Spaces and consequences
In the latest episode of the Air Quality Matters Podcast, I sit down with Plum (Victoria) Stone , a seasoned policy professional and the founder of the The Safer Air Project , to discuss the critical intersection of indoor air quality, universal accessibility, and public health. She brings a decade of expertise in cancer and social inclusion policy alongside her own lived experience with a chronic health condition and shares her perspective on how the built environment frequently fails the very people it is designed to shelter. The conversation challenges the building physics and engineering sectors to move beyond theoretical compliance and confront the real-world, real-time consequences of poor ventilation on vulnerable populations and society at large.
Why must we treat indoor air quality as a fundamental issue of universal accessibility?
The built environment has historically treated building performance and indoor air quality through a highly compliance-driven, binary lens, which frequently overlooks the immediate, physical requirements of the people occupying these spaces. Plum Stone argues that for individuals living with chronic health conditions—such as kidney disease, asthma, or primary immunodeficiencies—poor indoor air quality is not a distant, epidemiological risk but an immediate barrier to safe public access. By reframing clean air as an accessibility requirement akin to physical ramps or universal design, the responsibility shifts from vulnerable individuals having to protect themselves to building operators ensuring their spaces do not cause harm. She highlights that when we design and manage buildings to protect the most vulnerable, we inherently establish a higher baseline of safety and air quality that benefits every occupant.
How can we bridge the gap between technical air quality data and human risk perception?
A significant barrier to improving indoor air conditions is the invisible nature of the threat, which leads to a cognitive dissonance where occupants tolerate high levels of CO2 and pathogens because there is no immediate, visible consequence. To resolve this, Plum advocates for a stepped approach starting with the campaign to "make the invisible visible" by mandating real-time air quality monitoring and public displays in all shared spaces. However, because air cleaning technologies like HEPA filtration or UV-C disinfection can reduce pathogen risk without altering CO2 levels, simple carbon dioxide readings alone do not provide a complete picture of safety. The Safer Air Project is partnering with RESET, funded by the Public Health Action Network, to develop the "RESET Safer Air Accessibility Index" (Version 2.0), which uses advanced algorithms to translate complex variables—such as equivalent clean air changes per hour (eACH), PM2.5, humidity, and temperature—into a single, comprehensible safety percentage.
Expert Perspectives
The conversation exposes a deep frustration with the slow pace of policy change and the bureaucratic inertia that plagues public health advocacy. She recounts a recent, exasperating meeting in Canberra where policymakers claimed there was "no urgency" to the issue of indoor air quality, highlighting the profound disconnect between administrative timelines and the daily, high-risk reality faced by vulnerable families. To illustrate the severe consequences of this inaction, Stone points to a stark medical reality published in the journal Nature:
"Influenza and COVID can reactivate dormant cancer cells in people living with breast cancer and could lead to metastatic breast cancer."
This powerful scientific insight underscores that clean air is not a luxury or a secondary comfort metric; it is a life-preserving preventative intervention. Both of us argue that while big financial statistics are necessary, advocate groups must couple these numbers with human stories—like a child having to wear a mask and responsibility for there own safety and perhaps a loved one in a poorly ventilated classroom—to compel policymakers to act before the next major environmental or airborne crisis.
The Podcast will adopt The Safer Air Project for the next year as its charity to promote and support its work and bring it to a wider audience.
The Safer Air Project
Part 2: One Take Podcast
The One Take episode analyses a major empirical study published in Buildings and Environment titled "A Scalable Framework for Impact Analysis of Faults on Indoor CO2 in Buildings." This real-world research evaluates over 90 million rows of data from building automation systems across 23 commercial buildings in the United States to isolate how common HVAC faults directly degrade indoor air quality.
Which HVAC faults have the most severe impact on indoor carbon dioxide levels?
At the air handling unit (AHU) level, the single worst mechanical failure identified is an AHU discharge fan failure, which stops static pressure generation, drops supply airflow to zero, and causes return air CO2 to spike. At the local zone level, the most damaging fault is a "terminal unit airflow set point unreachable low," which occurs when a VAV box damper is stuck or ductwork is compromised, choking off fresh air and causing local CO2 to rise rapidly. The researchers overcame the feedback loops of demand-controlled ventilation by utilizing double machine learning (DML) to isolate true causal impacts from background variables.
A scalable framework for impact analysis of faults on indoor CO2 in buildings
The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with
MANN+HUMMEL - Particles Plus - Eurovent- Aico - Lindab - S&P
The One Take Podcast in Partnership with
SafeTraces - Inbiot - Farmowood - Ei Electronics - iAir Group - Zehnder
Charity Parnter
Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.
If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here. Do subscribe if you can; lots more content is coming soon.
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0:00 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters.
0:02 - I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Plum Stone.
0:07 - It was really good to welcome back a friend of the show and founder and CEO of the Safer Air Project.
0:13 - For those that don't know the Safer Air Project, it advocates for improving indoor air quality as a means to the prevention and control of airborne pathogens and other airborne pollutants, which negatively impact health outcomes.
0:29 - They advocate for the recognition of indoor air quality as a critical accessibility and inclusion issue for people living with chronic health conditions.
0:38 - Through community engagement, education and policy advocacy, they strive to raise awareness about the impact of indoor air quality on the well-being of high-risk populations.
0:50 - Plum is a policy and public affairs professional who has specialised for the last 10 years in cancer and social inclusion in terminal illness policy.
1:01 - It is this policy and patient advocacy experience, coupled with Plum's own chronic health condition experience, that has led her to found the Safer Air Project.
1:12 - I bump into Plum from time to time, and I'm always taken by her passion for improving air quality, not just for her community through the Safer Air Project, but its co-benefits for society at large.
1:25 - Honest, upfront and plain speaking qualities that have driven the Safer Air project to early success.
1:33 - But I think in general, it cuts through the noise and whataboutery that can frankly plague us at times.
1:40 - And that is always welcome.
1:43 - A kindred spirit in that sense.
1:45 - And one of my favourite people to bump into and chat with.
1:49 - Every time we talk, I come away with a new angle at looking at this problem.
1:54 - And that is a skill.
1:56 - And this conversation is no different.
1:58 - I really value the work that Plum and the Safer Air Project do, as I know thousands of others do too.
2:05 - To support this, the Air Quality Matters podcast are adopting the Safer Air project as its official charity partner for the next 12 months to help raise the profile of this important work as much as we can.
2:20 - This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Man Hummel, Particles Plus, Aco, Eurovent, Lindab and S&P Ventilation and simply would not be possible without them.
2:31 - Please do check them out in the show notes and at airqualitymatters.net.
2:36 - This is a conversation with Plum Stone.
2:55 - We say we build buildings for people and it's a bit of a trope, but actually, like when you really talk to the scientists and the engineers, you realise actually they completely forget about the people.
3:03 - And in a lot of cases would rather they weren't there.
3:06 - Right.
3:08 - But when you have people that are actually affected by spaces and not just in some chronic esoteric space.
3:17 - term, you know, that you might get cancer later on or this might cause COPD.
3:22 - But there are actually people that are affected in real time by spaces that they occupy.
3:29 - It it really brings it home.
3:32 - And that's it.
3:35 - That's not talked to that.
3:36 - There's very few areas where people are put
3:42 - in front of people in that way when it comes to air quality in the built environment is there and I think that's that's the really interesting thing about your work is this one of the few areas in the air quality community where you go.
3:57 - Here are some real live people that are actually affected in real time that actually care about the spaces now.
4:05 - Yeah, unignorable.
4:08 - Absolutely and I am.
4:10 - I was on a long drive last night back from Canberra and I listened to your episode with Lisa this week.
4:17 - And Lisa is one of Lisa Greenfield is one of those people who absolutely gets the lived experience of poor air quality and has totally changed her career as a result of that experience.
4:29 - Um, yeah, it's, um, seeing people in buildings, breathing in buildings is, is clearly what the buildings
4:41 - are intended for.
4:43 - So yeah, I think the point around engineers and building designers and things not really necessarily seeing the people and therefore valuing the experience that they have when in the buildings that they've designed, it's really important.
4:58 - And we even see that in terms of, when do people do the sort of the annual testing?
5:03 - Is it when the building's full of people or is it when the building's empty?
5:08 - Yeah.
5:09 - Yeah.
5:09 - And it's almost a cognitive dissonance, isn't it?
5:13 - I've spoken about this story before, but it keeps resonating for me.
5:18 - I was in a building in London for a conference.
5:22 - It was effectively a healthy buildings conference.
5:25 - Right.
5:26 - And there was a mix of...
5:28 - medical people there, building materials people there, and engineers and architects, usual kind of makeup, right, that you expect at these conferences.
5:35 - And it was in one of the most advanced buildings in central London, you know, and it was one of these buildings that has a floor dedicated to how amazing it is, you know, one of these spaces, you know, Siemens, and I don't know if it was Siemens, but, you know, it was, you know, big screens explaining how it was built and how it's the smartest, most amazing building.
5:56 - building on the street in London right and we were there for a day and I was doing my usual down the corridor having a podcast studio and interviewing people so I wasn't really involved in the main event for most of the day but I was on a panel discussion at the end of the day and so I came five minutes before the panel discussion and locked my room up and went down there and uh
6:21 - On the screen outside of this big meeting room, there was like 300 people in it.
6:27 - And it designed for that number of people, clearly.
6:31 - It had the CO2 and the temperature and the humidity on the space.
6:35 - And the CO2 was at 2,800 parts per million.
6:40 - And so I went, did a hard left straight to the desk and said, there's something majorly wrong with your meeting room.
6:47 - What are you doing about it?
6:50 - I don't know.
6:51 - Like, I'm not sure who you talk to.
6:54 - It's automatic, you know.
6:56 - So I said, right, okay.
6:58 - All right.
6:59 - So I went into the meeting room on the panel discussion and,
7:06 - And the fire doors have been wedged open at the back.
7:09 - So clearly people were feeling uncomfortable in the space in a room in a, in a multimillion pound state of the art building, right?
7:18 - With no openable windows, clearly.
7:21 - And somebody made the mistake of asking me what I thought about green building and healthy building labels, right?
7:32 - And I said, it's amazing, isn't it, that we've got 150 to 300 medical health building experts in a space sitting in a room that's clearly underperforming.
7:48 - And not one person in this room has thought to raise their hand and say, this is unacceptable.
7:55 - What are we going to do about it?
7:57 - And I said, until we, the experts, are capable of calling out the obvious, then what hope does the rest of the population have?
8:09 - And I was saying that, you know, that that is the question we need to answer before we expect the rest of the broader population to get this.
8:22 - If we can't do something about it, if we don't feel we have the agency, then...
8:26 - And I said, and you'd have been proud of me because I made your point.
8:31 - I said, look, best case scenario today, half a dozen of you are going to go home with a tickly cough you don't deserve.
8:40 - Worst case scenario, a few of those people are going home to people that can't afford to be sick.
8:46 - So this stuff has consequences.
8:49 - Yeah, it's perfect, Simon.
8:52 - I'm so proud of you.
8:54 - It's the exact point to be making because people don't see that consequence.
9:00 - You know, and to your point, I've been in a room before, big conference, union conference, and watch Lydia Murawska get up and go and find the facilities manager and say, the numbers are looking a bit bad.
9:15 - Could you do something about it?
9:16 - And it just goes to show the value of having a monitor so that you can
9:23 - work out you've got a problem before you get to the stage of people going oh there's a bit stuffy in here because undoubtedly it was bad before you can feel it.
9:33 - I've been at another conference same same same deal it was on a Sunday so it should have been in a really good building but on a Sunday so everything was turned off and it was the monitors that started beeping that alerted everyone to the fact there was a problem
9:45 - And it took an hour for the facilities management person to, to arrive because it was a Sunday.
9:51 - Um, so it's the value of having a monitor that enables you to go, Oh, okay.
9:56 - We've got a number.
9:57 - It's something's not working.
10:01 - We need to, you know, fix it.
10:04 - But you're precise.
10:05 - Yeah.
10:06 - Even if those of us who know and who've, you know, got monitors and can, can do something about it are still.
10:15 - Afraid is the wrong word, but there's enough peer pressure that means we don't want to be the person who gets up and says we've got a problem.
10:24 - And until we're all ready to say we've got a problem, what hope do our children have in classrooms when their classrooms aren't even being monitored?
10:34 - They certainly don't have the agency or the ability to make a difference.
10:38 - So, yeah, we absolutely need to do something about that.
10:43 - And it is this cognitive dissonance between cause and effect.
10:50 - that we understand as human beings we're quite resilient.
10:56 - We can tolerate discomfort and we can tolerate stresses on the body, you know, heating, exposure to some things for short periods of time.
11:09 - So you get the sense and, you know, you feel yourself doing it, that you tolerate that.
11:16 - in perfect environments for a period of time because you've done it before over and over again.
11:22 - You've been conditioned that nothing really bad happens, you know, that I can just go away and complain that it wasn't a really very nice space.
11:32 - And I might make a decision not to go back there.
11:34 - But there doesn't seem to be this...
11:37 - immediate consequence to an environment that isn't quite right.
11:41 - And that that is a common thread for all invisible disabilities in spaces, you know, and, and my, my dad has started wearing one of these invisible disabilities badges now when he's out and about.
11:56 - Right.
11:56 - Yeah.
11:57 - Yeah, exactly.
