How is Your Company’s Indoor Air Quality?

Sounds like an easy question, with a simple answer. But based on quite a few recent studies which confirmed various levels of contaminants in many employer facilities, it may be time to take a serious look at what the air excellent is at your place of business. Going Green does include minimizing or removing any inherent health hazard.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): “In recent years, increasing scientific evidence has shown that the air inside homes and buildings can be more polluted than the outside air in even the largest and most developed cities. Another lookup indicates that people spend about 90 percent of their time indoors. Thus, for many people, the health dangers may be higher due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors.”

Over the previous 20 years, many states, such as Florida, Pennsylvania, NY, California, and others have passed legislation growing their own Indoor Clean Air Acts. These acts referred primarily to tobacco smoking and the demonstrated harmful effects of 2nd hand smoke. Decades prior, federal legislation banned the use of asbestos in building merchandise and lead in paints. Based upon their health endangerment, these factors have been of course, the most obvious. But there remain different less obvious elements that can affect air quality.

Many of us are aware of mold, which has serious fitness implications and can normally be controlled using adjusting temperature and humidity. However, even the smallest unnoticed water leak can eventually reason mold to multiply. Also, emissions from your building’s HVAC source have to be consistently monitored. While the EPA encourages proper ventilation, this technique simply shifts the emissions to our atmosphere. A healthy inexperienced strategy would be to eliminate or appreciably reduce all emissions.

Indoor air quality is additionally greatly affected by Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). VOCs are gases emitted by way of a wide array of products numbering in the thousands. Examples include paints and lacquers, paint strippers, cleaning supplies, pesticides, building and furniture materials, workplace equipment such as photocopiers and printers, correction fluid and carbonless copy paper, drawing and craft materials including glues and adhesives, lasting markers, and photography solutions. Little testing has been done on the fitness effects of these gases, and virtually no trying out on the effects of combinations of these gases, which is evident in most commercial enterprise facilities. The best advice is to are seeking out and use products with No or Low VOCs then VOC monitoring is needed.

A green facility or enterprise can not only create a more healthy workplace but also minimize employee sick days and turnover including more financial advantages for your company.