A new study from Harvard and some other universities looking at worker’s cognitive performance found that they had the best mental functioning when there was low carbon dioxide (CO2), low VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and more outdoor air mixed in with the office air.
They studied 24 people with ages in the 20s to ages in the 60s, over 6 days with varying air quality. They were all relatively healthy – no asthma, etc. They had an office room where people worked on various tasks/tests on computers.
On some days, the air was “green” – low VOCs, pretty low CO2. On some days the air was “green+” where they added extra outside air to get even lower CO2 levels. On some days the researchers added CO2, other days they added VOCs. The order of the test days was: “green+”, moderate CO2, high CO2, “green”, conventional, and another “green+”. An office typically has VOCs which come from laminated particleboard furniture, the glue for carpets, cleaning supplies, dry erase markers, etc. CO2 typically comes from many people breathing in an enclosed space with not enough outside air mixed in.
People did better on “green+” days than “green” days for 8 of the 9 cognitive tests (the 9th test they were essentially similar), and on both “green” and “green+” days they did always did better than in a conventional office. The graph below tells the story, it is easy to see the gray bars are always lower, and the green-dotted bars are almost always higher. People even did better on the second “green+” day which was right after a conventional day where they did worse.
Figure 1 Average cognitive function scores and standard error bars by domain for the Conventional, Green, and two Green+ conditions, normalized to the Green condition by dividing all scores by the average score during the Green condition. Source: EHPOnline https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1510037
This study matches a lot of earlier studies, showing that “green” buildings are not only good for environmental reasons, but they also improve health and mental function. Here is an earlier study, also from Harvard. And we also know that outside air pollution gets into buildings and affects work performance, like when stock traders are affected by high levels of PM2.5 in New York.
It shows that we need to use low impact products that don’t make VOCs, and we need good HVAC systems with good filters, methods for removing VOCs, and more outside air mixed in.
Obviously you can’t do a study like this one with children instead of adults, where children breathe CO2 or VOCs on purpose, but since children breathe more air for their body weight and are more sensitive to air pollution in general we could probably expect similar or maybe even stronger effects.
Read the scientific study in EHPOnline here.
04/11/2024 AKMB
