that came out of the wildfire I think is interesting is that we have a data set that will be the first ever at-scale indoor air quality, minute-by by minute particle levels for over a thousand homes. So we released some of this data on the LA Fire Health website, la Fire Health dot org. And my team is analyzing the rest of that data. I think that'll be particularly interesting for the indoor quality folks because we haven't really had the live data adjacent to a fire at scale like this. So, very much like the Purple Air Network that people are aware of for outdoor air, we actually have a data set for indoor air quality all around LA and we're going to learn a lot about building design, infiltration and indoor air quality before, during and after one of these massive urban wildfires.
Simon:Isn't that going to be an interesting way we look at buildings going forward? These inherent data sets that we've never had before, that you only have to have one brand of an air quality sensor that is prepared to open source the data, with permission obviously, and all of a sudden you've got data sets you would have never stood a chance of getting before. That is a profound difference. Data sets you've, you would have never have stood a chance of getting before. You know that.
Joseph:That is a profound difference yeah, and think about this conversation we've having about what gets measured, gets managed. Well, why is indoor air quality been an afterthought? Well, we don't really measure it, or at least we'd measure, but it's not shared. Like you know, all the epa, outdoor air quality monitors, the purple air. Everybody has access, everybody gets those. We don't really have a similar map or understanding for indoor air quality, so largely then it's out of the public conscious, it's not catching reporters' attention, it's not capturing legislators' attention. But I think we have the opportunity and, honestly, the responsibility to be sure that's part of that conversation and we've been talking with EPA and FEMA and others and we've actually gotten that feedback that some of this work that we're promoting on hey, we've released data from these indoor air quality networks, here's what we're seeing has caught their attention. So it's actually doing what we're hoping is kind of one understanding for the people of LA, but to elevating indoor air quality into that national discussion.
Joseph:When we think about wildfire smoke by the way, this isn't I'm not saying the only ones doing this. When we think about wildfire smoke, by the way, this isn't I'm not saying the only one's doing this. I know a lot of great colleagues have done this for other wildfires. But you start to see momentum building to say, oh yeah, well, indoor, of course it'll just become an of course. Of course that has to be part of what we think about when we're responding to wildfires, both the active event but also the post wildfire events. We think about resuspension, rebuilding and even cleaning these places.
Simon:Yeah, I know we've got to be a little sensitive in the US at the moment about mentioning equity and fairness and things, but you were saying that you saw some differences in different parts of LA based on the history of the buildings and where they're from. Were you seeing some real equity differences, some social justice differences, depending on the types of demographics or areas that were exposed to wildfires? Did it, did it paint a picture, or is our grand chemical experiment in our buildings just so prolific now that every building is just so stuffed full of all sorts of retardants and phthalates and endocrine disruptors and you name it that it's just a? It's just a pea soup of stuff you're seeing after fires? Could you see differences in different areas?
Joseph:I think it's an everywhere, everyone problem. At the same time, we see differences and disparities, like we see across all health indicators, so of course we'd see it when it comes to buildings, environmental expos, exposures, wildfire events and things like this. So the one that'll make it tangible and concrete. Relative to the discussion we're having about seeing the lead plume, well, if you looked at the housing stock in the more wealthy areas versus less wealthy areas, well, the older homes that haven't been renovated, that haven't had the lead remediation, we saw higher concentrations of things like lead-based paint, lead in soil. So naturally, in these areas we're seeing higher levels of lead and the residual lead in soil which is and you're not seeing that in the wealthy area as much, because largely these homes, even the older ones, have been renovated, remediated. So you see these stark differences everywhere we look and so, not surprisingly, you see it in places like the LA wildfire.
Joseph:Some of the work we're doing right now, which we'll release in the coming weeks and months, is around. We're looking at water quality and VOCs and, forever, chemicals and nanomaterials and microplastics stratified by. Are you in the burn scar area? Are you adjacent? Are you further away? Are you in Altadena? Are you in Palisades. Where do you live? Are there differences that we're seeing? So a lot of that data will start to come out soon and we hope it'll help us understand a lot more about urban wildfires and the threats that exist. There's also lots of non-targeted testing thousands of chemicals being tested Working with colleagues at UT Austin terrific colleagues.
