Last Gasp—High carbon dioxide CO2 levels making us ill: Sick Building Syndrome—Ashes Ashes #7
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2019-01-16

There's something in our air that's making us sick - fatigue, eye problems, inability to concentrate, headaches, obesity, even cognitive declines to name just a few symptoms. What's more, this health hazard is increasing at an alarming rate and researchers and doctors are only now beginning to understand just how much trouble we might be in. What is causing all these problems and is there anything we can do to fix it? Join us this week as we explore this rarely reported health risk in "Last Gasp." 

Podcast by Ashes Ashes, reposted under CC License. Browse episode resources & read full transcript at https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-07-last-gasp

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

There was this big surge of building office buildings, so lots of people were suddenly working in offices, there were all these white collar jobs, and we saw this surge of productivity that aligned with the development of electronics in the office, that really created this sort of office space in a way that we haven't seen before, but people started getting sick in them. They had all sorts of weird problems like headaches, respiratory problems, inability to concentrate, eye problems, all sorts of things that anybody who's been in a building that feels stuffy has suffered from at times, and this became a big health problem.

Daniel: They didn't really know what was causing it either so they just labeled it Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) which I think is pretty creative and kind of funny.

David: The World Health Organization named it that.  They realized it was isolated to these actual buildings and as soon as people would leave, all the symptoms would disappear. If you took a weekend off or went on vacation, all of a sudden you’d feel much better.

So the question became “there’s something in these buildings causing this but what is it?” Many theories were thrown out. Toxic mold, or poor ventilation, or weird things coming off people, they weren't sure but eventually they were able to narrow it down to something about the air. They identified a number of pollutants in our air all the time, and they said “well it’s one of these things that’s causing this but we're not sure.” Some of the culprits were volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, formaldehyde, things that we still point to as harmful.

And yes, all these things are bad for us, but a lot of the physiological effects they were seeing still haven't been tied to any of these chemicals or causes and so the big question was “well it’s one of these things, maybe they interact, but as long as we keep the buildings well ventilated the problem goes away.” The way they tracked that ventilation to see “are we getting enough fresh air in here” was by tracking CO2, the carbon dioxide that we breathe out.

Daniel: So by measuring the CO2 that's in the air you get a litmus test for what else is in the air?

David: There's not a lot of CO2 in the air naturally, though that is increasing all the time which we’ll get to in a minute. But the CO2 level is very low, less than 1%.

A LITTLE BIT OF BIOLOGY

But we actively exhale CO2. So in the process of breathing and respiring, we take in oxygen, and that oxygen binds with stuff and generates energy, and the two main byproducts of that are carbon dioxide and water.

And we exhale that carbon dioxide into the air so if air starts off 20% oxygen, we breathe out 15% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide.

Daniel: So as we breathe out CO2 in our office buildings and our spaces, it's a good indicator of how well the building is ventilated, because we're putting a lot of CO2 in the air? If it starts to accumulate you know that the building is not very well ventilated because it's not being flushed out and replaced by air from the outside?

David: Exactly. We breathe out a lot of CO2 actually, it adds up quite a bit especially if you have a lot of people in the same room. A single person can emit up to 23 liters of CO2 per hour, and if you're doing physical activity that can dramatically increase by as much as 8 or even 10 times.

So this thing becomes a very good marker of how fresh air is and how much air is mixed with the outside because the outside air has very low parts per million of CO2. We exhale CO2 at 50,000 parts per million, and the background level of CO2 in the air outside has been increasing over the past hundred and so years because of pollution and greenhouse gases and burning fossil fuels, but it's now a little over 400 parts per million.

Daniel: That increase has happened just over the last 150 years since industrialization?

David: Yeah, this elevated CO2 level is a very new and recent phenomenon in the long terms of human history and in human health. Up until just a few generations ago the average background CO2 level was 280 maybe 300 in a particularly bad area.