11:58 - There'd, there'd been a,
11:59 - a game changer for people in airports and public spaces that that without having to well I mean you are wearing a badge I suppose but without having to describe disabilities in long form to every security person you come across about why it'd be really handy for you not to go through this thing um you get you get some benefit from it but
12:24 - This is this is that the crux of the air quality problem is this at a mass population level.
12:33 - And even with people that know better.
12:36 - This acceptance with a space that has a potential harm associated with it.
12:44 - because we've almost been conditioned in a way not to see the invisible disability that comes for many, many people in society when it comes to air quality, right?
12:56 - Yeah, and I think part of the problem is as well that the lack of, I mean, in the community, obviously that was in that room with you are obviously people who are aware of air quality, aware of the health impacts of air quality and therefore want to do something about it.
13:11 - But in general, the majority of people
13:13 - are not.
13:15 - The majority of people with invisible disabilities are not aware of the risks of poor air quality and therefore they're not thinking about it, they're not advocating for themselves and not that they should have to.
13:29 - But it takes, there's a certain level of proactiveness that is required in order to learn about it, if that's not your field.
13:38 - You know, and just going back again, because obviously I loved the episode last night with Lisa,
13:44 - She had to find out what it was that was making her sick and learned about it, which was the same for us.
13:52 - I'm just going to do something about the sun, which is creeping over.
13:57 - Apologies.
13:58 - We've got we've got we've got two problems from either side of the planet.
14:02 - I've got a rising sun here that's that's causing a lot of light.
14:06 - It's coming to say hello to you.
14:08 - Yeah, yeah.
14:10 - We're both getting cooler temperatures at the moment.
14:13 - Yes.
14:13 - Well, it started off warm today and then this southerly breeze hit and now it's very cold.
14:20 - So that's OK. Yeah.
14:22 - So the it's the general lack of awareness in communities about the risks for themselves.
14:29 - And that's really one of the things that we were trying to do in the early years.
14:33 - I mean, we're still in our early years, you know, we're two and a half, Safer Air Project's two and a half years old.
14:39 - But trying to raise awareness amongst communities, high risk communities about the role of indoor air quality in health, and how to help people from those communities understand the risks, how to prevent exposures that can make them sick, and how to advocate for themselves,
15:02 - But with accessibility in mind, I've really kind of come round on thinking whilst accessibility is obviously sort of still our main focus, people living with chronic health conditions need safe access to all public spaces.
15:16 - And as we've spoken about before, Disability Discrimination Act and Education Act and workplace health and safety, and all of these vehicles that say public spaces should be universally accessible or workplaces should be safe for everyone,
15:31 - schools should be safe for every child.
15:35 - I always start, I started thinking about that as how do you protect the person who's most vulnerable?
15:41 - How do you protect the person with the, you know, with the chronic health condition that means that an infection could put them in hospital?
15:49 - But now I kind of also see it from the perspective of how do you prevent the chronic health conditions that we know to be caused by air pollution?
16:00 - cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, et cetera, which all have great evidence behind, you know, the role of air quality in the development of those conditions.
16:11 - How do we see air quality not just as a prevention of worsening health in the form of, you know, for people with existing chronic health conditions, how do we see air quality, improving air quality, as the prevention of those conditions developing in the first place?
16:30 - That's interesting.
16:31 - And in a way that crosses a line from what we were just talking about previously, where we were saying that part of the power of your conversation are the fact that there are real people here now that this space affects right now all the loved ones around them, people that are associated with them, but that you're finding there's a natural expansion in
16:58 - the grouping of people that you're talking to and advocating for that go now beyond that.
17:04 - So perhaps again, more into this longer term, more esoteric risk.
17:11 - That must be a challenge, I guess, because one is very contained in the sense that they're identifiable.
17:21 - There's a very specific outcome to that risk for them, whereas the other cohort,
17:28 - you're into epidemiological risk in a way, you know, a population level risk that these perhaps they might have more vulnerabilities than another cohort.
17:39 - But nonetheless, you can't necessarily draw a straight line between the vulnerability and the outcome.
17:45 - We don't know.
17:46 - Whereas with the first cohort, it's a bit more acute and present.
17:52 - It's defined, right?
17:53 - You know that the person with kidney disease is at increased risk from an infection.
17:57 - You know that someone with asthma is at increased risk from exposure to particulate matter.
18:03 - So you know for those people that they have a risk and we should be doing everything possible to ensure that people living with chronic health conditions are safe and are protected from worsening health.
18:18 - What we don't know is who is going to develop cardiovascular disease.
18:23 - We don't know who's going to develop dementia.
18:25 - We don't know who's going to develop long COVID or ME-CFS from an, you know, or whatever from an infection.
18:32 - But we know that various pollutants are drivers of chronic disease.
18:39 - And therefore, if you take a view that everyone is at risk from exposure to poor air quality
18:46 - not only can, and obviously the beauty always was with the accessibility angle, that when you protect it for the most vulnerable, you protect it for everybody.
18:57 - Yeah, okay.
18:57 - Yeah, so in a way this is about not necessarily needing to know those straight lines between an environment and a longer term health outcome.
19:07 - It's the fact that there's a co-benefit from doing both anyway.
19:10 - There's a co-benefit and a preventative, so from a preventative health strategy perspective,
19:17 - air quality suddenly becomes the biggest lever that we have to pull in terms of reducing the growing burden of chronic disease.
19:26 - And that suddenly makes it a much more, well, it should hopefully make it a much more kind of palatable lever for government to go, okay, well, we're not just doing this because of the risk to this group, we're doing it because, actually, if you can push down on all of these other conditions,
19:46 - wow, we've just saved ourselves a lot of money in the budget, you know, and therefore we can spend it on all of these, you know, governments suddenly have got money to spend.
19:57 - Unfortunately, the experience so far is that no one wants to invest in prevention.
20:03 - And so that's, you know, so that's the, that's what we have to persuade policymakers of is the value of investing in prevention.
20:11 - But when you put it as it's,
20:14 - it will help this group.
20:16 - So you're achieving your requirements for universal accessibility through the Disability Discrimination Act or whatever the local regulation is.
20:31 - And you're also giving yourself a real head start on prevention.
20:38 - One of the things I've heard a lot in the last week is that Taiwan and South Korea have had
20:43 - enforceable indoor air quality standards for 30 years.
20:47 - Bronwyn King's been talking about it a lot.
20:49 - And the fact that that's a whole generation who have not been to school, with poor air quality, whole generations have been through school and university in those really important early years and won't have been exposed
21:12 - in the same way that our children here in Australia or in Europe have been because they've had standards for such a long time.
21:22 - Imagine if we were 30 years back, imagine if all around the world, everybody had had enforceable air quality standards 30 years ago.
21:32 - Yeah, that's interesting.
21:34 - I'm in South Korea in a couple of weeks time.
21:36 - So I must do some digging and get somebody on to talk about it.
21:43 - That's a good heads up.
21:43 - Thanks for that.
21:44 - Yeah, that's really interesting.
21:46 - Bronwyn's the one to find.
21:48 - I'm sure she can put you in touch with someone.
21:51 - I'll tap her up and get her to give me a few names.
21:55 - One of the things I was scribbling down when you were talking earlier there, and it was something I picked up actually the last time we spoke, was that perhaps the naive perspective of a work like yours is that this is very much...
22:11 - a campaign at a policy level and at a population level to raise awareness of a problem.
22:21 - But actually, a lot of your work has been raising the awareness of the impact of air within the vulnerable cohorts themselves, which is a step you wouldn't naturally think of because you'd think that they already know that.
22:38 - That's been a big journey for you, hasn't it?
22:40 - It's been identifying vulnerable communities and then the outreach specifically to those communities to provide them with the toolkits as much as anything else and raise awareness within them.
22:52 - Because they have their own whole advocacy engines behind them anyway.
22:57 - So you're bringing in a whole new...
23:01 - cohort, community into the conversation.
23:04 - But actually there's a need, it sounds like, within asthma groups, cardiovascular groups, kidney disease groups to actually go, hang on a minute, you know, this is a problem for you guys.
23:15 - Yeah, hugely important.
23:18 - And really kind of one of the, when we first founded, we set ourselves up with sort of three pillars of work.
23:25 - The top down, you know,
23:27 - policymaker, let's get government to act.
23:30 - The sort of the middle where we were kind of talking to businesses about, you know, how to improve air quality.
23:36 - You know, and we've done a lot of work with Well and others, and I'm sure, you know, we'll come on to talk about that in a bit.
23:43 - And then, so that was the sort of the middle bit.
23:46 - And then the bottom up, which was about engaging communities so that they were safe and so that they understood the risks, but also so that they could help us
23:56 - from a grassroots perspective, campaign to government.
24:00 - So we've spent two and a half years, we sort of started with a couple of small patient organizations, most importantly, whose communities have been asking them.
24:14 - what they were doing on air quality.
24:16 - So they were very proactive communities who understood the risks.
24:20 - So for Emerge Australia, they're looking after people living with ME, CFS and long COVID.
24:24 - That's clearly a group of people who understand the risk of viruses and airborne viruses and transmission and have become experts because they know that's what caused their condition.
24:40 - And for listeners that aren't aware, what's the acronym there that you used?
24:45 - Oh, sorry.
24:45 - Long COVID.
24:46 - M-E-C-F-M, myelogic encephalomyelitis.
24:49 - I think I try and use the acronym because I'm not very good on all the syllables.
24:55 - Yeah.
24:55 - Yeah.
24:56 - So M-E-C-F-S is the, and CFS is chronic fatigue syndrome.
25:04 - Okay.
25:04 - Very similar to long COVID.
25:06 - Yeah.
25:07 - in many ways, but also very different in others.
25:11 - Obviously they have a lot of overlap, particularly on the energy limiting side of things, but the unifying feature being their cause by viruses.
25:25 - So really a very kind of informed community.
25:28 - Immune Deficiencies Foundation being another one, community who all have primary or secondary immunodeficiencies.
25:36 - So again, very much aware of the risks of exposure.
25:40 - And the third one was cystic fibrosis together.
25:43 - And obviously community, you know, people living with cystic fibrosis have always been very aware.
25:50 - So their communities were asking those organizations, what are you doing on air quality?
25:56 - And so we partnered with them to help them share information with their communities about how they could, you know,
26:05 - How do you clean the air?
26:06 - How do you monitor the air?
26:07 - How do you ask your school for safer air?
26:11 - How do you ask your workplace for safer air?
26:14 - So those kinds of materials.
26:16 - And then as we've kind of, you know, really in the last 18 months to a year, we've been working on building that out with other organizations.
26:26 - So this year we signed, the first pre-budget submission that we signed
26:32 - And the way that Australia's kind of budget process works is that organizations can put in an ask in January when everyone's at the beach.
26:41 - I'm very cynical.
26:42 - I'm certain there's a reason that they ask for it to be submitted in the middle of the summer holidays.
26:48 - You can put in an ask, you know, five million dollars for a campaign or, you know, five hundred million dollars for, you know, whatever it is, if you've got bigger ideas.
26:59 - And.
27:00 - And we put in a submission for an indoor air quality strategy in January.
27:05 - And interestingly at that time, Heart Foundation and Lung Foundation came on board and the interesting conversations, particularly with Heart Foundation is this recognition that they, as an organization had worked out that this was really important, but they noted at the time that their community was still not asking them about it.
27:27 - So in that cardiovascular community,
27:30 - There is a lack of awareness around the role.
27:34 - And this may just be, you know, may be in other countries that, you know, the communities have differing levels of awareness, but here they were saying they weren't hearing from their community.
27:46 - What are you doing about this?
27:49 - So there's a lack of awareness or a lack of urgency and they want to change that because obviously they, as an organization, they knew.
27:59 - or they know of the positive benefits that improving air quality will have for their communities.
28:06 - So there's definitely an opportunity for us to better educate people about their individual risks based on the conditions that they have and potential future risks.
28:23 - Back to that, everyone is at risk.
28:25 - So I'm...
28:29 - I'm not sure how much education or information comes from a person's GP.
28:37 - About, you know, when we talk, you know, GPs are really good at talking about modifiable risk factors, you know, how their patient can improve, you know, maybe you should cut down on that alcohol, bit less chocolate, you know, a bit more exercise, that kind of thing.
28:53 - But how often do you think those conversations include clean your air?
29:00 - Because there are the communities, as you say, that have this ask on air quality where there is a straight line, you know, cystic fibrosis, long COVID, others, you know, people in cancer treatment with immune deficiencies, these kind of things, they know infection equals risk, like just black and white.
29:22 - then it's like a layer cake almost, isn't it, or like an onion.
29:25 - You peel back and there are these kind of secondary and tertiary risks associated with conditions, with exposure to air quality, that the communities may have very strong advocacy, like the Lung and Heart Foundation, right?
29:43 - But their community might not be as aware as it can be of the impacts of air quality.
29:49 - And, you know, we know that infection risk is a compounding factor for heart disease risk.
29:58 - You know, if you're already vulnerable and you have an infection, that brings a certain risk with it.
30:06 - the heat waves have been a really interesting one.
30:08 - I was doing some stuff on the one take around...
30:11 - There's a compounding impact between temperature and increased levels of ozone and particulate matter that have a real impact for ischemic strokes because it thickens the blood, but also there's a kind of a reaction within the body to ozone as well that has an increased clotting factor.
