Personal exposure to indoor pollution during everyday activities of hybrid workers in the UK

Bourikas, Leonidas and Moreno Rangel, Alejandro and Goldthorpe, Joanna (2022) Personal exposure to indoor pollution during everyday activities of hybrid workers in the UK. In: Indoor Air 2022 the 17th International Conference of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality & Climate, 2022-06-12 - 2022-06-16, University of Eastern Finland at Kuopio campus.

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Abstract

Western lifestyles and urbanisation have led many people to spend most of their time indoors. Existing studies have described the impact of indoor air quality (IAQ) on health and well-being. However, IAQ assessments typically focus on home or office settings. Hybrid working and a change in transport behaviour raise the question of what are the new trends of personal exposure to air pollution among all daily activities including home, office and transport. This study discusses the results from IAQ monitoring in everyday life of UK hybrid workers. It uses a personal air quality monitor to track daily activities to measure trends of personal exposure to air pollutants and identify spot-events of high exposure. The results present the diurnal and spatial variation of five indoor air pollutants: PM1, PM2.5, PM10, NO2 and VOC. Data was collected at 1-minutes intervals in an open plan office, a house with a small home office but also during the commuting between Glasgow (Scotland) and Lancaster (North West England) by train and between Lancaster and Southampton (South England) by car at different times of the day and traffic conditions. The findings discuss hybrid workers' spatiotemporal personal exposure trends to air pollutants and contextualise them to short- and long-term health risks. The paper concludes with recommendations to minimise personal exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollutants and mitigate health risks by identifying “high risk” activities in spatiotemporal relation to air pollutants.