Environmental Quality: a strategic asset

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Innovation in the world of Real Estate is transversal and is creating new business models and new metrics for the evaluation and profitability of property. Technology has already improved various aspects of economic performance, but the challenge for the near future concerns the strategic use of innovation, in order to gain the maximum benefit for all the stakeholders: owners, facility managers, tenants and the community. When we talk about Smart Buildings, there are still a variety of definitions (efficient, automated,...) and dialectical visions (intelligent, digital, green,...). All of which assume that the building offers superior performance, and amongst the various measures, over the past few years, the well-being of the occupants has emerged (health, comfort and user experience).

In the article “Occupant Health & Well-Being in Green Buildings,” published in April in the Ashrae Journal, (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers), it is clearly stated that there is still a much higher emphasis on the matter of energy consumption at the expense of indoor environmental quality: in an analysis of 100 Green Buildings, 80% of the sample had reached energy-saving objectives, but a mere 30% reported high levels of indoor air quality. Rating agencies are starting to get involved in these matters in the field of the evaluation of sustainability and the ethics of investment (ESG). Amongst all the initiatives, we quote the “Health & Well-Being” module, introduced by the Dutch agency, GRESB, in 2017 – recently integrated into the 2019 GRESB Real Estate Assessment.

Given that we can’t manage that which we can’t measure, Nuvap has developed a platform for monitoring indoor environmental quality, which makes it possible to conduct a dynamic and continuous evaluation of internal environmental quality, going beyond just air quality and including, amongst the parameters monitored, major pollutants such as radon gas, electromagnetic emissions and formaldehyde.

Nuvap has recently carried out a comparative analysis of the environmental quality of the offices of 100 companies in the tertiary sector across the length and breadth of the country, based on 20 environmental quality parameters.

Nuvap has also developed the Nuvap Index (an indoor environmental quality index) and analysed the correlation between the index and certain phenomena linked to work-related illnesses. 20% of the companies monitored showed an insufficient Nuvap Index. 19% of the companies monitored showed a Nuvap Index of over 8. The major pollutants that compromised environmental quality were Radon gas, VOC and Formaldehyde.

A comparison between daytime/nighttime and weekday/weekend data shows the clear impact caused by the use of machinery and human activity carried out in the places monitored on most of the monitored parameters. Some of these differences are as great as 80%.

This analysis corroborates the application of ongoing monitoring and highlights the advantages:

*clear discrimination of data according to the periods of occupation
*greater understanding of the problems brought to light
*support of the implementation of virtuous good practice and zero cost behavioural solutions.