The importance of clean air in your home

It’s our mission here at Joseph Homes to build better homes for a better world. Many factors go into the process of building a healthy home for our customers, from sourcing sustainable building materials to specifying low toxicity paints. Something that is a huge consideration for us in delivering a healthy home is to improve the air quality inside the places we build. But why do we do this? When you think of air pollution do you immediately think of vehicle fumes and busy roads, with any immediate danger to your health being from spending time outside in close proximity to these harmful fumes? Unfortunately, these harmful fumes seep into our homes and whilst we’re inside, we can be breathing in just as much pollution as being outside. We spend most of our times indoors – at home and work, so we need to consider what we can do to make every breath we take inside our homes as clean as possible.

Public Health England reported in March 2019 that air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to health in the UK, with between 28,000 and 36,000 deaths a year attributed to long-term exposure. There is strong evidence that air pollution causes the development of coronary heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and lung cancer and exacerbates asthma. It’s a serious problem, but one we are trying to improve with the homes we build.

And it’s also not just air pollution from outside we need to think about. The infographic above from Airtopia shows us the true extent of possible sources of toxins in the air from places you would not have expected such as your mattress, cooker and even ink from print cartridges. Raising awareness of the toxicity levels in these everyday household items is key to helping make some easy changes to improve air quality inside our homes.

We want all our homes to achieve the highest levels of internal air quality as well as tackling the impacts of external air pollution. We’ll do this by using VOC free paints where possible and looking at other ways we can specify products and materials with lower toxins through the build process. We’ll also be specifying high-grade filters for our MVHR systems to help reduce fumes and pollen entering our buildings. Our technical and design teams are working hard to understand the best specifications and products on the market which benefit our customers and deliver healthier homes.

It’s Clean Air Day on the 17th of June this year, an important time to raise awareness of the impact of air pollution. Find out more about this year’s campaign on their website.

Led by Global Action Plan, Clean Air Day brings together communities, businesses, schools and the health sector to:

•  Improve public understanding of air pollution.
•  Build awareness of how air pollution affects our health.
•  Explain the easy actions we can all do to tackle air pollution, helping to protect the environment and our health.