Saving Costs with Healthy Rooms
Low-Emission Building
Klara Meier
Sustainable living and working spaces don’t only benefit people and their environment; they also have a positive influence on the lifecycle costs of a building. So it’s twice as important to investigate building materials for potential pollutants!
I had my key experience of low-emission building in Australia, when some friends and I built a small mud house on a lake. We shaped the mud bricks ourselves and lay them out to dry in the Australian sun. We needed so little material to build the entire house. This fascinated me. And when it was finished it was also surprisingly cool and pleasant in comparison with conventional buildings – my interest had been sparked. Since then, low-emission building has joined low-CO₂ building and the circular economy as one of my principal areas of research – and the three areas complement each other perfectly. For example, products must meet certain low-emission requirements in order to be reusable or suitable for high quality recycling. All these issues are closely related to other design disciplines such as architecture, building physics, and structural engineering. In order to find efficient solutions, integrated design – as embodied here by ATP– is unavoidable. It fascinates me to see that almost every product has a low-emission alternative that we should try to favor in our everyday design work.
It might surprise some people, but we spend 90 % of our time indoors. In certain circumstances, indoor air can be five-times more polluted than outdoors air – with children’s bedrooms often being the most seriously affected. (See, for example, The disturbing facts about the indoor generation)
According to a study in this context, only 13 % of those questioned knew what they should look for in products, furniture, and materials, etc., in order to promote healthy living. (See: Healthy Living Survey 2021). This means that we designers at ATP must provide our clients with a lot of information in order to ensure that the interiors of the future are healthier.
Studies show that 90 % of the operating costs. If we design our buildings with healthy living and working spaces, we can impact upon this directly. Sick building syndrome has become more common in recent years and has a direct influence on the days of absence and days lost to illness by employees. This syndrome can manifest itself in diverse symptoms – the irritation of the mucous membrane in the eyes, nose, and throat, tiredness, headaches, reduced energy levels, disturbed sleep patterns, etc. – and, depending upon an individual’s sensibility to the pollutant, can even occur at very low doses.
In a research project, we investigated this subject with a particular focus on lifecycle costs. The aspect of health/days lost due to sickness was addressed under the label “co-benefits” of sustainable buildings. The result showed us that the payback period of an energy-efficient building could be reduced from 20 to 10 years.
Conclusion
Low-emission materials enable us to design more sustainably, because they allow us to protect the health of both the people who produce or process these materials and the people who eventually work or live in these buildings. And, on top of this, we also protect the earth, the air, the groundwater and surface water, and the flora and fauna – a win-win situation for all life on earth.