30:32 - So, you know, these...
30:34 - People that are vulnerable from one thing where there's, you know, they're probably really focusing in on diet or cholesterol or whatever it is that they're being focused in on by their by their health professionals.
30:46 - There's these environmental risks that are associated.
30:50 - They just might not be aware of.
30:52 - And then you've got another layer below that of just general population health.
30:57 - But as you said very rightly, you fix one, you fix them all.
31:02 - This is one of these great interventions that, you know, doing it for the right reasons for the people that this clearly impacts in the moment and is an accessibility issue in a very profound way.
31:16 - actually has a cascade effect right the way down through the secondary and tertiary impacts on vulnerable populations and the population at large.
31:24 - So, you know, why wouldn't you?
31:26 - And a future benefit.
31:27 - Future benefit.
31:28 - A future benefit for disease prevented.
31:31 - Yeah.
31:32 - Which I just think is such an interesting way of thinking about it.
31:38 - And I need, you know, we need people far smarter than me to be able to sort of project, well, what does that look like?
31:44 - What does it, you know, if we said, when we did our report in 2024, we included, you know, a cost benefit analysis that was done by a professor from ANU, and he's an economics professor.
32:03 - And then we made an estimate.
32:07 - If you improved indoor air quality and you,
32:12 - set certain standards, you could potentially have an impact on, you could reduce transmission of certain viruses by say 60%.
32:21 - And that would have X, Y, and Z impact.
32:25 - What happens if you were, and that would lead to a return on investment of benefit cost ratio of 3.5,
32:37 - for every $1 invested, which is obviously quite substantial.
32:44 - Imagine if you did that for asthma.
32:47 - We improved indoor air quality, which reduced the exposure.
32:51 - And it would reduce the amount of asthma incidents by X, which would lead to Y, you know, it's, um,
33:01 - I'm super excited.
33:02 - At the moment, the Australia's CSIRO, which is our kind of, you know, science, you know, government funded science body is doing a project on the cost of poor indoor air quality.
33:15 - Now it was last done in 1998, which I like to sort of, you know,
33:21 - I think was before Australia last won the Rugby World Cup, you know, like a really long time ago.
33:29 - And it was estimated to be costing Australia $12 billion a year.
33:35 - I'm not an economist, but inflation would have significantly increased that figure in the last 30 years.
33:44 - So even if all of the assumptions in that model from 1998,
33:51 - were exactly the same, we're definitely looking at more than $12 billion a year.
33:57 - The thing is those assumptions likely were a massive undercount.
34:02 - And so there's been a consultation for this CSIRO project and it's now going to include, well, it's now going to include influenza transmission, COVID transmission, et cetera, which wouldn't have been included in the last one.
34:17 - It's going to include all of these different parameters
34:20 - And that weren't included the first time round.
34:23 - And we're, I mean, literally counting the days until this number is released.
34:30 - Because the likelihood is we're talking tens of billions of dollars a year on the cost of inaction on air quality.
34:42 - Because when you, when you think about all of the things, what are the things, let's see if we can kind of brainstorm, what are all of the things that air quality costs a country?
34:50 - So it's the flu, the COVID, the RSV.
34:55 - Now it's also the measles, because that's rearing its ugly head.
34:59 - You know, the chicken pox.
35:01 - Okay, so we'll just, we'll put them into a bracket.
35:03 - That's costing us a lot.
35:06 - The asthma, the cardiovascular disease, the stroke,
35:13 - The chemical, the chemical exposures, the occupational health, the occupational lung disease.
35:20 - All of these things all have a massive cost.
35:24 - And yet if we can.
35:26 - Notwithstanding absenteeism, presenteeism, performance, all of the kind of the softer
35:34 - I say softer, but, you know, the kind of the performance related, you know, output impacting impacts of poor air quality.
35:44 - Yeah, I mean, the costs are huge.
35:46 - I think there was a...
35:47 - Sorry, I'll let you finish your train of thought.
35:49 - Yeah, go on.
35:50 - There was, well, to add to yours, there was another study that was published recently that showed that when you improved air quality in a daycare centre, parents work or the
36:03 - their absenteeism from work reduced by 34%.
36:06 - So the knock-on effect of improving air quality in the daycare meant that parents were having to take 34% less time off sick.
36:14 - Yeah, we all felt that pain.
36:16 - Yeah.
36:16 - Petri dishes.
36:17 - Yeah.
36:19 - Yeah, it's...
36:22 - I'm torn there because...
36:26 - I know these big numbers, and I use them all the time, frankly.
36:32 - There are many jurisdictions that have some very big numbers when it comes to the cost of air quality on society.
36:41 - As does many other things.
36:43 - Yet we seem to do sweet F all about it.
36:46 - You know, this is similar for sustainability and the impact of climate change, right?
36:51 - You know, you put these huge numbers out and go, look, this is just...
36:56 - so ridiculously common sense that that why wouldn't you?
37:02 - Well, if it was that simple, we'd have done this over and over and over again for all of those big number line item numbers.
37:10 - So you can take that view.
37:13 - But equally.
37:15 - We have shown that we can do that in many areas.
37:18 - You know, London low emission zones is a classic example of that.
37:22 - Build up the evidence to show the impact of pollution on the citizens of a city.
37:27 - Show the cost.
37:29 - Build up the financial models to show the financial and health impacts of doing something about it.
37:36 - do it.
37:37 - And hey, presto, 15 years later, you start to see you're actually starting to see the epidemiological outcomes.
37:44 - And there was that great report out recently about lung size recovery of kids in the ULES zone as a result of the actions that they took.
37:53 - So real manifest outcomes.
37:57 - positive outcomes on society, so much so now that the emissions from commercial kitchens have now overtaken traffic pollution as the number one particulate matter contributor in City of London because they've had such a positive impact on pollution.
38:15 - So we can do this stuff, even if it's not at a national level, at a huge urban level.
38:21 - or regional level.
38:23 - And this has happened with ozone.
38:25 - It's happened with all sorts of things.
38:26 - We know we can do this.
38:28 - So on one hand, I go, okay, big report coming out.
38:32 - This is going to say this is shocking, frightening.
38:36 - It'll make some headlines, and then we'll do absolutely nothing about it.
38:41 - or you can take a much more positive proactive view and go well okay the work that you're doing you're laying these foundations these building blocks of that means we will do something about this we can start enacting some laws and make a difference i i hope it's the latter because i'm i'm hanging i'm hanging everything on the fact that this number is going to be so big that the uh
39:06 - the policymaker argument for continuing to do nothing just becomes ludicrous.
39:14 - You know, I'm thinking it's the lay down, here we go.
39:17 - It's costing us, you know.
39:21 - You have to convert those numbers, though.
39:25 - The only advice I have is anything that has a number of a million or a billion associated with it.
39:33 - the brain cannot cope with that enormity.
39:37 - So it's almost pointless.
39:38 - You have to convert it to a cost per week to a family or something that means something to people because they just can't... You know, I always do this thing in my talks where I ask people to tell me how many...
39:51 - how long a million seconds is and you get all those wild answers you know it's like it's 12 days basically but you get a week you get a week two days you know 15 or 15 hours you get weirdly weird so now say tell me how many seconds a billion seconds is and it's 32 years
40:10 - So the scale of going from millions to billions to trillions, we just can't wrap our head around.
40:19 - So it becomes vanilla numbering after a while.
40:23 - And it just gets slotted in with all the other big numbers that don't really mean anything to your daily life.
40:28 - But if you can convert that to investment in schools or costs to your groceries or something that people can care about, you might have an impact.
40:38 - Or, you know, to be told by government that there's no money and you sit there going, well, we've spent $368 billion on AUKUS, on submarines.
40:48 - Yeah.
40:50 - Okay, well.
40:52 - Oh, there's always money for the military industrial complex.
40:56 - We know that one painfully, yeah, when you need to find it.
40:59 - It's amazing where you can pull money out of.
41:01 - Yeah.
41:02 - No, I totally, totally agree.
41:06 - It becomes...
41:07 - it becomes a number that, you know, only people like Elon Musk can kind of imagine.
41:13 - Oh, a billion.
41:13 - I know what that looks like.
41:15 - Yeah, it's in my bank account.
41:17 - Yeah, I've got a thousand of them.
41:21 - So, yeah, I like the phrase stories trumps stats.
41:28 - So, yes, this sort of, you know, the big number is going to be really important.
41:34 - Yeah.
41:35 - but we've got to build the stories too.
41:37 - The stories of the people most impacted that can help policy makers go, yeah, that's, we should do something about that.
41:48 - You know, the child in the classroom, protecting themselves because of, you know, high risk family members or the person living with a transplant, the person going through cancer treatment, you know, all of these people
42:04 - have stories to tell about their need and all of them have a right to be safe, from something that can cause them harm.
42:16 - And that's why we have these frameworks for ensuring safety.
42:25 - So the stories I think are gonna be just as important about
42:33 - as the ridiculously big number that nobody can wrap their head around.
42:38 - Yeah.
42:39 - How do you balance that personally?
42:42 - Because I imagine...
42:44 - like a lot of people in your position that advocate for people that are hard done by, by society, those personal stories keep coming.
42:54 - Now I can imagine on a daily, weekly basis, people are reaching out to you feeling heard for the first time in their lives about many, many conditions.
43:06 - Um,
43:08 - That's a double-edged sword, I must imagine, for you personally.
43:12 - But both having lived through many aspects of this yourself, but also the balance between it being a driver, you know, a daily reminder of why this stuff is important, but also then from an emotive perspective, finding that balance to do the engineering work of this and keeping the wheels, you know, because there's nothing more boring than the government's policy work, right?
43:37 - And not just getting cross.
43:39 - That's fun.
43:40 - Yeah.
43:41 - Yeah.
43:41 - Yeah.
43:42 - We believe you.
43:43 - And getting really cross with people that they just don't get it and they're not caring.
43:50 - Like, that must be that there's a line here, I guess, that you have to find between exasperation and emotion because this stuff matters.
44:01 - You care.
44:03 - These are real people.
44:04 - These are real stories.
44:05 - Yeah.
44:06 - and the mechanics and the slow moving nature of this policy work and advocacy work.
44:14 - Yeah, it's, and you're catching me on a day after I spent a day in Canberra, having multiple conversations with people, some of which were exceedingly exasperating, you know, so to be told by policymakers that there's no urgency to this issue.
44:33 - And I had to say, I had to say to the,
44:36 - the person, it's really difficult to hear that because my family feels like it's been abandoned and we're protecting ourselves on our own because policymakers don't see the urgency in this issue.
44:49 - And yet it is a daily challenge for us.
44:54 - So it is tricky.
44:56 - I mean, my whole kind of, my whole career, it was sort of built on patient advocacy.
45:03 - So I've always sort of lived in that space between patients, people living with cancer, because I was predominantly worked in cancer advocacy, and policy makers, and trying to connect the stories of people to the policy decisions.
45:31 - One of the meetings I had yesterday was with an MP who I've been meeting with for 12 years.
45:37 - And 12 years ago, we were asking him to support what's called pan-tumor registration of cancer medicines.
45:45 - It's one of these things where lots of cancers are driven by the same genomic marker.
45:52 - And so a treatment for breast cancer with this genomic marker
45:58 - may also work for someone with a rare gynecological cancer with the same genomic marker.
46:05 - And yet the person with breast cancer was getting it for free, subsidized by the government, and the person with the rare gynecological cancer was paying for it at $10,000 plus per month.
46:16 - So connecting those people with the minister to say, this is really unfair.
46:23 - My doctor says I should take the same medicine as the person with breast cancer.
46:28 - why am I having to pay?
46:31 - And last weekend, the minister announced that he was going to deliver this thing that we were asking for 12 years ago, the pan-tumor registration of cancer medicines.
46:42 - It took 12 years, 12 years of making really strong evidence-based arguments with real people, many of whom have sadly passed away in the intervening years because they didn't get...
46:58 - what we were asking for.
47:01 - But we finally got there.
47:02 - And I sat in this MP's office yesterday and I just thought, I really hope I'm not sitting here in 10 years time.
47:08 - I don't want to be 54 sitting here still asking for the same thing.
47:17 - We've got to be smarter.
47:18 - And it
47:20 - So there are definitely, you know, but the value of the story is- Can you move it faster than that?
47:25 - I mean, is that, I mean, interestingly, I'm interviewing up in Dublin later this afternoon, an ex-environment minister from Ireland who's actually a scientist.
47:41 - So now he works in helping scientists communicate with policymakers.
47:48 - So I'm really interested to talk to him about what the mechanics of government look like from inside and how you communicate and advocate for change in these kind of environmental risks.
48:03 - dynamics because he was sitting over the environment as part of his portfolio to understand what moves the needle like realistically how does how do you present information how do you tread the line between the emotive stories and making people feel uncomfortable to move faster and
48:25 - and just the gears of policy work.
48:31 - And I guess that's something that you've learnt through experience.
48:39 - Do you know where that line is?
48:41 - Is it a line that always shifts?
48:44 - And is it a case of...
48:47 - you're constantly pushing on that boundary to the point where sometimes it backfires.
48:54 - But what I'm getting at is that the work that you do
49:02 - You have at some point you can't leave people comfortable all the time with this information.
49:08 - Otherwise, it doesn't have impact.
49:11 - So and I know this.
