How a visiting Harvard professor got business editor Nikki Mandow worried about going to work
Harvard academic Dr Joseph Allen has this weird thought experiment. Take your age and multiply it by 0.9 - that’s how much of your life you’ve lived indoors, he says.
“We are an indoor species.”
For me that’s 50 years inside.
Phew.
Playing with some more numbers, I worked out I’ve spent close on 11 of those 50 years in an office or educational institution - mostly an office. That’s more than a decade - 96,000 hours - spent in a space where the atmospheric conditions are controlled pretty much by someone else. The air I breathe, the chemicals in the paint and the carpets, the heat, the lighting.
It had never crossed my mind to worry about this until I heard Allen speak at this year’s Green Property Summit.
Now I can’t understand how I was so blasé for so long.
Joseph Allen is director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings Programme and associate professor at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health. Before Harvard he was in the private sector, and his job involved investigating problems with “indoor environmental quality” - mostly air quality, but also, temperature, lighting, chemicals, and noise.
He thinks buildings can make you sick – or they can keep you healthy.
Yet, as he says, most of the regulations we have around air quality are for the outdoors.
“In the United States we have national ambient air quality standards. We don’t have a corollary for the indoor environment.”
Nor does New Zealand.
Meanwhile, Allen says, the messages we get around living well - exercise, good food, not smoking, keeping away from pollution - don’t focus on the places we spend most of our time - indoors.
“This is a glaring hole in our understanding of lifestyle,” Allen says.
Of course, Covid has made us think a lot more about being inside.
Suddenly, in 2020, we became acutely aware that indoor spaces, particularly public indoor spaces - offices, shops, churches, cruise ships, buses, bars, hotels - could be deadly.
The more we understood about the pandemic, the more we realised infection comes from bad air, not infected surfaces, Allen says.
Think about the Pullman Hotel cluster, and the cleaner who got sick in an empty plane where the aircon got switched off.
One way we try to make being indoors healthy is to make indoors as much like outdoors as we can. Opening windows, improving filtration and ventilation systems.
But bugs aren't the only risk. The air in our offices could be making us bad at our jobs.
Allen was talking about this stuff way before the pandemic.
Back in 2015 his healthy buildings team tested employees’ cognitive function in green-certified and non-green-certified buildings and found what countless office workers had long suspected: indoor air quality influences job performance.
“People working in green buildings think better in the office and sleep better when they get home,” a 2016 Guardian report into the study found.
“The research indicates that better ventilation, lighting and heat control improves workers’ performance and could boost their productivity by thousands of dollars a year. It also suggests that more subjective aspects, such as beautiful design, may make workers happier and more productive.”
Like humans, buildings need to breathe, Allen told the sold-out Green Property Summit crowd in a windowless downstairs room in Auckland’s Aotea Centre. But from the 1970s, as we became more worried about energy efficiency, the people constructing and managing our big buildings increasingly tried to seal them to conserve energy.
“We set our ventilation rates for energy, not for human health,” Allen told the summit.
Even without a coronavirus to make us sick, there is apparently plenty of other potentially bad stuff in our office buildings.
Like cleaning products, deodorising products, flame retardant and stain-resistant chemicals in building materials (including insulation products and paint) and in soft furnishings like sofas and carpets.
Allen calls these “forever chemicals” because of how long they stick around, and how they can leech slowly into the environment and make us sick - or even sterile.
He talks about dust in offices which is “hormonally active” because of these harmful chemicals.
I don’t know what hormonally active dust is, but it doesn’t sound good.
The good news is that New Zealand's office buildings may be getting healthier. Figures from the New Zealand Green Building Council show Green Star certifications have gone from 10 buildings in the 2018 financial year to 16 in FY 2019 and 20 so far this year - possibly 22 by the end of June.
"Looking at the registrations, we think we might certify more Green Star buildings in the next year than ever before," senior strategy advisor Niall Bennett says.
Market forces
Scott Pritchard, chief executive of Precinct Properties says the company has been involved with $1.5 billion of real estate investment over the past five years, including Auckland’s Commercial Bay development, and tenants are demanding sustainable and healthy office space space.
“There’s huge demand from occupiers. If you were going to build a new building now you’d be crazy to build low quality,” he says.
And that basically means ignoring our building code “which is still at a level of infancy” when it comes to sustainable building, Pritchard says.
“You are looking to outdo your peers and offer something better.” – Scott Pritchard
“If you can double the amount of fresh air from what is mandated in the building code that will make a big difference.
“The building code sets minimum standards, but there is an absolute focus from the commercial real estate market towards more sustainable buildings.
“You are looking to outdo your peers and offer something better.”
Kiwibank moved its Auckland headquarters to a new building in October 2020. The block has a Six Green Star certification - the highest rating available - and its specifications include “low environmental impact applied coatings, no ozone-depleting refrigerants, good levels of daylight in office areas and low VOC flooring, applied coatings, adhesives, sealants and ceiling tiles”.
VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, are particular nasties associated with sick building syndrome. These include formaldehyde, benzene and acetone and get released into the air from building materials, paints and carpets.
Kiwibank’s sustainability lead Julia Jackson says designing the new space wasn’t just about avoiding stuff that could make staff sick. It was also about incorporating good stuff.
“We were looking for as much connection to the outside world as possible for as many people as possible,” she says. The building has a large atrium area through all floors and the desks and collaborative spaces are around the outside, by the windows, which look out over Victoria Park.
Jackson says it’s too early to track whether people take fewer sick days and are more productive in the new building, particularly because the disruptions to people’s office work patterns due to Covid will skew results. But anecdotal evidence suggests employee satisfaction will be higher.
“What we’ve really noticed is that connection with nature - that floor-to-ceiling view out to Victoria Park, where you’ve got a line of trees.
“People say the ability to get away from the screen, to look outside and feel a connection to the natural world has benefits for their mental wellbeing, for their ability to focus, to have quality conversations, and to deal with stress.
“It’s an unintended consequence of our move to a green building. We were focused on the technology within the building, including efficient air circulation, but one of the biggest benefits is the ability to look out to trees."
Allen's research suggests companies located in green buildings aren't just saving money on energy costs, there's also a monetary value around worker health and climate change. Allen says Harvard's Healthy Buildings team introduced a big range of sustainability and health measures into its own campus between 2008 and 2016 and then calculated the dollar value of the benefits.
The biggest saving was in energy - $US165.9 million - but there was also $24 million of health benefits and $20 million of climate benefits.
"This powerfully extends the value proposition. These buildings worked better in terms of market performance," Allen says.
All this talk about financial performance was calming. I could put my business journalism hat back on, stop worrying about being killed by the office carpet.
But then Allen switched back.
"We're at a precipice here. We're dealing with a global pandemic; we have a climate crisis right at our doorstep. And buildings are central to this solution, so much so that the decisions we make today regarding our buildings will determine our collective health now and for generations."
Hell, I might just get out for a walk.
