『Air Quality Matters』のカバーアート

Air Quality Matters

Air Quality Matters

著者： Simon Jones
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今ならプレミアムプランが3カ月 月額99円

2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.

This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.

And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.

The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.

We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.

Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.

From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.

Air Quality Matters


© 2025 Air Quality Matters 博物学 科学 自然・生態学
エピソード
  • Finish Line Problem: Defining What Healthy Buildings Mean for Human Bodies - Stephanie Taylor #112

    Finish Line Problem: Defining What Healthy Buildings Mean for Human Bodies - Stephanie Taylor #112
    2026/03/30
    This week, we sit down with Stephanie Taylor, a unique physician architect whose career is dedicated to bridging the deep chasm between the medical profession and the built environment, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about buildings: What if the real problem isn't just that our buildings are failing us—but that we're measuring the wrong things entirely? As medical advisor for ThinkLite Air, she applies her clinical insights to the development of advanced air sensing and cleaning technology, transforming raw environmental data into actionable health impact scores. By integrating medical science into engineering standards, she continues to champion the idea that engineers are in many ways the physicians of the future, responsible for the preventative care of billions of people who spend so much of their time indoors. Key Topics Discussed: Buildings as Extensions of Health: Why treating buildings as part of caring for human health could be one of the biggest advances of our century. The opportunities are clear: decreased acute and chronic diseases, improved productivity, better financial outcomes. But will we actually do it? The obstacles include resistance to change, difficulty bringing the medical community into building management, and the legal ramifications of talking about health. Defining the Finish Line: What does good indoor environmental health actually look like? Stephanie's answer: an indoor space that does not increase our physiological stress level. Not just measuring hazards, but diminishing components of the indoor environment that cause stress on our cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, and immune systems. The Imperceptible Forces Problem: We design buildings and respond to environments as we can perceive them—rain, cold, visible mould. But the imperceptible exposures are the ones causing us problems. Low humidity impairing immunity. Ultrafine particles penetrating deep into the lungs. VOCs we cannot smell. The challenge is monitoring and controlling what we cannot sense. The Platinum Building Paradox: Why even the most advanced buildings with all the badges can fail spectacularly. A healthy buildings conference held in a room where 100 experts sat in a fog of their own breath for four hours, CO2 climbing to 3,000 parts per million in one of the smartest buildings in London. The disconnect between design intent and operational reality. Beyond Wells Riley: Rethinking how we model risk. The traditional Wells Riley equation models exposure to infectious bioaerosols. Stephanie is expanding that framework to model not only exposure risk, but also what indoor air quality is doing to your immune system—your protective mechanisms. It's not just how many weapons are shooting at you, but your ability to defend yourself. ThinkLite and the Health Index: Seeing what's going on through sensors, analyzing the data in a way that is relevant for the human body system by system—lungs, brain, cardiovascular health—and then remediating. Turning arbitrary data points into relevant health metrics. Moving from zigzag lines on dashboards to actionable health impact scores GUEST: Stephanie Taylor Physician Architect | ASHRAE Fellow | Medical Advisor, ThinkLite Air Stephanie Taylor - LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-taylor-md-b6456b8/ https://www.thinkliteair.com/ The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/ Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Ultra Protect (https://www.ultra-protect.co.uk/air-quality-matters) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon. Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: Buildings as an Extension of Human Health 00:06:42 The Medical-Building Disconnect: Why Healthcare Must Join the Conversation 00:12:17 Defining the Finish Line: What Does a Healthy Building Actually Look Like? 00:23:29 The Imperceptible Hazards: Why We Design for What We Can Sense 00:27:38 The Autonomic Building: Automation as an Extension of Human Physiology 00:33:27 The Platinum Building Paradox: When Award-Winning Spaces Fail Their Occupants 01:01:43 The Legal Minefield: Why Talking About Health Is Terrifying for Building Professionals 00:51:23 Think Light Air: Translating Environmental Data into Human Health Impact Scores 01:40:37 Beyond Wells-Riley: Modeling Vulnerability, Not Just Exposure 01:28:54 The Path Forward: Regulation, Education, and the Courage to Do the Hard Thing
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    1 時間 57 分
  • Federal and State Policy: The Missing Piece in the Indoor Air Quality Puzzle - OT40

