Air Quality Matters

This week, we examine a document that represents a profound shift in how we think about school environments: What if the debate over airborne transmission and clean air in schools is finally over—and the real fight is just beginning?

The document is titled Ventilation and Air Quality in Education and Childcare Settings, published on 24 February 2026 by the UK Department for Education. It applies specifically to England, and it codifies into official government guidance something we've been arguing about for years: that good ventilation is absolutely essential for healthy and productive learning environments. This isn't a theoretical discussion anymore. This is operational policy.

The guidance plainly states that effective ventilation does more than just prevent overheating. It improves pupils' alertness and concentration. It removes polluted air. And crucially, it removes air that might contain virus particles, reducing the spread of respiratory infections like colds, flu, and COVID-19. This is massive. It places the management of indoor air quality squarely in the realm of basic school health and safety.

Key Topics Discussed:

The Monitoring Framework: Schools are expected to regularly monitor CO2 concentrations across their buildings. The guidance provides best practices on sensor placement—at head height or table height, at least half a meter away from people, and away from doors, windows, or ventilation outlets. If you're under 800 ppm, your ventilation is good. Between 800 and 1500 ppm, it's adequate but could be improved. Over 1500 ppm, your ventilation is officially poor and you need to act.

Pragmatic Winter Compromises: The guidance addresses the real-world conflict between keeping kids warm and keeping their air clean. Partially open windows, open higher-level windows to reduce drafts, air out rooms for 10 minutes every hour during breaks. But crucially, do not prop fire doors open to get cross ventilation.

Beyond CO2: The document talks about multifunctional environmental sensors that can track temperature, humidity, particulate matter like PM2.5 and PM10, and volatile organic compounds from sources like formaldehyde, cleaning chemicals, body odors, and vaping products. Yes, they specifically mention monitoring for vapes.

Air Cleaning Units—With Massive Caveats: The Department for Education is crystal clear that while air cleaning units reduce airborne contaminants including viruses, bacteria, and fungal spores, they do absolutely nothing to improve ventilation or lower CO2 levels. They are not a substitute for ventilation. The government only recommends HEPA filtration units—subtractive technology that physically catches pollutants. They explicitly reject air ionizers, ozone generators, and units with unenclosed UV fields.

The Funding Sting: Between 2021 and 2023, the Department for Education provided CO2 monitors and air cleaning units to all state-funded education settings. But now, in 2026, the guidance explicitly states that the government will not replace faulty or damaged devices, and they will not pay for replacement filters. The ongoing financial burden of maintaining clean air has been shifted entirely onto individual school budgets.

The Controversial Bits: The guidance talks about bringing in fresh outdoor air—a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting when many schools are backed up against busy roads. It standardizes on NDIR CO2 sensors, which are solid but arguably already behind the times compared to photoacoustic sensors. And that 1500 ppm threshold—many in our community will argue that allowing CO2 levels anywhere near 1500 ppm is simply not acceptable for vulnerable populations.

Ventilation and Air Quality in Education and Childcare Settings UK Department for Education, 24 February 2026

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ventilation-and-air-quality-in-education-and-childcare-settings/ventilation-and-air-quality-in-education-and-childcare-settings

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 UK's New School Air Quality Guidance
00:01:15 The Science Is Settled: Air Quality as Basic Health and Safety
00:02:16 The Monitoring Solution: CO2 as Your Ventilation Indicator
00:03:19 The Traffic Light System: Understanding CO2 Thresholds
00:04:03 Winter Pragmatism: Balancing Warmth and Fresh Air
00:04:46 Beyond CO2: Multifunctional Environmental Sensors
00:05:36 Air Cleaning Units: The Promise and the Limitations
00:06:39 HEPA Only: The Government's Firm Stance on Technology
00:07:41 The Sting in the Tail: Who Pays for Ongoing Maintenance
00:08:56 The Uncomfortable Details: Fresh Air, NDIR, and 1500 PPM
00:10:41 The Bottom Line: Science Won, Now the Funding Battle Begins

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

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

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

This week, we dive into a question that challenges one of the most common assumptions in building energy efficiency: What if the chemical tests we use to validate air cleaning technology are completely missing the point—and what if the human nose is actually the most reliable instrument we have?

