Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

Healthy Indoors | 9 Maine IAQ Council's annual event. "We're ready. Now people want to understand our area of expertise. This is your moment." Other programs such as EPA's Indoor Air Plus label and the WELL certification are health driven and growing. EPA's label is for new construction and they're currently working on a program for existing homes. WELL, which has only been around in the last five years, already has more than 800 projects worldwide. According to Tohn, funder Fannie Mae is also getting involved in this health market in the last year with their pro- gram called Fitwel. The lender uses "Healthy Housing Re- wards" to entice multifamily builders to get cheaper money to build under the Fitwel standard. The U.S. government is using the program as well. There are some IAQ elements in the program. This is a "cost-effective, high-impact" build- ing certification which includes a building rating system on how to design and operate healthier buildings. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) holds the trademark on the Fitwel brand and the science behind it all is controlled through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the General Services Administration (GSA) is using the certification as a tool to assess performance of government-owned buildings. "More people are focusing on health in relation to build- ing better buildings," Tohn said. "Now's the time to figure out where the opportunities are for our industries to get in- volved in this. I've thought a lot about the energy efficiency world and the health benefits of energy efficiency. But the real opportunity may be in that we have a real workforce and a system that funds energy efficiency in this country. What can we be doing to improve the health in buildings using the energy efficiency infrastructure we already have." Three Tiers With the audience divided pretty equally among ener- gy efficiency and IAQ professionals, Tohn talked about the three tiers she saw as a way to get more involved in healthier buildings. 1. We have to do the work in a way that doesn't make people sick. Do no harm. The good thing, she said, is that for the most part the work we do is making people healthy if we do it right. 2. Let's do our energy efficiency work not all by our- selves anymore. Tohn said that's it's time to connect with other partners, especially in the health commu- nity, way more intentionally. I n 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), University of Tulsa and myself produced a confer- ence on asthma and allergies that was supposed to break down barriers between the medical community and the indoor environmental industry. It was thought that if we brought all the stakeholders to one event we'd be able to work together in solving consumer's indoor health issues where they live, work and play. Sure, we seemed to have a lock on public health officials work- ing on the issues in their small way--house by house-- but the key though was getting the doctors to hop on board the train to play a role. We needed them to think about the buildings and homes in a new way and ask the consumer how they felt in those areas. Fast forward 18 years, consultant and researcher Ellen Tohn broke down what's happening in the world today and she said there's progress. In just the last few weeks, she's been at events for climate, energy, and children's health. All of these events have featured increased communica- tions about solutions for health and buildings. "In terms of health outcomes, clinical care with doc- tors or drug prescriptions only make up about 20 percent, while the physical environment-- what we do in air and water and housing conditions-- counts for 10 percent of what makes us healthy," she told attendees of the IAQ & Energy 2018 Conference held earlier this month in Port- land, Me. "So we're affecting half of that and that's quite significant. Doctors are starting to talk about health 'up- stream,' or the ways we're living that make us unhealthy and how do we fix that." Tohn, who is the founder and principal at Tohn Envi- ronmental Strategies in Wayland, Mass., says that for the amount of money the United States spends on healthcare we don't have very good outcomes. Because of this she's beginning to see in a variety of sectors that experts are realizing the places we live is a big driver for people's health. And this is really starting to come to fruition in building standards. Green Building Standards The taglines "Buildings Are for People" and "Doing Right By Planet and People" are now no accident. Green build- ing programs are starting to track health benefits of occu- pants. Workplace studies are now calculating sick days as a means of gauging health. "All these years we've been toiling in the woods talking about indoor air quality," Tohn said to attendees of the

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