    Federal and State Policy: The Missing Piece in the Indoor Air Quality Puzzle - OT40
    2026/03/26
    This week, we tackle a question that cuts through decades of technical progress and scientific consensus: What if the reason we still don't have clean indoor air isn't because we lack the technology—but because we lack the policy to actually implement it? The paper is a policy commentary titled Federal and State Policy Opportunities to Improve Indoor Air Quality, published in the Journal of Health Security. It's authored by a powerhouse group of experts, including Georgia Lagoudas and colleagues from Brown University, Harvard, and several other leading institutions. Many of them have been previous guests on this podcast. This isn't a theoretical exercise. It's a roadmap—a practical, actionable menu of policy interventions that could finally bring indoor air quality into the same regulatory and public health framework that we've successfully built for drinking water, fire safety, and smoking bans. Here's the glaring truth: we spend about 90% of our time indoors, yet we have no unified national initiative for clean indoor air. We have the Clean Air Act. We have the EPA regulating outdoor air. But outdoor regulations completely fail to account for the fact that outdoor pollutants make their way inside—where we spend all our time—and they ignore the fact that indoor spaces have their own unique pollutant sources. Concentrations of certain pollutants can be two to five times higher indoors than outdoors. And outdoor regulations do absolutely nothing to address one of the biggest indoor threats: the spread of respiratory pathogens like COVID-19 and influenza. Key Topics Discussed: The Current Mess: The federal government doesn't really regulate indoor air outside of occupational settings, leaving jurisdiction to state and local governments. Building codes are adopted and enforced locally, creating a massive patchwork of different standards. Some states like California, Connecticut, and Minnesota have taken steps, especially for schools, but there's no comprehensive national roadmap. Develop Health-Based Indoor Air Quality Targets: Right now, building owners and facility managers don't have a simple unified goal. We need clear thresholds for easy-to-measure indicators like carbon dioxide and PM2.5. The EPA or a coalition of NGOs should publish voluntary health-based targets, providing a clear benchmark that states and local entities can adopt. If you don't know what the target is, you can't hit it. Support States and Local Communities to Adopt Standards: Develop a national model indoor air quality code—similar to national model energy codes. Provide tax incentives to commercial buildings that make indoor air quality improvements, similar to deductions for energy efficient buildings. Create a state playbook filled with template language for regulations and building codes to make it easy for local governments to take action. Implement Sector-Specific Standards: Schools need indoor air quality monitors, regular HVAC inspections, and better filtration. Nursing homes should have indoor air quality standards as a strict condition of participation, just like hospitals. Federal buildings housing around a million federal employees need robust ventilation verification programs. OSHA needs to update its permissible exposure limits—many were developed in the 1970s, nearly half a century ago. The Two Biggest Priorities: Developing health-based indoor air quality targets and getting states to adopt indoor air quality building standards. If we can agree on what good air looks like and put it into the building code, the market will innovate to meet those demands. Federal and State Policy Opportunities to Improve Indoor Air Quality 10.1177/23265094251410880 (https://doi.org/10.1177/23265094251410880) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Missing Framework for Clean Indoor Air 00:01:12 The Glaring Gap: Why Indoor Air Quality Has Been Ignored 00:01:45 Why Outdoor Regulations Fail Indoors 00:02:22 The Astronomical Cost of Inaction 00:03:01 The Current Mess: A Patchwork of Standards 00:03:55 Recommendation One: Health-Based Indoor Air Quality Targets 00:04:43 Recommendation Two: Supporting States with Standards and Financing 00:05:38 Recommendation Three: Sector-Specific Standards 00:07:13 Recommendation Four: Research and the Wild West of Air Purifiers 00:08:30 The Bottom Line: Clean Air Is a Choice We Must Make
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    11 分
  • Free Radicals, Diesel Particles, and the War Zone in Your Lungs - Frank Kelly #111