49:12 - I've spoken to you.
49:14 - You're great at triggering, pushing people to think in a different way about this.
49:21 - And it's uncomfortable to listen to and think about.
49:25 - Because you have to ask the uncomfortable questions.
49:28 - Otherwise, shit don't get done.
49:31 - Like that's the reality.
49:33 - But in that, there's a line, I guess.
49:37 - And I guess you're constantly thinking about that.
49:40 - Like, how uncomfortable do I make this person in front of me?
49:44 - I've got to make them care.
49:47 - but also you know at some point you get pushback that you go too far.
49:53 - I guess that's a really hard line to try and track.
49:56 - Yeah, really fine line.
49:58 - I don't think I've ever seen it backfire.
50:02 - You know, my job is to try and put a fire under the people who can make change happen to make them do it faster.
50:13 - You know, if I could have done anything to move
50:16 - the pan-tumor medicines thing faster than 12 years, I'd have done it.
50:22 - You know, the reality, and unfortunately the reality is that over that period, you end up with changes of government and you end up with changes of officials and you've got to sort of start again and build it again.
50:32 - And, you know, so you kind of, you know, there's two steps forward, one step back.
50:36 - I mean, when, you know, thinking to the meetings yesterday, being told that there's no urgency,
50:42 - well, it sounds like we need to make it a bit more urgent, doesn't it?
50:44 - You know, like, and so how are we going to do that?
50:47 - And, but there is a line.
50:49 - I mean, I'm assuming reaching across the table, grabbing people by the lapel and shaking them until they listen to you, you know, bawling and shaking and, and, and, you know, locking doors and refusing to leave.
51:02 - There are lines here, clearly.
51:04 - Yeah, I mean, you know, professionalism, I think is the line, you know, but,
51:10 - Yeah, I mean, I said to this person yesterday, it's really, you know, and I really thought it through before I said it, because I didn't want to be upset, even though this person had just told me that basically my kids were wearing masks in schools, the only mask is getting bullied and stuff, trying to protect themselves while facing significant health impacts as a result of exposures that have occurred in the classroom isn't urgent enough for him.
51:40 - I was quite frustrated about that.
51:41 - And so I sort of, but I sat back and was like, well, you know, I just, it's very difficult to hear that.
51:50 - You know, as a mother who's, you know, turned my life upside down to try and solve this problem.
51:57 - It's very difficult to hear from someone who could make a difference that,
52:02 - This problem is not urgent enough.
52:03 - This problem affects all of us.
52:06 - Did they have a response to that reply from you?
52:09 - I mean, what are the next steps in those?
52:12 - Because what you're describing there, however it's articulated, is a common articulation of a.
52:20 - thanks very much for the information.
52:22 - We'll take it under due consideration and we'll call you, don't call us, right?
52:27 - It's the classic, thanks very much, that we really feel for you.
52:31 - We'll go away and have a think about this and expect an email from us in a few weeks' time, blah, blah, blah.
52:40 - Where do you drive it on from those conversations where you get that kind of passive pushback or passive wall where you go, well, okay, how do we make this more urgent?
52:54 - What do you need in front of you for us to help you understand why this is urgent?
53:02 - Like, how does that work practically at a policy level?
53:06 - I think the...
53:10 - for this person, they were bureaucrats.
53:11 - So they're less sort of, you know, obviously there are people above them that, you know, will ultimately make the decisions.
53:25 - I mean, he acknowledged that for many people, airborne infections are still a risk and that people are still dying.
53:38 - So I'm not sure why,
53:40 - You would suggest that there's no urgency if you're aware of that.
53:43 - It's just that maybe, you know, there's not there's not enough pressure coming from community members or externally, you know, outside of government to be making ministers think we should do something about that.
53:59 - So that again just kind of comes back to our job to help build that ground swell of
54:08 - How do we make community members make this ask an urgent problem?
54:14 - My concern is that the lack of urgency means we're not getting ourselves ready for the next big problem.
54:25 - And here we are in Australia, the whole world is facing the worst El Nino in a thousand years.
54:37 - What happens if we end up with bushfires worse than 1920?
54:41 - What will we have done to protect our indoor spaces to keep our communities safe in that event?
54:54 - Everyone will feel the urgency when that happens and yet we'll have missed the opportunity to have done something about it.
55:02 - The same goes for whatever the next airborne
55:08 - Well, we're just, you know, in some parts of the world, we're heading into a fuel security crisis of the likes we've not seen in a generation, certainly since the 1970s.
55:18 - And we know what happened the last time we had a world fuel crisis.
55:23 - We ended up with sick building syndromes and indoor environments that were shut down and sealed up and underventilated because of cost of energy.
55:32 - You know, and I think, you know, that's a very real present problem, you know, that we have to
55:38 - So there are these, I think that I find that always really interesting.
55:42 - There are these moments that happen every few years, you know, from from COVID to to fuel crises to global environmental disasters, where they're like touch papers for the broader public, but also.
56:02 - the politicians that are trying to react to that and, and how we lean into those events to try and gain some traction at the right time that we set up in a way that, as you say, are we ready for that?
56:15 - But as policy people and advocacy people, are we ready for that as well?
56:20 - Are we, are we thinking those six months, nine months in advance and going, right, how do we start preparing our strategies so that we can, you know,
56:30 - we can tug on those levers that are going to appear with the policymakers.
56:36 - You know, we saw that with COVID.
56:38 - And one of the things that happened in Ireland was the code of practice for indoor air quality was a direct response of COVID and opposition motions for better protection for people in the workplace.
56:50 - Yeah.
56:50 - You know, and you've got a you've got a mechanism out the other side of it, as imperfect as it is.
56:56 - But something happens, you know, because people took that chance to do something at that point.
57:02 - You know, that's the reality of these long problems we're trying to solve, is that stuff's going to happen in that period of time.
57:09 - Is there something we can lean into to to try and get some traction?
57:13 - And the question comes, does it happen fast enough so that the people who are.
57:19 - on the frontline in terms of risk are okay.
57:28 - Yeah.
57:28 - You know, are protected, you know, can we do the pan-tumor thing faster so that people have access to the medicines and they don't need to die?
57:36 - Can we improve the air quality faster so that fewer people become exposed, so that fewer people become infected?
57:44 - So can we do these things faster?
57:49 - I really hope so, because all of those things, as you say that, yes, things come out of them.
57:56 - They take time.
57:57 - We've got a new model code of practice here in Australia that Safe Work Australia published in March for the control of biological hazards in the workplace, which is great.
58:08 - And it recognizes biological hazards that transmit through the air.
58:12 - So it's even using the right terminology.
58:15 - And then it connects to a standard
58:19 - that's intended to control odor.
58:22 - So, you know, there's so close and yet so far.
58:27 - Yeah, yeah.
58:28 - Well, you know, that's why I have such an enormous amount of respect for you and people like you that do this kind of work, because as you say,
58:41 - the what's at stake is so important, but the process is so thankless and infuriating and frustrating.
58:50 - You know, it is two steps forward, one step back on almost every angle you look at this.
58:57 - And that is incredibly, like you say, you know, this stuff is moving slower, unfortunately, than the political cycles it sits within.
59:05 - And you can spend,
59:08 - a decade building up champions and people and getting movement and being very steady and seeing progress year on year.
59:18 - And in that 10 year period, you could have had two changes of government, you know, and people starting and leaving careers, you know, and it's a constant process of starting again, it seems.
59:30 - And, you know, and that's the, that's the salesman's constant,
59:35 - pain is building up knowledge and experience and advocacy within organisations and those people leaving or going off to do something else or just moving department.
59:47 - The civil servants are classic for that.
59:49 - You build up all of these people with the expertise to understand what you're talking about within the machinery of government.
59:56 - And they get a promotion or move sideways into a completely different department.
1:00:00 - And that's it.
1:00:01 - Gone.
1:00:01 - You know, two years of work just without warning.
1:00:06 - And meet Stephen, the person that's taken over my role.
1:00:11 - Stephen, 25 years old, fresh out of college, hasn't got a notion of what you're talking about.
1:00:17 - And you're like, oh, God.
1:00:21 - Here we go again.
1:00:24 - Yeah, and that's what happened to us here.
1:00:26 - You know, the Assistant Minister for Health who launched our report in November 24 election in May 25, she moves to another portfolio and our real champion was no longer in a portfolio area that had any interest.
1:00:44 - You know, she couldn't even, if she wanted to, pretend to be
1:00:50 - that she still had any say over the policy at all because she just moved into a totally new portfolio.
1:00:57 - And as a result, we're kind of left trying to now get the person who took over and their colleagues to care about it in the same way.
1:01:09 - So yeah, that is a hammer blow to an advocacy strategy when the person that is, when you've identified a champion
1:01:20 - And they go, and that's the biggest, you know, as you well know with air quality, the lack of a natural portfolio to lead.
1:01:32 - Should it sit in health and disability?
1:01:34 - That's the portfolio that we want it to sit in.
1:01:37 - Should it sit in workplace health and safety?
1:01:39 - Should it sit in environment and water?
1:01:41 - Should it sit in education?
1:01:44 - Where should this portfolio?
1:01:48 - brand spanking new healthy air policy sit.
1:01:54 - And if, I mean, I would like it to sit with the health minister.
1:01:57 - I don't think he really wants it.
1:01:59 - So he's hot potatoing it off to, you know, what do you do without a champion?
1:02:05 - Yeah.
1:02:06 - Yeah, there are mechanisms within government for these interdepartmental groups that kind of coordinate this stuff.
1:02:13 - I mean, they do do that from time to time.
1:02:16 - And air quality is a good example of that.
1:02:19 - Sustainability and the environment is another good example of that.
1:02:22 - You know, its impacts cross into health and nature and, you know, resources and energy, you know, you name it, you know, agriculture.
1:02:30 - You know, it's interdepartmental in nature as is air quality.
1:02:36 - You know, and that's the challenge.
1:02:38 - Not only is there not an obvious home for it, I would argue it's health, frankly, but it's very hard to convince people to put it there.
1:02:49 - that it straddles so many areas, you know, particularly because particularly when we talk about them buildings, you know, if it was just an environmental risk as in an external environmental risk, that's one thing.
1:03:02 - But because it then moves into buildings, you're then into housing and into, you know, supply chains.
1:03:09 - And, you know, it's...
1:03:12 - I'll have you back to the podcast in just a moment.
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1:05:08 - Now, back to the show.
1:05:10 - You've been at this now a few years.
1:05:12 - Has there been any surprises for you in the development of this with the cohorts or the groups of people that you found yourself advocating for or the kind of spaces you found coming under the spotlight?
1:05:30 - Because, you know...
1:05:32 - you only start this from a personal worldview because it's the only way advocacy starts right so you understood the challenges that you and your family had faced on the people that you were talking to a face and felt that you need to do something about it but as this has broadened into more medical settings bit broader cohorts if you've been both at national and regional levels talking to people
1:05:55 - Have you found yourself talking to groups that you never expected to have to be talking to or thinking about spaces that you never thought you'd be in front of in this work?
1:06:05 - The best conference that I presented at in the last two and a half years was the unions, the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
1:06:14 - Never expected to find myself there, but what an incredible group of people who all fully understand
1:06:21 - the importance of safe working environments.
1:06:24 - So they've been an incredibly supportive group and we're super excited to have one of the assistant secretaries of the Australian Council of Trade Unions coming to speak at our conference in October, next month, it's really soon.
1:06:42 - And yeah,
1:06:46 - they get it and the Safe Work Australia model code of practice that we were just talking about is obviously hugely sort of underpins their work.
1:06:56 - So yeah, that's been amazing.
1:06:59 - What's been really encouraging from a patient organization perspective has been to see what started with just a small number who got it has expanded.
1:07:12 - We were in Parliament House yesterday, obviously,
1:07:15 - taking around our new call for a national healthy air strategy and um the organization we started get ronman king and i started getting logos for us on thursday we've been working on this with the center for safe air which is a national health and medical research council funded um research group pretty with predominantly with a focus on outdoor air um but they're obviously interested in
1:07:44 - Lydia is one of their fellows.
1:07:46 - So, you know, they obviously do have an interest.
1:07:48 - We've been working on this national strategy with them.
1:07:51 - And in the four days that we started collecting logos so that we could, you know, take a logo sheet with us to Parliament House on yesterday, Asthma Australia, Breast Cancer Network, Cancer Council, Lung Foundation, Emerge, as I mentioned before, yeah.
1:08:13 - So a much broader range and much bigger organizations as well.
1:08:18 - So with my background in cancer, I was super delighted to see Cancer Council and Breast Cancer Network coming on board.
1:08:26 - I don't know if you know, there's a really great study that was published in Nature, which basically showed that influenza and COVID could reactivate dormant cancer cells in people living with breast cancer and could lead to metastatic breast cancer.
1:08:43 - Now, if that isn't a reason for us to be working to prevent transmission, I don't know what it is.
1:08:50 - So it's really encouraging that that growth in recognition of patient organisations, of the importance of this for their groups, has been really heartening because it was pretty, you know, going out and founding a charity on your own is always a bit of a
1:09:13 - wake up call or, you know, even just kind of making the decision to do it.
1:09:17 - And it can feel a bit lonely.
1:09:20 - So getting those organisations coming on board and endorsing what we're doing is, you know, that makes a big difference.
