The debate over indoor air quality in commercial buildings is rapidly developing into the issue of the decade for building owners, managers and tenants as evidence mounts that a variety of maladies may be traceable to everyday items in the office.
”Indoor air quality has been the major issue coming forward in the 1990s,” said Stephen Hokanson, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association International. ”People keep asking, `Is the air I breathe in my building healthy?` ”
That question isn`t a hypothetical one for workers in the year-old Du Page County Courthouse, where poor indoor air quality is being blamed for medical troubles suffered by as many as 250 people. County board chairman Aldo Botti last week estimated it may cost $2 million to correct the problems.
”There is something going on in modern, air-conditioned buildings that is making people more sick than they were in old-fashioned ventilated buildings,” said Simon Turner, technical manager for Healthy Buildings International, an environmental consulting firm based in Fairfax, Va.
HBI surveyed Chicago area office tenants in the spring and found 30 percent of the workers complaining about the indoor environmental quality of their buildings. The findings mirrored national results compiled by health officials but were the first with a local spin on the problem.
”Most of your exposure to pollutants takes place indoors,” said Demetrios Moschandreas, an Illinois Institute of Technology environmental engineering professor. ”Even if we solved all of the outdoor air-quality problems, there would still be problems indoors.”
The growing awareness of indoor air quality has led to the formation of the International Academy of Indoor Air Sciences, whose founding members have been meeting informally since 1978. They have scheduled an international conference on the topic for Helsinki, Finland, in 1993. Moschandreas is president of the group.
Bringing academic discipline to the indoor air-quality arena may prove helpful.
”Indoor air quality is not a science right now. It`s a mystery in many cases,” said Katherine Hammock, senior product manager for indoor air-quality at Carrier Corp., a maker of heating and cooling equipment. ”Sometimes the problems aren`t real complicated. It`s just like a puzzle you`re trying to solve.”
Hammock said one complaint Carrier helped investigate involved an office worker who began breaking out in hives on the job. It turned out the trouble was the perfume worn by the person in the adjacent work station, she said.
The list of potential trouble spots in indoor air quality, as illustrated by the perfume example, is long. And it is growing as specialty areas such as fitness facilities and day-care centers are added to commercial buildings.
”We`ve added all these products and compounds to our offices so that we now have a long list of pollutants that can cause problems,” Turner said.
”Elimination of these pollutants is the key to improving indoor air quality.”
Smoking rooms, becoming more popular as companies try to make work areas smoke-free, can become a problem if they are not properly isolated from the rest of the building and if air isn`t exhausted directly outside.
Restaurants or delicatessens, a part of many office buildings, can give off odors. Even galleys or kitchenettes with little more than a coffee pot and microwave oven can add moisture and heat, which place added burdens on the office cooling system.
Paints and chemicals in graphic arts departments or on-site print shops may pose hazards. Books, library shelves and even dividers and partitions can become repositories for dust and mold that can cause problems.
Simply having more people in an office can cause difficulties, because people give off carbon dioxide, and breathing excessive carbon dioxide can bring on a variety of maladies, from headaches to fatigue.
Yet most indoor air-quality problems are easy to solve and even easier to prevent, said Jack Mitchell, director of the bureau of building management for Wisconsin, who oversees the operations of six government buildings in Madison. ”The majority of the problems we have with indoor air quality are problems with the building occupants, and they don`t even know they`re the problem,” Mitchell said.
Hammock cited another case in which workers complained of headaches and nausea at noontime. An investigation showed the cause was a new tenant down the hall who had been cooking lunches on an indoor hibachi.
”We generally know what`s going on in our maintenance shops or kitchens, but what about gymnasiums or aerobic rooms, which may have been added to the buildings without engineering input,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell is one of three specially trained leaders who present an indoor air-quality seminar developed jointly by the BOMA International and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA, along with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, have published a building air-quality guide that is the basis for the seminars offered around the country. The seminar first became available this spring.
It came to Chicago in early August, sponsored by BOMA/Chicago and BOMA/
Suburban Chicago in conjunction with the EPA. About 150 real estate professionals attended.
The guidebook describes a ”healthy indoor environment” as one in which
”the surroundings contribute to productivity, comfort and a sense of health and well being.”
Here is how a model workplace is supposed to stack up:
”The indoor air is free from significant levels of odors, dust and contaminants and circulates to prevent stuffiness without creating drafts. Temperature and humidity are appropriate to the season and to the clothing and activity of the building occupants.
”There is enough light to illuminate work surfaces without creating glare and noise levels do not interfere with activities. Sanitation, drinking water, fire protection and other factors affecting health and safety are well planned and properly managed.”
The guidebook notes that indoor air-quality complaints have risen steadily over the years, but points out that, outside of a few technical journals, little practical information on the subject has been made available to building owners, managers or tenants.
”As managers of office buildings, it`s our responsibility to provide comfortable working environments. But it`s important to realize that building management and occupants share in the responsibility of improving the indoor air quality,” said Llani O`Connor, executive vice president of BOMA/Chicago. Tenants, for their part, are getting more vocal in their concern over indoor environmental issues, said Michael Silver, president of the Chicago real estate brokerage firm Equis Inc.