The paper is titled A Method for Testing the Gas Phase Air Cleaners Using Sensory Assessment of Air Quality, published in the Journal of Building and Environment. It's authored by Cantor Amada, Lee Fang, Pavel Wargocki, and colleagues from Waseda University in Japan and the Technical University of Denmark. This research was conducted as part of the IEA Energy and Buildings and Communities Annex 78 project, and it proposes a radically practical testing protocol for gas phase air cleaners—one that puts human perception at the center, not just chemical spreadsheets.

But here's the problem. Current standards typically test these air cleaners by challenging them with a few selected chemicals—measuring how well they remove formaldehyde, for example. But indoor air contains hundreds of different gaseous pollutants. If you only use chemical analysis on a handful of compounds, you might completely underestimate real-world performance. Worse, you might completely miss harmful byproducts the air cleaner is actually creating.

Key Topics Discussed:

Subtractive vs. Additive Air Cleaners: Subtractive cleaners remove chemicals using things like activated carbon. Additive cleaners decompose chemicals using active components like photocatalytic oxidation, ion generators, UV, or ozone. Some additive technologies can transform relatively harmless pollutants into dangerous unwanted species—or pump ozone into the space. If your chemical test isn't looking for those specific byproducts, the machine gets a pass grade while actively making the room worse.

The Two-Phase Testing Protocol: Phase one is a screening phase—do no harm. The goal is simply to make sure the air cleaner doesn't have a negative effect on air quality. Phase two is the deep dive, testing the air cleaners at various ventilation rates from very low to standard levels, with panelists rating acceptability and odor intensity.

The UVO Zone Device Failed Immediately: One additive air cleaner—a UVO zone device—actually increased the odor intensity in the room, particularly when humans were present. It was dropped from the study. An ion generator was allowed through to phase two just to see if poor results would be repeated. They were. It significantly decreased the acceptability of the air.

Activated Carbon Worked—But Only for Building Materials: When the pollution source was purely building materials like old carpets and linoleum, the activated carbon air cleaners significantly improved air quality. But when the pollutant source was humans—people just sitting there breathing and existing—the air cleaners did not significantly improve perceived air quality.

The Chemical Data Lied: Parallel chemical measurements showed that total VOCs dropped significantly when using the carbon air cleaners, regardless of whether the pollutant came from materials or humans. If you were only looking at the chemical spreadsheet, you would say the air cleaners worked perfectly in all scenarios. But the human panelists were telling a completely different story. The chemical measurements simply did not match the sensory evaluations.

The ISO 16000-44 Standard: This research heavily supports the new ISO 16000-44 standard approved in 2023, which outlines the test method for measuring perceived indoor air quality to test the performance of gas phase cleaners. The sector is slowly recognizing that the human experience is a metric.

A Method for Testing the Gas Phase Air Cleaners Using Sensory Assessment of Air Quality

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.111630

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 Challenge of Testing Gas Phase Air Cleaners
00:01:14 The Energy Dilemma: Why Air Cleaners Matter for Buildings
00:02:12 The Chemical Testing Problem: What Current Standards Miss
00:02:53 Additive vs Subtractive: Understanding Air Cleaner Technologies
00:03:43 The Human Nose Solution: Sensory Assessment as a Testing Method
00:04:04 The Experimental Setup: Real Materials and Real People
00:04:50 Phase One Results: The Do No Harm Screening
00:05:54 Phase Two Deep Dive: Testing at Various Ventilation Rates
00:06:31 The Big Reveal: When Chemical Data Doesn't Match Human Experience
00:07:28 The Massive Implication: Why Chemical Analysis Alone Fails
00:08:21 The Path Forward: ISO 16000-44 and Sensory Testing Standards
00:09:24 Closing Thoughts: The Human Nose Remains Essential