1:09:28 - And then oddly, like, you know, I think we were talking about the multidisciplinary portfolio, you know, nature of this work.
1:09:38 - You know, other organisations on, you know, we've got academic institutes, which obviously you'd expect from a research perspective.
1:09:44 - But organisations like Green Building Council, Neighbours being the energy rating scheme and international well building.
1:09:51 - You know, so there is a group that can go right over here to the climate change minister.
1:09:55 - You know, you get the patient organisations going to the health minister.
1:09:59 - You get the, you know, the industry.
1:10:01 - So, you know, AERA being the peak body for the HVAC organization.
1:10:08 - industry, Camphill, you know, all of those kind of organizations, they can go to the industry minister.
1:10:13 - So suddenly you've got a coalition of people with different interests or different reasons, but all supporting the ask for a healthy air strategy.
1:10:26 - So I think that's the, I came to this because I could see the health impacts.
1:10:33 - That was what was so clear to me, my backgrounds in health policy.
1:10:37 - It was a health impact in my family.
1:10:40 - Okay, let's, you know, health minister, health minister.
1:10:43 - But the interesting thing for me has been meeting people who have different, you know, are connected to different portfolios.
1:10:52 - So the, you know, the union's being connected to workplace health and safety, the, you know, green building councils and others being connected to the environment minister.
1:11:01 - That's.
1:11:02 - Sorry, the climate change minister, because here in Australia we have the climate change and the environment ministers separate.
1:11:08 - So, yeah, that's that I think is the really interesting thing is is meeting stakeholders from across different.
1:11:14 - You know, I never would have thought about finding myself in a, you know, presenting at, you know, well conferences and things.
1:11:21 - And I'm super excited.
1:11:22 - We've got the Well Summit next week.
1:11:24 - I'm here in Sydney and I'm doing a fireside chat with Jack, which will be brilliant.
1:11:30 - But there's a totally different audience to one that I'm used to.
1:11:33 - And it's been great.
1:11:38 - Talk to me about unions, right?
1:11:41 - If you heard the podcast yesterday with Lisa, I asked her the same question because I'm fascinated by the union angle here.
1:11:52 - Both from the, well, no, I mean, purely on the workplace part of this, that there are, you know, we've gone through centuries now
1:12:03 - of heartache making workplaces safe, right?
1:12:10 - Through industrialization, through the knowledge economy and sick building syndromes, you know, into this new world of working from home.
1:12:20 - You know, unions have been a crucial part, a crucial building block from the very beginning of advocating for workers rights.
1:12:28 - They understand this
1:12:30 - better than almost any other cohort in the world.
1:12:35 - And yet we've seen them almost exclusively absent from the air quality conversation.
1:12:42 - Something that, as the health and safety chair in Ireland said very unequivocally,
1:12:52 - An employer has a responsibility for the quality of air that an employee breathes, no matter where their place of work is and no matter what they do.
1:13:03 - There is a responsibility of an employer to provide a safe working environment for their employees.
1:13:11 - Full stop, black and white.
1:13:13 - That's it.
1:13:15 - No argument.
1:13:16 - And we are on record as saying that.
1:13:19 - And that sent shivers down the spines of many people listening to her saying that for obvious reasons, particularly with the work from home angle.
1:13:28 - But I just it just seems to me that we've never pulled on the union angle here.
1:13:35 - And we saw elements of it during Covid in the UK.
1:13:38 - The teachers union started to produce some guidance for teachers to advocate.
1:13:45 - But...
1:13:47 - Have you been able to get some sense of the machinery of that group as it relates to air quality, where the recognition is, at what point this goes up their list of things to start advocating on behalf of members for?
1:14:06 - It seems to me to be a huge missing part of this conversation, is the union part of it.
1:14:13 - A hundred percent.
1:14:15 - We're very lucky here, the union that I mentioned, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, that's the peak body for the unions here.
1:14:23 - And one of their assistant secretaries, Liam O'Brien, presented at the launch of our report.
1:14:29 - So in November 24, he's been on a webinar with us, our workplace webinar.
1:14:34 - He spoke on a panel at our event in October last year in Parliament House.
1:14:39 - So has been really proactive, you know, and Lydia and Professor Brendan Crabb from the Burnett Institute and I presented at their conference, you know, I think in October 24.
1:14:51 - So they have been very interested.
1:14:55 - And I was moved to tears by the New South Wales Teachers Federation, presenting evidence to the, we're about to wrap up,
1:15:08 - a New South Wales clean indoor air inquiry.
1:15:12 - So the health committee of the New South Wales parliament have been running this inquiry.
1:15:19 - It was launched at our event.
1:15:20 - It was announced at our event in November last year.
1:15:24 - There was the first, you know, submissions were due again, end of January, I think.
1:15:28 - And I did, gave oral evidence in February, and then the Teachers Federation gave oral evidence in March.
1:15:37 - And I was so relieved.
1:15:41 - Their testimony was amazing.
1:15:42 - I'll send you the link to their submission, which was just fantastic.
1:15:51 - They've got a bit quiet.
1:15:54 - They recently told me that I was inviting them to our conference in Canberra.
1:15:58 - They recently told me that it's no longer a priority for them.
1:16:02 - So I may have cried a little early with relief that they were finally at the table, but I'm hoping we can get them back.
1:16:12 - But the ACTU have been fantastic.
1:16:15 - And obviously we have this new model code of practice that I just mentioned.
1:16:19 - There has just been a review of, a best practice review of model codes.
1:16:26 - And from the,
1:16:28 - public consultation that was again, that was published in March, there was a call in there for action on climate change and action on air quality.
1:16:39 - So something will get given to the workplace health and safety ministers, the way that it's works here in Australia, it's a federated model.
1:16:46 - So there's, there's, you know, the Commonwealth help them.
1:16:52 - workplace health and safety minister, and then there are states and territories.
1:16:55 - So something will get given to them on the basis of that public consultation that was published in March, but it mentioned air quality and specifically in relation to climate change.
1:17:08 - And the interesting thing I think about the climate change angle and the responsibility of the person conducting the business
1:17:18 - And what you were just saying, you know, in terms of, you know, people conducting business have a responsibility to be, to ensure that their workers are safe from the air quality, wherever they breathe it in the workplace.
1:17:31 - Well, for some people breathing outdoors, there are pollutants that an employer can control, but there are also pollutants that an employer
1:17:45 - really can't control.
1:17:46 - So how and you know, in a warming climate, what does that look like?
1:17:51 - So I think that'll be really interesting from a regulation perspective.
1:17:54 - But then it's much easier to for an employer to manage air quality inside a building.
1:18:00 - And so, yeah, but that's that's the whole point of workers rights and safety is that that, you know, it's risk mitigation.
1:18:10 - You know, you can't you can't eliminate risk.
1:18:13 - Nobody expects you to be able to.
1:18:15 - But you have to do everything that can be reasonably expected of you.
1:18:19 - giving the resources that you have to protect people that work for you.
1:18:24 - That's the fundamentals of health and safety at work.
1:18:27 - And, you know, for me, air quality and the risks associated with it are no different to manual handling risks.
1:18:35 - You know, there is an inherent risk in lifting and moving in a workplace.
1:18:41 - And what you have to do is understand what those risks are, who's vulnerable to them more than others, and put...
1:18:48 - mechanisms in place and training and the hierarchies of control and all that good stuff.
1:18:54 - We know how to do this stuff.
1:18:55 - Like this is not the fundamentals of health and safety in the workplace are a well, well trodden path.
1:19:04 - And I, I just, I'll be, I might be interested to chat to Liam O'Brien or others, actually, if anybody's listening from the union space that wants to come on and chat to me about this, I'd be fascinated to hear,
1:19:16 - What drives unions to care enough to provide, like you've had with many of your cohorts, get the knowledge out there to the members of their groups so that they understand and are aware of this and know their rights?
1:19:34 - which is often what unions are about.
1:19:36 - You know, did you know your workplace has this responsibility?
1:19:39 - Did you know there's a code of practice?
1:19:41 - Did you know that they're supposed to do an annual or a biannual inspection of the ventilation system?
1:19:47 - When was the last time you saw some come around and check your HVAC system?
1:19:51 - You know, that can be very powerful.
1:19:54 - And, you know, in many of the spaces that you're advocating for,
1:19:59 - you know, medical settings, teaching spaces, public spaces.
1:20:04 - These are all workplaces as well.
1:20:06 - All workplaces.
1:20:07 - All workplaces.
1:20:08 - Yeah.
1:20:08 - And this is, again, it's this trickle down.
1:20:12 - You get it, you fix that space from a workplace perspective.
1:20:15 - And hey, presto, you fix that space for all of that other, all those other layers that you've been talking about.
1:20:22 - Fix it for teachers.
1:20:23 - Yeah.
1:20:23 - You fix it for the tool.
1:20:25 - Yeah.
1:20:26 - Yeah.
1:20:27 - I love it.
1:20:27 - By the way, there's already a rule for that.
1:20:29 - We're supposed to have fixed it for the teachers.
1:20:32 - So we don't have to make anything new up.
1:20:34 - You've just got to do what you're supposed to have done.
1:20:36 - Yeah.
1:20:37 - And then everything else will follow.
1:20:39 - And weirdly, there's already a rule for the children because every child should have a safe learning environment.
1:20:44 - So there's a double whammy on school settings because, you know, it's already covered by two two pieces of legislation and yet
1:20:54 - the problem still remains entirely invisible in that setting.
1:20:58 - And I liked the discussion you were having with Lisa about if the canteen was causing, you know, X percentage of the workforce to be sick, how long would the canteen remain open for?
1:21:12 - You know, how long would it be allowed to do that?
1:21:14 - If the water was making people sick in school, how long would it be allowed to do that?
1:21:21 - And yet here's this,
1:21:23 - other environmental challenge than we just kind of accepted.
1:21:26 - And so I thought that was a great way of thinking about it as well.
1:21:31 - Perhaps what we need to do on, when we're going for advocacy meetings is take a dirty bottle of water with us, say, put it on the table and say, would you drink it?
1:21:42 - In one of our discussions yesterday, we were,
1:21:45 - talking about buses, which is obviously always a good discussion because buses are so badly ventilated.
1:21:52 - And I had a little Aranet, which has the sticker, I don't know if you know, the re-breathed air percentage sticker on it.
1:21:58 - And so we were speaking about 3,500 ppm, which is 8% re-breathed air.
1:22:06 - And I said, would you like to drink from this glass with 8% backwash?
1:22:11 - And then, you know, just recoil in horror of no, of
1:22:15 - I'm fine.
1:22:16 - Thank you.
1:22:16 - I really I'd rather not.
1:22:18 - So I think my mind was going to the food one there.
1:22:21 - And I was thinking, you know, because the water is an old trope this stage.
1:22:25 - You know, there's been movies written about people putting glasses of water in front of solicitors and judges and stuff.
1:22:31 - Right.
1:22:31 - But you wonder on the food angle, you know, a warm prawn sandwich that's been sat out all day long, you know, that's been affected by the environment.
1:22:40 - Would you eat this food that that's been in an environment that could have made it ill?
1:22:45 - frankly, no, I wouldn't go anywhere near it.
1:22:48 - You know, a curled up, you know, curling at the edges, prawn sandwich, you would not pick that up and eat it, you know, but yet you go into a space that that air has been in there festering for several hours.
1:23:02 - Would you want to breathe it?
1:23:03 - No, but we do.
1:23:04 - You know, that's the analogy, isn't it?
1:23:07 - Yeah.
1:23:08 - And so, you know, this conversation was happening in a cafe in Canberra.
1:23:15 - You can walk inside and see the star rating on the wall behind the till that tells you we've got a five star hygiene rating.
1:23:26 - Now, why can't we see that for the air?
1:23:28 - That's, you know, the simplicity of being able to put a number, put some information about the air quality and enable people to see it.
1:23:45 - That's a really good point, Plum.
1:23:47 - And it was a question I really wanted to touch on in this conversation with you, because in part, we had this conversation when we met in Singapore.
1:23:56 - And I asked you, in a complex environment of a conference where there was meeting rooms, breakouts, big auditoriums, outdoor spaces, communal spaces, every type of environment, I asked you the very pointed question,
1:24:14 - What would you need?
1:24:16 - What would good look like from a building perspective that would give you the confidence to know how what that risk looked like for you?
1:24:28 - That enabled you to make a decision, whatever that decision was about that space.
1:24:34 - as opposed to having to take everything as a potential worst case scenario, because there's just no information.
1:24:40 - I think a really important part of this discussion, we never really got to talk about it the last time.
1:24:45 - And you probably have a much better idea of what that looks like now than you did when we first spoke a year or so ago.
1:24:51 - Um,
1:24:53 - I think painting a picture of what good looks like out there, you know, have you been able to start imagining what that looks like?
1:25:03 - What?
1:25:03 - Yes.
1:25:04 - Because because a lot of a lot of the advocacy work is that you're not doing good enough.
1:25:08 - This this is the problem.
1:25:10 - This is how it's affecting people.
1:25:12 - But also a major part of this is.
1:25:15 - What does the roadmap to good look like?
1:25:18 - Have you been able to build a picture yourself of what that starts to look like in a world where accessibility from an air quality perspective is taken seriously by organisations?
1:25:31 - Yeah, so I see it in a bit of a stepped process.
1:25:36 - What can we do immediately now?