Joseph:They have a great indoor air quality program. They have a van loaded with scientific instruments. They're doing transects of the sites to collect data on real-time particles, real-time metals, vocs. So there's lots of new data that's going to come out of this fire that we hope will help inform strategies to protect other communities in the future. Help the people of LA inform better building decisions, better building design. How do you bring in not just healthy, safe, green buildings but also resilient buildings into the conversation? So I think it'll be a really rich data set that our field will be able to publish and kind of inform future strategy around these national crises. We'll be able to publish and kind of inform future strategy around these national crises.
Simon:Are you looking at things like the microbiome as well and the bio? You know? Just in honor of airborne, I've just read what you said your colleagues got nods on at various different points. So there's some great books out actually at the moment for people. We've got airborne. There's the particulate one out as well, which started with the six cities, cities, some really as well, which started with the Six Cities study, some really good reads on air quality, if people want to start getting books out, and, of course, healthy buildings. But, of course, one of the things I noted from the Airborne book was that you do get very large plumes of mold spores and microorganisms in wildfires, don't you? Is that stuff that you're picking up in your assessments as well?
Joseph:So we don't have anything to share right now. On're picking up in your assessments as well, so we don't have anything to share right now on it. But yes, that is part of the assessment. One of my colleagues this is her area of expertise and we're analyzing. We have many, many, many samples from all these homes and from across the area, but that's all being analyzed, yeah.
Simon:So there's loads more to come anyway, loads more to come, and I agree with you on the great books out there.
Joseph:I love Airborne and my colleague Doug Dockery at the Harvard School of Public Health on. Particles of Truth tells a really interesting story around the Harvard Six Cities Air Pollution Study, which was the first to put outdoor pollution on the map, associated with premature mortality, but also tells a really interesting story about science, how it gets adopted into these ambient air quality standards and also the many challenges they've had along the way, including lawsuits over many decades that tried to attack the underlying science. Because if the underlying science could be washed away, then all of the ambient air quality standards that rely on that science would also go away. So it's an interesting story of science but also the application of science to protective standards. Probably our indoor quality field could learn a lot from it. It's a similar path good science informing thresholds that then comes under scrutiny, comes under attack, and it's been a decades long story. So I highly recommend reading Particles of Truth.
Simon:Yeah, no, absolutely. It's one on my list to read. Actually, I've got it shipping on the way and it was the same with airborne long history of good, solid science and coming under political pressure and all sorts of things. You know that that was more of a story of not being able to communicate good science, I think, in a lot of case, and then science being taken into the large military industrial complex for a period of time as well. So there was a different angle with that. Joseph, I've taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for spending the afternoon talking to me. It's a conversation I've been looking forward to enormously. Yours is one of the air quality books I've probably read the most times because I keep finding parts of it that resonate with conversations that I'm having and look to it. So if people haven't read it, we'll put links in the show notes for people to access it. Joe, thanks so much for your time.
Joseph:Yeah, I appreciate that note. I appreciate you having me on Again. I appreciate what you're doing for our entire field and yeah, I mean I lost track of time. I just like you, I like talking about this topic, I like thinking about it and there's important work to be done and I think we're on the cusp of one of the greatest public health interventions of the century around our building. So it's the moment to keep accelerating. So thanks for having me on and giving the outlet, and it's good to chat.
Simon:Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed the podcast and know someone else that might enjoy it too, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. The podcast was brought to you in partnership with Eurovent, aeco, errico, ultra, protect 21 Degrees and Imbiote All great companies who share the vision of this podcast, and your support of them helps them support this show. Do check them out in the show notes at air quality mattersnet and do also check out the youtube channel by the same name, with loads of extra content appearing on there weekly. Thanks a million. See you again next week.
