Resilience Reality: Facilities Can Be Healthy & Green
By Paul Angersbach, Aeroseal’s Vice President of Commercial
“The person who manages your building has a bigger impact on your health
than your doctor.”
This quote may seem to be hyperbole. But it’s a well-informed statement from the leading expert on healthy buildings from Joseph Allen. Allen is the director of the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the author of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Space Drive Performance & Productivity. Allen’s research proves that poor indoor air quality (IAQ) negatively impacts the personal well-being and productivity of a building’s occupants.
As facility owners look to reduce costs, modernize their infrastructure, and drive revenue, a more established priority – energy efficiency – may seem to compete with building health. But by addressing a top building fault, HVAC duct leakage, leading energy service companies (ESCOs) are decreasing energy waste and improving IAQ while reducing operational costs.
As we return to the workplace and post-pandemic reforms are shaping the built environment, the above issues fall under the umbrella of building resilience. ESCOs can help building owners respond efficiently and effectively to the call for building resilience by focusing on the building’s single biggest problem.
Treat the Issue, Not the Symptom
More than ever, facility managers understand the importance of proper ventilation and IAQ. This is due in part to ventilation’s role in preventing COVID-19. Many IAQ issues are addressed with a mix of filtration, UV lights, and duct cleaning. But without eliminating leaks in a building’s HVAC ductwork, only the symptoms of the issues are being addressed.