1:25:38 - And what should it, you know, what are we aiming for in the future?
1:25:42 - So we've got a campaign, which is really super simple, to make the invisible visible.
1:25:49 - So just in any public space, to be monitoring the air quality and displaying the air quality.
1:25:56 - Just means immediately it's not up to the person to be carrying a portable monitor to be able to check.
1:26:04 - we know that if you're not measuring it, you're not managing it.
1:26:07 - So at least if someone in the building is responsible for measuring it, they're responsible for managing it.
1:26:13 - So hopefully they're responsible for making it better.
1:26:16 - So that's really the sort of the first step is just making it visible.
1:26:20 - So that's why we, you know, super simple ask for organizations monitor your air quality and display your air quality.
1:26:29 - But then we kind of get into this
1:26:31 - gray area of, you know, what are we looking for?
1:26:36 - What do the numbers tell us?
1:26:40 - And how do we know what cleaning, air cleaning technology is being used in a space if we can't see it?
1:26:51 - So not only is, you know, the air quality itself not visible, but the technology is often invisible too.
1:26:56 - And I love just, you know, the thing that most stuck in my mind, obviously, you know,
1:27:00 - I had the absolute pleasure of seeing you in New York this time last year for the UN.
1:27:08 - In that conference room in the UN, the Aronet's reading 1500, stable at 1500.
1:27:17 - So it's being filtered, but what's it?
1:27:20 - It's being recirculated, but what's happening to it?
1:27:24 - And at 1500, arguably from a,
1:27:29 - infection risk perspective, that's a risky space, particularly for someone with my level of risk.
1:27:38 - And then you go online and you go, oh, okay, well, they went and upgraded their filters to Merv 14 filters in 2020.
1:27:44 - So that's pretty good.
1:27:47 - You know, that's a higher level of efficiency.
1:27:51 - So it's been really well filtered.
1:27:54 - Okay.
1:27:54 - So the risk is obviously substantially less.
1:27:57 - But to what degree?
1:27:59 - And how do we know that?
1:28:00 - And why did I have to go online to find that information out, you know, on a random website?
1:28:06 - Why is that information not just, you know, walking?
1:28:08 - Why is that not on the door as the space you go into?
1:28:12 - Yeah.
1:28:13 - And that was a point that really resonated with me when we were talking about this in Singapore was that,
1:28:19 - there are very practical things.
1:28:21 - You know, I had a long conversation with Lydia about the space when we were talking about the fact that two experts are sitting in the space talking about a PPM number with almost no contextual information at all.
1:28:34 - We're basically guessing.
1:28:35 - We're saying, look, we're in a,
1:28:36 - Humid environment, there's probably a certain amount of recirculation, therefore, an elevated CO2 levels probably means X.
1:28:44 - And therefore, there's two of us in this space.
1:28:46 - We're having to make these.
1:28:48 - And you're going, actually, that's very resolvable.
1:28:51 - You know, either technically in a modern world where.
1:28:57 - your phone that's geo located in any environment can tell you in real time what percentage of recirculated air, what the infection risk score is in that space based on the CO2 and the engineering solutions they're bringing to bear to manage that space.
1:29:13 - Because.
1:29:14 - You know, not all spaces bring in 100% outdoor air, you know, depending on where you are in the world, where the way buildings are managed, they're managed vastly differently for very real reasons.
1:29:26 - Yeah.
1:29:26 - But even at a very basic level for you, just having a like a restaurant, a plaque, a menu on the door, a menu on the building or something accessible that says this is how this space operates in these conditions.
1:29:40 - So this is what it means to you.
1:29:42 - Yeah, absolutely.
1:29:43 - So like I'm looking at my monitor here, which has got, you know, it's just me, it's a naturally ventilated, it's quite cold.
1:29:49 - So my window is not open very much.
1:29:51 - You know, I'm at 790 on the CO2, PM 2.5 is at three.
1:29:55 - The UFC is quite a small number, 100.
1:29:59 - At 50% humidity, 20 degrees, right?
1:30:02 - So like, there's a lot of information there for a naturally ventilated space.
1:30:06 - I don't really need anything too funky to happen to those numbers.
1:30:10 - I can work it out.
1:30:11 - But once you're in any, you know, anywhere with any form of mechanical ventilation or even portable filtration, those numbers change a bit.
1:30:22 - So I don't know if you're aware of the reset viral index.
1:30:26 - It was created in sort of 2021, really to sort of try and answer the score.
1:30:31 - What is the percentage safety of a space based
1:30:36 - I think it was CO2, PM2.5, humidity and temperature.
1:30:39 - So everything that's on that monitor, you know, goes into an algorithm and pops out at 98%, for example.
1:30:48 - And then they did a 2.0 version, but this version never got published for whatever reason.
1:30:57 - They had a look at what happens to the percentage safety of a space when you add portable filtration.
1:31:06 - If, as in here, PM2.5 is already exceptionally low, I've turned on the HEPA filter, it stays exceptionally low.
1:31:16 - Did the risk increase?
1:31:19 - Did it decrease?
1:31:20 - Did it stay the same?
1:31:22 - Well, if the purifier is working in the way that it should work, the infection risk has decreased, but nothing on that monitor has changed.
1:31:32 - So how much safer did the space get because of the filtration?
1:31:39 - And that's what they were trying to answer with that 2.0 version.
1:31:43 - So I've always been fascinated by this.
1:31:45 - I just, yeah, let's get that answer.
1:31:48 - That's, you know, like that seems like something that would really help move us forward.
1:31:53 - And so somewhere in between the time that, you know, the 2.0 version was, you know, shelved
1:32:00 - ASHRAE 241 was published with the, you know, and with ASHRAE 241, there's an equivalent clean air changes per hour calculator.
1:32:08 - Like there's a giant spreadsheet that gives you all of these numbers.
1:32:13 - So we've literally just announced a project with RESET funded by the Public Health Action Network to finish the 2.0 version and to build in the other disinfection technology.
1:32:28 - So it will answer the question of what happens when you add filtration, what happens when you add, you know, UV, what happens when you add induct, what happens when you do X, Y, and Z.
1:32:41 - To try and build basically something that can be made to be bespoke to any setting.
1:32:48 - Because as you said, all, you know, all environments, depending on where they are in the world or, you know,
1:32:53 - I mean, I was in Cairns last week, which is an entirely different climate to here in Sydney, despite being on the same island.
1:33:03 - So entirely different, you know, cleaning, air cleaning thing.
1:33:07 - You know, humidity is obviously the problem up there.
1:33:10 - A lot of mould.
1:33:12 - So, yeah.
1:33:14 - How do we, how do you create something that can therefore be bespoke, made to be bespoke to any environment?
1:33:21 - You, where you sort of, you know, take a couple of, you know, hit a couple of switches and go, okay, this is what we're using.
1:33:26 - I'm not sure if it's going to make the noise, by the way, I think it should.
1:33:31 - You know, and it'll give you the number, you know, 95% safe.
1:33:36 - So that's, that's the plan.
1:33:38 - And so not only will you get the safety score,
1:33:43 - but there'll also be information available.
1:33:45 - This is what we're using.
1:33:47 - Yeah, and I think it's really important and it's something that I've really struggled to wrap my head around because it is hard.
1:33:54 - The perception of risk is a very personal thing.
1:33:58 - It's a very dynamic thing.
1:34:00 - It moves, it's different with different people.
1:34:04 - And it has very different consequences as well to different people.
1:34:08 - So it's a very hard thing to say that something's safe or not or something is this or that.
1:34:14 - And this is always the trouble.
1:34:15 - It's very hard for engineers and scientists who work it off in very binary environments to understand a world where this is an imperfect world.
1:34:26 - We could argue forever about CO2, PM.
1:34:30 - You pick a pollutant, there'll be...
1:34:32 - communities arguing about this, that and the other with them as they should do.
1:34:36 - But at some point, somebody's got to make a decision about a space that they're in.
1:34:42 - What that means to them.
1:34:44 - And we don't have the right to say what that means to them.
1:34:49 - That's a decision they have to make.
1:34:52 - But we have to try.
1:34:53 - We have to try and put those spaces in a place where somebody can make a meaningful determination on,
1:34:59 - of what that risk represents to them.
1:35:02 - And there are so many equivalents to that in health and safety, whether it's mental health, lifting, whatever it is, people make personal determinants of a risk as it's presented to them that could be different the next day.
1:35:19 - And we as workplaces and we as engineers have got to work with that and figure out how that works in reality.
1:35:27 - And I think it's a really interesting conundrum to think about.
1:35:33 - And for me, there's several layers here.
1:35:35 - There's the layer of how can I present information in a way that's meaningful, whether it's live or online.
1:35:48 - administrative in nature, you know, a label of an information sheet, a website, detail, whatever.
1:35:54 - And how accurate is that information?
1:35:58 - You know, how good are those devices at giving you the right information?
1:36:03 - And how good is the administrative process behind it?
1:36:08 - So if we're relying on assumptions...
1:36:12 - How well can we rely on assumption?
1:36:15 - As we know, painfully in the built environment, most buildings are built to standards.
1:36:22 - Virtually none of them perform to those standards.
1:36:25 - So if we assume that a filter is MIRV 14...
1:36:30 - that's a dangerous assumption to make that it's doing what it should do, or that you've even got a MRV 14 filter installed, or that the thing is even on and not being bypassed.
1:36:42 - You know, we know through painful, painful experience in the built environment that we have not cared about the performance of HVAC systems and ventilation systems traditionally, that they run to failure.
1:36:58 - So it's a really interesting conundrum.
1:37:01 - And I kept bringing it back.
1:37:03 - And it was that personal question to you in Singapore is to the, at what point does a building represent a low enough risk
1:37:14 - that you don't feel, for example, that you need to take personal protection to mitigate a failure on somebody else's part.
1:37:23 - And that has got to be, you know, that's a very esoteric thing.
1:37:27 - It's an unfair question to ask someone, frankly, because it can change.
1:37:31 - It's different from person to person.
1:37:35 - The, I mean, for example, in the situation we were in very, very close quarters with a thousand people in a small room, you know,
1:37:44 - The risk, I mean, none of what we're trying to do will solve short-range transmission.
1:37:50 - Yeah, for sure.
1:37:51 - So at any given time, you can be talking to someone and that's it.
1:37:58 - Too bad they were asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic and you've got... Or symptomatic and didn't give a shit.
1:38:06 - And symptomatic and didn't give a shit.
1:38:08 - Yeah, exactly.
1:38:09 - Or tail end.
1:38:10 - Anyway, that risk will be there.
1:38:15 - based on the assumptions that were included in the report that we spoke about earlier, if improving indoor air quality can lead to at least a 60% reduction in transmission, your chance of coming in contact with someone who is infectious will obviously reduce because will significantly impact on, you know, the R number of any infectious disease.
1:38:33 - So I think there will come a time at which, you know,
1:38:37 - that's not such a risk.
1:38:38 - And for example, I don't mask outdoors.
1:38:40 - I've, you know, I've been infected with COVID in the last 18 months and I'm confident, you know, it was outdoors.
1:38:49 - And the person only said to me after five minutes of talking, I've got a bit of a sore throat.
1:38:52 - I was like, oh God.
1:38:54 - You know, and so I tend to, you know, that's where I sort of, can we get to a place where, you know, we're in an indoor space that's well enough ventilated
1:39:06 - your risk profile is as reduced as it would be if you were outdoors.
1:39:12 - And how do we give people the information so that they don't look at a CO2 number and go, well, that's really high.
1:39:22 - This is a very risky space where they can look at the number and go, well, that number's quite high, but the filtration in here is very good.
1:39:32 - and make a different assessment.
1:39:34 - So we'll never solve the problem of eliminating risk, but what we can do is try, which is obviously what the aim of the workplace health and safety laws may be to reduce the risk to as low, give people the information to know whether the risk has been reduced to the lowest practicable level.
1:39:59 - That's what we're trying to give people the ability to understand.
1:40:03 - And more importantly, just kind of by making it visible and by kind of having it become one of those things that you're just used to seeing.
1:40:11 - Like we're all used to seeing the star numbers.
1:40:13 - And talking about and acting on.
1:40:16 - Yeah.
1:40:17 - Again, another interesting thing is you mentioned restaurants and cafes with hygiene ratings.
1:40:24 - I don't think I've ever looked at one of those.
1:40:28 - I don't think I've made a decision on a hygiene rating.
1:40:33 - I'll make a visible decision on a that looks dodgy.
1:40:37 - That looks a dodgy restaurant, right?
1:40:40 - But I don't make a choice about entering that space based on that.
1:40:46 - Maybe if I was vulnerable and I've been sick so many times from poisoning, I would care, right?
1:40:51 - I bet you...
1:40:53 - I bet you no restaurant with a one or two star leaves it at one or two star.
1:40:58 - They get themselves up.
1:41:00 - No.
1:41:00 - And that's the point.
1:41:01 - It's not so much a decision for the user.
1:41:03 - It's a tool for the space to up the game.
1:41:08 - Yeah.
1:41:10 - There was a couple of thoughts that were springing to my mind when you were talking there.
1:41:13 - One was about.
1:41:15 - risk decision making.
1:41:16 - And it's a fascinating lens to put yourself in the position of somebody that's vulnerable at different scales of vulnerability, perhaps, where, like you say, for some people, going into a room with 400 people
1:41:33 - and that you're going to have random conversations with at any one time, a conference being the example of it, or a wedding, perhaps.
