Whether for work, school, home, or leisure, people spend more than 90% of their time indoors. And because indoor air pollutants are risk factors to your employees’ and guests’ health as well as to your physical assets, indoor air quality should be a priority for every Chicago business owner.
Indoor air pollutants fall into 4 main categories: biological pollutants, volatile organic compounds, combustion byproducts, and legacy pollutants. Because all pollutants affect your facility and resources in different ways, it’s important to understand their impact on your business and how to combat them effectively.
Biological Pollutants
What’s the Problem with Biological Pollutants?
Moisture collects in the air and settles on surfaces, creating a happy vacation home for bacteria, mites, pollen, and other contaminants produced by living things. These contaminants can endanger the health of your staff and visitors, but this is a preventable liability.
How to Resolve Biological Pollutants
Commercial air filtration services can remove those biological pollutants from your facility to protect the health of your staff and guests. And since these contaminants are often bred in excessive moisture, use a commercial humidifier/dehumidifier to prevent mold and mildew at the source.
Volatile Organic Compounds
What’s the Problem with Volatile Organic Compounds?
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are dangerous gases emitted from everyday liquids or solids. Many products like paints, aerosol sprays, and disinfectants produce VOCs, and their concentration is much higher indoors. VOCs can linger in the air and cause a range of symptoms as simple as nausea or headaches and as serious as kidney or liver damage.
How to Remove Volatile Organic Compounds
For buildings that frequently use disinfectants indoors, preventing long-term health damage from VOCs is vital. Protecting the people who occupy your building is as simple as installing a commercial air filtration system and properly ventilating the facility.
Combustion Products
What’s the Problem with Combustion Products?
While many of us may think of planes, trains, and automobiles as the primary sources of combustion pollutants, many of these hazards can be found indoors, too. Indoor appliances like space heaters, furnaces, and fireplaces can all emit dangerous gases. Additionally, outdoor air can work its way inside, bringing the risks of tobacco smoke and even exhaust from cars and lawnmowers. In addition to the health risks of carbon monoxide or radon poisoning, other emitters of combustion can produce dangerous chemical pollutants that can make your staff and visitors extremely sick.
How to Remove Combustion Pollutants
As much as we may wish to prevent combustion pollutants from entering a facility entirely, they are often unavoidable, especially when your indoor air is contaminated by the pollutants outdoors. Thankfully, the best way to protect your building and its occupants from these harmful chemicals is to properly ventilate the facility so that dirty air can be moved away from people.
Legacy Pollutants
What’s the Problem with Legacy Pollutants?
Whether your building has been in operation for a century or its new construction, legacy pollutants refer to any pollutants that accompany your facility’s building materials. This can include everything from asbestos fibers in an older building to chemical off-gassing pressed into new lumber used in your building’s construction to mold that’s found its way in any corner of your facility. Since these pollutants are built into every corner of your building, there’s no escaping them for a clean breath of air without stepping outdoors.
How to Remove Legacy Pollutants
The best way to combat legacy pollutants is with proper commercial filtration and ventilation systems. The right filtration and ventilation system will protect any person in the facility from overexposure to these legacy pollutants that can make them sick.
Contact the commercial air experts at Murphy & Miller today to learn more about how a commercial indoor air quality system can protect your Chicagoland business.