    Free Radicals, Diesel Particles, and the War Zone in Your Lungs - Frank Kelly #111
    2026/03/23
    This week, we sit down with Frank Kelly, Professor at Imperial College London and Director of the Environmental Research Group, to examine a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about air pollution: What if the real danger isn't just how much dust we're breathing, but what that dust is made of and what it does to our bodies at a cellular level? For over three decades, Frank Kelly has been one of the architects of London's modern understanding of air quality. His pioneering work on the oxidative potential of particulate matter has transformed how we evaluate the toxicity of everything from diesel exhaust to wood smoke. By proving how these pollutants trigger harmful free radical reactions and deplete antioxidants in the lungs, he provided the scientific backbone for London's most ambitious public health interventions, including the Congestion Charging Zone and Ultra Low Emissions Zone. Key Topics Discussed: Beyond Size and Mass: Why PM10, PM2.5, and ultrafine particles are categorized by size, but size alone doesn't tell us what's actually harmful. The real story is in the chemistry, the physics, and the biology of what those particles carry and what they do when they reach the lung. The Meteor Analogy: Particulate matter isn't just carbon spheres. It's a complex, ever-changing cocktail of metals, gases, chemicals, and biological material that picks up and sheds components as it moves through the environment and into our bodies. Oxidative Potential: What free radicals are, why transition metals on particle surfaces drive oxidative stress, and how the body's antioxidant defences like glutathione, vitamin C, and vitamin E fight back. When the balance tips, inflammation and cellular damage begin. The Seesaw Model: On one side, you have particulate pollution with oxidative potential. On the other, your body's natural defences. Your genetics, your diet, and your environment all determine where you sit on that seesaw and when the damage starts. The London Success Story: How Frank's research directly influenced the introduction of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone. The data showed that children living in East London exposed to heavy traffic pollution had slower lung growth than children outside London. That evidence became the catalyst for policy change. Indoor Air Quality and the Well Home Study: Over 100 homes in West London instrumented for two months each to understand indoor pollution sources. The findings: damp and mould in social housing, gas cooking as a major pollutant source, and pollution migrating from kitchens into children's bedrooms where it stayed trapped overnight. The Microplastics Problem: Modern tyres are 55% plastic. As the fossil fuel industry loses its market in surface transport, it's shifting to plastic production. Frank's team has developed methods to characterize plastic particles in air, water, and food. The challenge: distinguishing plastic signatures from human tissue in toxicology studies. The Future of Air Quality Monitoring: Moving beyond mass-based metrics to real-time oxidative potential monitoring. Frank's team is developing prototype instruments that measure free radical activity in the air instantaneously, allowing us to identify which pollution sources are truly harmful. GUEST: Frank Kelly Professor, Imperial College London | Director, Environmental Research Group https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/frank.kelly The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/ Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Ultra Protect (https://www.ultra-protect.co.uk/air-quality-matters) The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast) If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon. Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Hidden Complexity of Particulate Matter 00:05:50 Understanding PM10, PM2.5, and Ultrafine Particles 00:08:01 The Lung as an Open Door: Why We're Vulnerable 00:09:52 The Meteor Effect: What Particles Are Really Made Of 00:20:41 The Seesaw Battle: Oxidative Potential and Free Radicals 00:25:46 The London Laboratory: Evidence That Drove the Ultra Low Emission Zone 00:59:13 The Indoor Air Quality Challenge: A New Frontier 01:11:43 The Kitchen Problem: Why Cooking Dominates Indoor Pollution 01:26:46 The Research Ecosystem: Eight Teams Tackling Air Quality 01:44:51 The Future: Real-Time Oxidative Potential Monitoring
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    1 時間 49 分
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