TRANSCRIPT – Indoor airPLUS Home Buyer concerns

ANNE RANCOURT: Welcome to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Indoor airPLUS Podcast Series. I’m Anne Rancourt. Today, I’ll talk to EPA’s Dave Price about the importance of good indoor air quality and how builders can address home buyers' concerns about the air quality in new homes with EPA’s Indoor airPLUS Program. 

ANNE RANCOURT: Dave, thanks for being with us. 

DAVID PRICE: Thanks for inviting me.

ANNE RANCOURT: Can you tell us about the health concerns that today’s home buyers have, and how their homes are a starting point for living healthier?

DAVID PRICE: Well, I think there’s a large number of home buyers that are concerned about the health of their families. And, when they look at a new home, there’s lots of things that go into the home buying decision process. But, one of them is health. And, if you watch just simply the advertisements on television these days you see all the products being sold in the marketplace to clean the air and to provide a more healthy indoor environment for people and the statistics tell us that those products are being very, very successfully sold in the marketplace. So, it shows that there’s a demand, that people are concerned about health. People are also more concerned about health issues in homes because of things like the sharp increase in asthma. Our information tells us that there are more than 20 million Americans that suffer from asthma and there’s over 2 million emergency room visits every single year that are directed to asthma. All of us know someone, either in our family or neighbors or friends, that suffer from asthma so it’s not a secret anymore. Lots of people suffer from that and other respiratory related issues.  Collectively, we know it’s an issue in homes and for home buyers.  

ANNE RANCOURT:  What about children, would they be affected by indoor air quality?

DAVID PRICE: Well, absolutely. Their lungs are developing and the medical community tells us that they’re more susceptible to some of the things that adults might not react to so significantly because of their newly developing lungs. As I mentioned, asthma is a huge problem for kids these days.

ANNE RANCOURT: And, what about indoor air quality versus outdoor air quality? Is there a big difference between what we find in our homes versus outside?

DAVID PRICE: What we’ve found is that the load of chemical pollutants indoors is typically two to five times greater than what you’d find outdoors. It’s kind of counter intuitive because we’ve all seen the pictures over the years of the smoke stacks and with clouds of pollutants rolling out of factories, but when we do the science, we find out that the chemical load indoors is much higher than outdoors.

ANNE RANCOURT: And why should builders participate in a program that helps with indoor air quality? Is there a reason they should get involved with Indoor airPLUS?

DAVID PRICE: Right away, what comes to mind is that it’s a real opportunity for builders to address these issues right at the design phase of the house. There are simple things that you can do to a new house that are much more complicated to accomplish in an existing home. So, if builders are aware of what the technologies are, the building materials they can use, the methods they can use to avert or avoid indoor air quality problems, they can design these right into the house and it’s much less expensive for them to do that. Plus, they produce a product that’s much more marketable. 

I often talk to builders about this issue and they are well aware of what they’re facing in the marketplace these days. It wasn’t too many years ago, in 2005, when we had our greatest production of homes in the United States. We were building well over 2 million homes a year nationwide. And, then from 2006 to 2008, we had a steady decline in the number of homes that we were bringing online. And now, 2009, the numbers look like we may get to 600,000 versus over 2 million back in 2005. That sends many messages to builders, but one of the strongest messages is that it’s an incredibly competitive marketplace. If they’re still in the business or if they’re going to regenerate their business as the market comes back and recovers, they’re going to have to offer products that are competitive in the marketplace and the label that EPA is offering is a wonderful opportunity for them to produce something that differentiates them from their competition. 

ANNE RANCOURT: And, the label is backed by EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Can you talk a little about what that means for a builder to have that label on a home?

DAVID PRICE: What we’ve done is develop a very comprehensive label that covers a wide swath of issues that could compromise indoor air quality in homes. We’ve also designed it so that it’s multi-layered. I’ll give you a perfect example. One of the things that we require, we address, is carbon monoxide. Everyone knows that carbon monoxide can kill someone very quickly. So, what we do is to qualify for the label, a builder has to use sealed combustion appliances in the house and very simply, those appliances do not use indoor air for the combustion process. They use an outdoor air supply and then they exhaust the combustion products to the outdoors. So, there’s no opportunity to cycle carbon monoxide and other pollutants indoors where someone could react negatively to those. The second layer that I spoke of is, we require that a carbon monoxide alarm be installed in the house. So you’ve got again, two layers of protection. The carbon monoxide alarm as it turns out also addresses a really significant problem we’ve discussed – or discovered – in recent years and that is that a lot of pollutants will migrate from a garage into the living space in the house and we didn’t know that too many years ago, but now we are well aware of it. Due to pressure differences, those chemical could be drawn, let’s say, it could be pesticides that are stored in the garage, it could be the starting up of an automobile and emitting very early on that when the car starts cold, it emits a large amount of carbon monoxide. Those products can be drawn into the house because of air pressure differences between the garage and the house. And also, it’s not uncommon for builders to put heating and air conditioning equipment in the garage, and so if you have any leaks in the equipment, it will draw those chemicals as pollutants into the equipment and distribute them through the ductwork throughout the house. 

ANNE RANCOURT: Can you talk about the link between indoor air quality and possible increased sales for builders and the connection between consumer demand and selling homes?

DAVID PRICE: Yea, I think that the key to this is that builders have to understand how to market indoor air quality. At first blush, it’s not easy. It’s not as romantic as a granite top or a special chandelier or a whirlpool tub in the bathroom, but as we indicated earlier, this is a big issue with home owners. They really care about health, especially if they have children, and so what we’ve tried to do is provide builders the tools to market these features and we think they can successfully do that with the marketing tools that we have. The bottom line is a builder is not going to want to take this on unless he or she can see the value of it and the fact that they can market this to their customer and make some money in offering it.  So, they’re offering a better house or a higher quality home or more durable home and we’re helping them communicate those upgrades and those benefits to the consumer.

ANNE RANCOURT: Thanks for listening. To learn more about EPA’s Indoor airPLUS program, visit epa.gov/indoorairplus and check back for more from the Indoor airPLUS Podcast Series. I’m Anne Rancourt from The Cadmus Group.