There is growing recognition of the large health and productivity costs imposed by poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in commercial buildings—estimated variously at up to hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This is not surprising as people spend 90% of their time indoors, and the concentration of pollutants indoors is typically higher than outdoors, sometimes by as much as 10 or even 100 times. 6 The relationship between worker comfort/pro- ductivity and building design/operation is com- plicated. There are thousands of studies, reports and articles on the subject that find sig- nificantly reduced illness symptoms, reduced absenteeism and increases in perceived produc- tivity over workers in a group that lacked these features. 7 For example, two.