1:41:40 - A wedding, flown, right?
1:41:44 - There are no safe scenarios there for you personally, right?
1:41:49 - So at that point, you're making decisions to either...
1:41:53 - do the last of the hierarchies of control, which is personal PPE, or you decide not to be in that space, right?
1:42:00 - That they're your two choices because the consequences of not doing one of those two things are too big or grave.
1:42:12 - But then there are people, I guess,
1:42:15 - As we were talking about this layering down the scale, perhaps, where these are secondary risks to an underlying condition where they don't generally mask in most spaces or they don't generally make a decision about the environments they're in.
1:42:34 - How do we present information?
1:42:36 - What does a good space look like to them that they can make a risk decision about that space?
1:42:42 - And you, I think you articulated one really well.
1:42:45 - In an ideal world, if you can say this indoor space is equivalent to outdoors,
1:42:51 - is a zero risk space as much as we can make it, then that's your starting point.
1:42:57 - So if you can have a label on a space that says, for all intents and purposes, regardless of what CO2 says in here, because we've got other technologies in play,
1:43:06 - This is an outdoor equivalent space.
1:43:10 - That's it.
1:43:11 - 24 hours a day or within the working period or whatever it is.
1:43:14 - This is equivalent to an outdoor space.
1:43:17 - I think we can make that mental picture.
1:43:19 - That's one to make.
1:43:21 - But I'm guessing that perhaps we can't make it's very difficult to make all spaces equivalent to an outdoor space.
1:43:29 - So how do we articulate a risk that's perhaps one or two steps down from that?
1:43:34 - Can we create a picture for people that says this isn't an outdoor space equivalent, but this is another type of space that you can imagine for you to make a risk decision on?
1:43:46 - So this is equivalent to you being in a.
1:43:50 - a home with three other people and one of them might have a cold, what's your risk of getting an infection?
1:43:57 - Right.
1:43:58 - Or something, you know, something that a human being.
1:44:00 - Is it a home with daycare kids or, you know, what are the, what are the frame, you know, beyond a CO2 sensor and a plaque on a wall, like how do we describe spaces for people that they can make an immediate decision on risk?
1:44:17 - that's relevant to them.
1:44:22 - Because that's kind of what we're talking about here fundamentally is that when we're talking about accessibility, different people will have different tolerances of risk, but everybody has to make, because we move around the world, we have to make a decision in the moment of whether that's a tolerable risk.
1:44:42 - And something goes off.
1:44:43 - You know what risk's like?
1:44:45 - Something goes off in your gut.
1:44:48 - that you go, you know what, I'm going to move to the other side of the street here.
1:44:52 - Or you know what, I'm going to walk down to that crossing here.
1:44:56 - I don't feel safe here.
1:44:57 - Or you know what, I don't like the look of that bridge.
1:45:02 - You know, something goes off.
1:45:05 - You know, you need to present information in a way, in the moment, in one scenario where people can make a decision about an environment they're about to walk into
1:45:17 - that can resonate at a level that they go, no, maybe we'll go next door or, you know what, I'm going to get the mask out and put that on.
1:45:27 - Then there's another level to this.
1:45:29 - Sorry, just let me finish my train of thought.
1:45:31 - The other level to this is the, is at a life level where,
1:45:35 - about where you generally choose to put yourself, which I think is at another level.
1:45:40 - Right.
1:45:40 - So there's the level in the moment where you have to make a decision in that moment about what's the right risk mitigation for you.
1:45:48 - But there's also that, particularly if you have a vulnerability, you'll generally build a life around you.
1:45:54 - that doesn't put you in those positions, right?
1:45:58 - So you need to present information at a higher level that enables people to make choices about the kind of spaces they're gonna put themselves in or the kind of, and you articulated this beautifully when we first met about,
1:46:11 - For example, your kids going on a school bus on a school trip, you know, that's a that's a good example of it's not an in the moment decision.
1:46:19 - That's sitting down and looking at our life pattern and going that that scenario just presents too many risks.
1:46:27 - So how do we build a life around that that zeroes that risk down for us or.
1:46:33 - parties indoors or outdoors or whatever they are right yeah yeah so i find that fascinating yeah two years later i'm still driving to i'm still taking the kids to the excursion um because the bus really is yeah
1:46:48 - You know, that is currently an unsolvable problem.
1:46:53 - We need to go back to buses of the 1950s, which had the openable windows.
1:46:59 - You know, there's beautiful American school buses.
1:47:02 - That's the yellow, you know, the magic school bus.
1:47:05 - That's what we need.
1:47:08 - And until then, you know, that is just an infection nightmare.
1:47:14 - I'm dreading the...
1:47:16 - Year six camp down to the snow is a six-hour drive.
1:47:20 - I'm not quite sure how I'm doing that one yet, but we'll work on it.
1:47:25 - My daughter's just moved into student accommodation in a university.
1:47:29 - I mean, my Lord, they're sharing a small apartment student accommodation with 10 other teenagers.
1:47:37 - Probably definitely worth a pair of pie, you know.
1:47:39 - Yeah.
1:47:41 - Like, it wouldn't be a bad Christmas present, I suspect.
1:47:47 - Yeah, I mean, you know, whereas, you know, we do the indoor parties now, you know, that's only really to the well-ventilated ones, you know.
1:47:58 - But it's too difficult to miss out on them.
1:48:00 - And so making a decision to wear a mask is how you get to continue to do things, even though the risk
1:48:10 - of doing the thing might, you know, might, might feel like too much.
1:48:15 - You know, the sort of, I kind of, I, I tend, like I got asked this question yesterday, the MP I was meeting with said, I'm not infectious.
1:48:23 - I was like, oh, how do you know?
1:48:27 - Did, did, you know, like, I'm, I'm sure you're not, but just for the purposes that you might be,
1:48:36 - and the minor inconvenience of me wearing a mask for five minutes, because it was a very short meeting, I'm just going to wear my mask because you don't know that.
1:48:47 - You could be asymptomatic, you could be pre-symptomatic, you certainly haven't tested.
1:48:53 - You know, I don't want to be sick for a week.
1:48:55 - I don't want to bring home something that's going to make my children sick.
1:48:57 - I don't want to bring home something that's going to make, you know, so sometimes it is just a case of being mildly inconvenient.
1:49:06 - to prevent something that could be extremely inconvenient.
1:49:12 - Yeah, there's that end of it, but there's also like, I think that articulation of the problem probably does a disservice to the deeper problem of that is that some spaces are becoming inaccessible to people because, you know, this is someone's workplace.
1:49:30 - This is a space they have to go to a bank or be a patient in or a student of.
1:49:35 - Plenty of people who've had to...
1:49:40 - assess that risk and go, well, that workplace can't, will never be safe enough, you know?
1:49:48 - And interestingly, you know, my co-founder Amy will sort of, you know, talk about how her husband, who has a very serious chronic health condition, was previously told, well, you can't work here.
1:50:04 - There was an aspergillus, you know,
1:50:07 - He worked in an ICU in a hospital.
1:50:10 - There was an aspergillus problem.
1:50:12 - And so he was told he couldn't work there anymore, that he would have to work somewhere else in the hospital.
1:50:18 - And it's a really, you know, back in the day, it was like, oh, okay, yeah, sure.
1:50:23 - That sounds like a really sensible option.
1:50:26 - And yet the reality is that really shouldn't have been the approach.
1:50:28 - The approach should have been, we're going to make it safe.
1:50:32 - Yeah.
1:50:33 - Yeah, or present that risk or do something about that risk and present it in a way where that person can make a decision about it.
1:50:41 - You know, the same.
1:50:43 - Yeah, it's a. I'm just fascinated by this end of the discussion, as much as I am about the engineering and the policy.
1:50:51 - Yeah, yeah.
1:50:52 - Because ultimately, we're all humans.
1:50:55 - We all have a connection and we all want people to feel safe in our presence.
1:51:01 - Well, most of us do, right?
1:51:03 - And that's what's fundamentally at stake here.
1:51:07 - It's why I asked you the question I did.
1:51:09 - It's why people want to do the right, beyond the ROIs and the billions of invested, at a fundamental, it's just the right thing to do at a human connection level.
1:51:21 - We want to know how as a business, how as a building, how as a policymaker, how we put
1:51:32 - people in your position and the groups that you represent in a space that they can make a decision ultimately that's right for them.
1:51:41 - And ultimately that decision for them in that moment might be not to be in that space or to wear a mask.
1:51:47 - Frankly, there are environments where those risk and it will change depending on community infection risks at the time and pandemics and all the other stuff that goes with it.
1:51:59 - But that's that's a question we've got to answer.
1:52:01 - And it's the kind of question a business will ask you as well, I guess, down the road.
1:52:05 - Is that a plump?
1:52:06 - I get it.
1:52:06 - I'm so into what you're saying.
1:52:08 - This is brilliant.
1:52:09 - What do I do?
1:52:11 - Yes.
1:52:11 - Tell me what to do.
1:52:13 - What does how do I get my workplace?
1:52:16 - that I can put a safer air badge outside of this building and say that we now do the right thing for our employees.
1:52:27 - That's really interesting.
1:52:28 - Yeah, so this is kind of part of this roadmap that I was briefly touched on about the Making the Invisible Visible campaign.
1:52:36 - So we want people to monitor so that the first answer is, what are you monitoring your air quality?
1:52:42 - Now's a really good time to start.
1:52:44 - you know, if you're not already.
1:52:46 - And if you're not already doing it, sorry, if you are already doing it, make it visible.
1:52:53 - So making it visible so it's a transparent thing that anybody can access the information.
1:52:59 - And I love your idea, the geolocation of being able to kind of tap into that, you know, so that it's readily accessible.
1:53:10 - Then kind of moving forward, okay, well now we'll have, you know, what we're gonna call the reset Safer Air Accessibility Index.
1:53:17 - So that's the evolution of the viral index into this accessibility index, where it will give us the percentage safety score based on all the things that they're doing to improve their air quality.
1:53:29 - Right, and make that visible and provide people with the information.
1:53:33 - And ultimately where I want to get to is,
1:53:37 - You know, becoming, you know, we spoke earlier about the Hidden Disabilities Lanyard.
1:53:42 - You know, part of the program with the Hidden Disabilities Charities, they educate organizations.
1:53:51 - You know, so an organization will, you know, sign up to Hidden Disabilities so that they can run a Hidden Disabilities educational program for their staff.
1:54:02 - let's run an educational program about the role of indoor air quality in accessibility, the role of indoor air quality in health, and just kind of general team cohesiveness.
1:54:14 - So that's the sort of, that's the process, make it visible, make the technology part of it visible, educate people so that, you know, we know that we're providing people with the information that they need in order to be able to
1:54:31 - feel safe, feel like they can make an informed decision.
1:54:36 - I look at my ironet, I know I'm not making an entirely informed decision.
1:54:41 - It's enough for me to go on.
1:54:43 - It's not, it doesn't get, you know, in the environments, in this room, perfect, naturally ventilated, it's giving me enough information.
1:54:53 - In smarter rooms than this,
1:54:58 - it's drifted, you know, its usefulness has drifted.
1:55:01 - But until we get to adding what is the impact, what is the equivalent clean air changes per hour, and therefore what is the level of safety, that's what we have to go on.
1:55:17 - So that's the direction that we're moving on, making the equivalent air changes per hour visible so that people know.
1:55:24 - And hopefully in doing so,
1:55:27 - educating some people along the way, educating people who may already have a risk, but don't know about air quality and how it impacts their health, and educating people who might not yet, who might not yet have developed the condition that's either, you know,
1:55:49 - How do we prevent the chronic health condition from developing in the first place?
1:55:53 - But we'll do that along the way as we improve the effort for everybody else.
1:55:58 - And most of what you're talking about, there are co-benefits to doing anyway.
1:56:02 - You can't manage what you can't measure.
1:56:05 - So the benefits of making stuff visible, there also helps you improve energy efficiency and all of the other stuff that comes with that data.
1:56:11 - I mean, it's endless where it goes.
1:56:13 - And often what we're talking about here isn't some idealised...
1:56:19 - world, it's often just getting value for money for what we've already been paying for.
1:56:24 - And I talk about this all the time is that the vast majority of what's at stake here is often just bringing buildings to code in the first place.
1:56:34 - Many of the high risk spaces that we encounter
1:56:39 - a high risk, not because of the nature of the space, but because of the performance of that space, not doing what it should do.
1:56:47 - And that we've paid for that.
1:56:48 - We paid the ventilation system.
1:56:50 - We paid for the maintenance.
1:56:51 - We paid for that building and it's not fundamentally doing what it's supposed to be doing.
1:56:56 - So often this isn't a cost that's on us.
1:56:59 - Often this is about us identifying where we're not getting value for money in many cases, which is also a really good thing.
1:57:06 - And
1:57:07 - I ran an experiment here the other day where I just got one of my sensors to feed its data into my AI.
1:57:17 - and to give me advice about my space.
1:57:19 - I gave it some personal information about what I wanted out of that space.
1:57:24 - It kept an eye on the data from that space.
1:57:27 - And it told me, we could very quickly be moving into a world where your phone beeps in your pocket and tells you, by the way, based on the space that you're in right now, because I've been able to pull the data because it's a publicly open sourced set of data for this space, it's presenting these risks to you at the moment.