”Tenants are demanding specific qualifications for purity of air and water as well as warranties addressing freedom from hazardous materials. And they want it written into the lease,” Silver said.
Much of the attention in the indoor air-quality debate has been focused on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, casting the spotlight on what is usually the most mundane of mechanical functions for building owners and managers.
In the case of the Du Page County Courthouse, where several employees have reported becoming ill, officials believe indoor air difficulties can be rectified by upgrading the building`s air exchange system and improving the constant level of air movement throughout the structure.
”The HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) systems are being blamed for a lot of indoor air-quality problems. One of the trouble areas we`ve seen is in a cutback on maintenance contracts, and you could have a problem if you`re not cleaning ducts and changing filters regularly,”
Carrier`s Hammock said.
And ventilation systems designed to handle a certain number of people in a given space may be overtaxed by the number of computers that have joined the people.
”A computer gives off as much heat as a human,” Turner said.
The proliferation of electronic devices, including facsimile machines and laptop computers, in offices has added tremendously to indoor air-quality problems, experts say.
”New copiers are an especially big problem right now,” Mitchell said.
”They need to be set in an area where they can be properly ventilated.”
”In many of our buildings, we are in a constant cooling mode now, with the advent of all these electronics. It has to be an awfully cold day before we need to add any heat,” he said.
On top of that, copiers, fax machines and other gizmos can give off toxins and the chemicals used to produce the documents or clean the machines may contaminate indoor air.
Indoor environmental consultants are finding their business picking up, as building owners and managers seek to ward off problems.
Turner said a ”soup to nuts” indoor air-quality inspection of a typical 100,000-square-foot office building could cost $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the complexity of the environmental testing involved.
”We encounter many situations in a reactive mode that could have been avoided had proper management of indoor air-quality issues been exercised early on,” said Gary Crawford, vice president of Boelter Environmental Consultants, a Park Ridge-based firm.
Crawford said he recommends building owners and managers audit their indoor air quality at least once a year.
”By taking a proactive approach, the chances of a major problem arising are minimized,” he said.
But the testing, even if routine, can set off alarms among tenants, which underlines the sensitive nature of the indoor air-quality issue.
”The medical community really hasn`t learned to deal with the indoor air-quality issue,” said one suburban official who manages government buildings.
”When they get a complaint, they come to us and say, `Tell us what you`ve got in the building and we`ll test (the patient) for it.` We`re saying they need to tell us what they see and then we can go into the building and test for that substance,” he said.
”But no matter what you do, if you get complaints, the rumors go through the building and it can get to a point of hysteria.”
One of the best ways to reassure tenants is through strong communications, Mitchell said.
In pilot projects he started for Wisconsin, Mitchell said he found tenants responding well to things such as visits from industrial hygienists or tenant tours of building mechanical and ventilation systems.
”If word gets around that you are operating a building that is unhealthy, you will lose tenants. And the word will spread,” Mitchell said.
Congress has proposed enacting federal indoor air-quality guidelines, but legislation is stalled.
Hokanson said building owners and managers, who spent ”tens of billions of dollars” removing asbestos only to see the federal government declare that managing asbestos in place was safe, worry that proposed indoor air-quality rules may produce a similar result.
”The question is can we afford the cost of regulation and its compliance,” said Hokanson.
BOMA is working with others to draft a model indoor air-quality law and hearings on the proposal are being held this month in New York City and Washington, D.C.
”Among other things, this law hopefully will provide a method to enforce minimum air-quality stan-dards in commercial buildings,” said Bettina Browne, executive vice president and environmental attorney for ISS International Ser- vice Systems in New York City.
Browne is vice chairman of an indoor air task force sponsored by the Environmental Safety Council of America, which has been working on the model law for more than a year.
Though many cities changed their building codes in the 1970s to restrict the amount of fresh air allowed into buildings, part of an effort to hold down rising energy costs, Chicago did not follow suit.
Standards for the volume of air that must be moving through buildings, expressed in a measure of cubic feet per minute, have been higher here than the national recommendations. New national guidelines adopted last year equal Chicago requirements.
For office space, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers now recommends that air circulate at 20 cubic feet per minute per person. In some cases during the energy worries of the 1970s, office buildings were operating at as low as 5 cubic feet per minute per person.
”Since you can`t eliminate all the sources of indoor air pollution, adequate ventilation is essential,” said Linda Reed Friedman, president of LRF Design Group, a commercial interiors firm based in Clinton, N.J.
Friedman said sources in buildings that contribute to indoor pollution include a number of common items: paneling, insulation, carpet, carpet adhesive, furniture fabric and even the wood in the furniture. All can be sources of volatile organic compounds naturally emitted by new products.
In California, building owners have started ”baking” new buildings before occupancy, a practice in which temperatures are raised to 90 degrees or more for an extended period while ventilation equipment is run full speed to exhaust compounds given off by the new materials in the building and its furnishings.
Mitchell said a new state building in Wisconsin, set to open in September, will undergo baking before occupants arrive. He said the process was used successfully on a renovated building the state occupied recently.