1:57:45 - I suggest you do X, Y or Z.
1:57:47 - We're not a million miles from that, frankly.
1:57:50 - No, no, 100%.
1:57:51 - We've been working with indoor care to, we've got some monitors that have gone into our patient organization partners, so Emerge and others.
1:58:02 - And we're, indoor care have got the monitors connected to a dashboard that gives them that information.
1:58:08 - That's exactly the purpose, show people,
1:58:12 - And then, yeah, provide them with the information that they need in order to be able to make it better.
1:58:17 - In a language and framed in a way that they understand.
1:58:20 - It isn't zigzaggy lines on a dashboard that means nothing to most people.
1:58:23 - It's just a text message that goes, by the way, this is X risk.
1:58:27 - It's equivalent to Y.
1:58:29 - These are three things you could do right now to improve the environment that you're in.
1:58:33 - You know, magic.
1:58:36 - Easy.
1:58:37 - Yeah.
1:58:38 - God, we chewed through two hours quickly there.
1:58:40 - I knew we were going to.
1:58:41 - It's been so good catching up with you again.
1:58:44 - I'm not sure when we're next going to cross paths.
1:58:46 - It was a great opportunity to sit down with you for a couple of hours and have a proper chat.
1:58:50 - Plum, people, I'm assuming, just keep an eye on the Safer Air project.
1:58:55 - It's all there.
1:58:57 - All of your work, both at a policy level and an outreach level, is all there for people to keep up to date with what's going on.
1:59:04 - Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, obviously the work that we're doing on the call for a national healthy air strategy is obviously really important to people in Australia.
1:59:12 - But our Making the Invisible Visible campaign is something that is global.
1:59:17 - And so we're running that campaign at the end of October, the last week in October, to coincide with National Indoor Air Quality Awareness Month.
1:59:27 - which is based in the US.
1:59:29 - We just thought we'd piggyback off that.
1:59:31 - It seemed as good a campaign as any for us to get involved in.
1:59:36 - So yeah, making the invisible visible, the ask is really simple.
1:59:40 - Monitor.
1:59:42 - and commit to making it transparent.
1:59:44 - And I'm imagining that so many of your listeners are already doing number one, and probably many of them are already making it visible.
1:59:51 - So sign up and help us kind of grow that movement to really kind of make it visible to policymakers as well, that this is something that there is support
2:00:04 - for in the business community.
2:00:07 - So yeah, our website's as good a place as any to head to.
2:00:10 - All of the information is on there.
2:00:12 - And for the global listeners, although, you know, obviously because you're based in Australia, a lot of the policy work is focused on...
2:00:22 - Australia, but there's so much to learn outside and you're involved in the Global Pledge, you're involved in the global communities through IWBI and others.
2:00:32 - There's lessons to be learned here for everybody, isn't there?
2:00:35 - Yeah, the intention is, yes, whilst we're obviously very focused on immediately trying to change Australian policy,
2:00:43 - And the intention is to be able to use it as a test case for other jurisdictions.
2:00:48 - Can the same arguments shift policy in other countries?
2:00:54 - And I'm confident that they can and that we'll be able to sort of use it as a blueprint for action in other countries.
2:01:03 - So, yeah, happy to speak to anybody who's trying to get air quality strategies or
2:01:12 - mandated performance standards or whatever it is you're trying to do from a policy perspective, happy to chat.
2:01:19 - What works in one place might not work in another.
2:01:25 - But yeah, it's one of those things.
2:01:27 - We just need to find the leader who wants to champion.
2:01:32 - I think that's the biggest, and if you've got, as we're seeing the Global Pledge countries
2:01:41 - they've got leadership.
2:01:42 - They've got real national leadership.
2:01:45 - So I think there's an awful lot that we can learn from that.
2:01:47 - And no doubt by the time this episode goes out, we'll have seen that.
2:01:52 - We'll have seen the next UN event come and go.
2:01:56 - And hopefully, I won't see you there this year, but hopefully we'll meet there again one day.
2:02:04 - Yeah, absolutely.
2:02:05 - Plum, it's been brilliant.
2:02:06 - Thanks so much for taking time to talk to me today.
2:02:08 - I appreciate it.
2:02:09 - Thanks a million.
2:02:10 - No, it's amazing.
2:02:11 - Always great to chat, Simon.
2:02:14 - Thanks for listening.
2:02:15 - Before you go, can I ask a favour?
2:02:16 - If you like this show, please do spread the word and let's keep building this community.
2:02:21 - Like, share, subscribe, give it five stars if you can.
2:02:24 - All that stuff really helps with the reach.
2:02:26 - These shows are not possible without our sponsors.
2:02:29 - So thanks a million to them as always.
2:02:31 - See you again next week.
-
0:15 - Welcome back to Air Quality Matters and One Take.
0:18 - One Take, my take on a paper or report on air quality, ventilation and the built environment.
0:23 - I'm Simon Jones and today we're looking at a piece of work that gets right to the heart of what we do in the real world when managing buildings.
0:31 - It's a paper published in Buildings and Environment called A Scalable Framework for Impact Analysis of Faults on Indoor CO2 in Buildings.
0:41 - Now, that might sound a bit academic or a bit dry at first, but trust me, this is anything but dry.
0:48 - It's a massive real world study that analysed over 90 million rows of data from building automation systems across 23 commercial buildings in the US.
1:01 - Think about that for a second.
1:03 - 90 million rows of actual operational data.
1:07 - And what they were looking at is something we talk about all the time on this show.
1:12 - The gap between what a system is designed to do and what it actually does on the ground.
1:18 - Specifically, they wanted to understand how common HVAC faults, the stuck dampers, the leaking valves, the failing fans, actually impact the air we breathe.
1:30 - We've had plenty of studies looking at how faults waste energy, but empirical evidence linking these faults to actual indoor air quality and specifically CO2 levels has been really hard to come by until now.
1:46 - What I love about this paper is how it tackles a really thorny problem in data analysis.
1:51 - And it's a concept I want to spend a minute on because it's so important.
1:55 - It's the difference between correlation and causation.
1:59 - In a building, everything is connected.
2:01 - If you just look at the raw data, you might see some really weird counterintuitive things.
2:07 - For example, if you look at the position of an outdoor air damper and indoor CO2, the data might show that when the damper is wide open, CO2 levels are actually higher.
2:20 - If you just did a simple correlation analysis, you might conclude that opening the outside air damper causes CO2 levels to rise, which makes absolutely no physical sense, of course.
2:32 - But of course, that's not what's happening.
2:35 - What's actually happening is that the building has demand controlled ventilation or DCV.
2:41 - The system is programmed to open the damper because the CO2 is rising.
2:47 - The high CO2 is causing the damper to open, not the other way around.
2:53 - It's a matter of timing, a snapshot in time.
2:57 - It's a classic feedback loop, a classic confounding factor.
3:01 - To get around this, the simultaneity bias, the researchers used a really clever approach called double machine learning or DML.
3:10 - Essentially, they used machine learning to strip away all of the noise and confounding variables like the specific building ID, the time of day, the weather and the current CO2 baseline.
3:24 - So they could isolate the true causal impact of a specific fault on the next step CO2 levels.
3:31 - But let's look at the methodology and the weaknesses of this study, because no research is perfect, right?
3:36 - First, the biggest blind spot in this paper is the complete lack of direct occupancy data.
3:42 - They didn't have a way to count how many people were actually in the rooms.
3:48 - We all know that humans are the sole source of indoor CO2 in these spaces.
3:52 - To compensate, they had to use proxies, things like building ID, the time of day and calendar variables to estimate occupancy patterns.
4:01 - While this is a clever workaround for a 90 million row data set, it's a major limitation.
4:08 - If a room was unexpectedly packed with people during a period marked as low occupancy by the algorithm, the model's estimate of the fault's impact on CO2 could be skewed.
4:21 - Second, they had to rely on return air CO2 as a proxy for zone level air quality across most of their 23 buildings.
4:30 - Return air is a blended average.
4:33 - It's the air coming back from dozens of different rooms all mixed together in the ductwork.
4:39 - If you have a severe underventilation fault in one specific conference room, that critical safety hazard is going to be completely diluted and hidden when mixed with air from 20 other empty offices.
4:53 - They did have however, 335 individual zone sensors.
4:59 - but only across four of the buildings, meaning the spatial resolution of their zone level analysis was actually very narrow compared to the overall data set.
5:09 - Despite these limitations, though, the results are fascinating and highly relevant to the built environment.
5:16 - They ranked 23 different types of faults based on how much they actually degrade ventilation.
5:23 - Let's start with the air handling unit level.
5:27 - The absolute worst fault for your indoor air quality is an AHU discharge fan failure.
5:33 - This is when the fan is supposed to be running, but it's just not generating the static pressure needed to move the air.
5:40 - When that happens, your supply airflow drops off a cliff and return air CO2 spikes because there simply is not enough fresh air coming in to dilute it.
5:51 - The next worst is a poorly tuned system.
5:54 - They looked at AHU damper unstable faults, where the outside air damper is oscillating like crazy, opening to 100% and then slamming shut to the minimum position every few minutes.
6:08 - This is usually the sign of a poorly tuned PID loop.
6:11 - And because the damper is constantly cycling back to its closed position, it severely reduces the overall volume of air entering the building, leading to a steady climb in CO2.
6:24 - It's a great reminder that stability in control systems isn't just about energy and mechanical wear, it's about the air we're breathing too.
6:33 - But then we get to some of the really counterintuitive findings.
6:37 - They looked at valve leaks.
6:38 - Now you might think a leaking cooling valve or a leaking heating valve is just an energy issue.
6:45 - But in an air handling unit they have massive knock-on effects on ventilation.
6:52 - Take a leaking cooling valve for example.
6:54 - If cold water is constantly slipping past that closed valve the supply air temperature drops too low.
7:02 - The building's control system tries to fix this by doing two things.
7:07 - It opens the heating valve and it closes the outside air damper to keep the warm air in.
7:14 - So because of a leaking cooling valve, your fresh air intake gets choked off and indoor CO2 levels shoot up.
7:23 - On the other hand, if you have a leaking heating valve,
7:26 - the supply air temperature gets too high.
7:29 - To cool things down, the system does the opposite.
7:32 - It opens the outside air damper to take advantage of free cooling if it can.
7:37 - This actually dilutes your indoor CO2 and improves your air quality, but it does so at a massive energy penalty because you're running a heating system loop and a cooling loop against each other potentially.
7:51 - And that brings us to the core tension of the paper, the constant trade-off between energy efficiency and indoor air quality.
7:59 - Economiser faults are a perfect example.
8:03 - If an economiser gets stuck open or runs when it shouldn't, it draws in a ton of fresh air, which makes the CO2 levels look fantastic, but the energy required to condition all that extra air is huge.
8:16 - Now let's zoom in from the air handling unit to the actual zones, the rooms where people are sitting.
8:23 - They analysed 335 zone CO2 sensors
8:27 - And the absolute worst local fault they found was, are you ready for this one?
8:31 - Terminal unit airflow set point unreachable low.
8:36 - This is when the VAV box or terminal unit damper is stuck or there's a ductwork issue.
8:44 - And the actual airflow to the room is consistently lower than what the thermostat is asking for.
8:51 - When this happens, you get a localised underventilation and the zone CO2 spikes dramatically because the fresh air is simply not getting into the space.
9:02 - Conversely, they found that if a zone has an occupied cooling set point out of range fault, meaning someone has set the thermostat below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the system runs the fan harder to deliver more cold air.
9:17 - This increases the total volume of the air and actually reduces the zone CO2 levels.
9:24 - But again, it's an energy disaster.
9:27 - So why do all these things in this paper matter so much for those working in the built environment?
9:32 - In facility management, we are constantly bombarded with fault alerts.
9:36 - In a large building, you might have hundreds of alerts a day, and maintenance teams are almost always stretched thin.
9:44 - If you don't have a way to prioritise those faults, you end up just ignoring them or just focusing on the ones that cause the immediate comfort complaints.
9:53 - We've all been there, right?
9:54 - What this paper provides is an evidence-based data-driven ranking that allows facilities teams to prioritise maintenance actions based on their actual impact on both energy and indoor air quality.
10:06 - It shows us we can't treat all faults the same.
10:10 - A leaking cooling valve isn't just an energy and maintenance annoyance.
10:14 - It is actively degrading the air quality in the building, making people sluggish and reducing cognitive performance or perhaps even causing an infection risk.
10:24 - A stuck terminal unit damper isn't just a minor temperature issue.
10:29 - It's causing a major CO2 spike in that zone.
10:34 - By using equipment IDs and temporal features as proxies, and by leveraging that massive 90 million row data set, they've built a really robust and scalable framework.
10:46 - It's a fantastic piece of research, and it's exactly the kinds of evidence-based approach
10:51 - we need if we want to bridge the gap between energy efficiency and actual healthy buildings.
10:56 - Thanks as always for listening.
10:58 - I do really appreciate you spending time with me and do check out the sponsors in the show notes.
11:03 - This podcast was brought to you in partnership with Safe Traces, Imbiet, Farmwood, Zender.
11:09 - EI Electronics and the IAIR Institute, all great companies who share the passion of this podcast and aren't here by accident.
11:17 - Your support of them helps them support this show.
11:21 - Thanks a million and I'll see you again next week.