#12.2 - Francesca Brady: Harmonizing Air Quality and ESG Strategies for Healthier Workspaces and Sustainable Futures

Part 2

Francesca Brady - is CEO and Co-Founder of AirRated an indoor air quality (IAQ) certification company 

She is an advisory member for the Camden Clean Air Initiative, the BREEAM Health and Wellbeing technical group, and a member of the International WELL Building Institute's Covid-19 Taskforce. 

A rising star in air quality in many ways including on the  Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2021 for her work with Air rated.

With a Masters in Environmental Geoscience specialising in indoor atmospheric chemistry she was Formerly Head of Research for Air Rated, before taking on the role of CEO in  2020. 

Since then she has been dedicated to promoting and educating audiences from all walks of life about the importance, benefits and management of good indoor air quality.

Francesca is a top-tier communicator and can frame a complex subject in ways that are resonating with the audience, clearly. 

Air rated is a standard with a laser focus on air quality and is growing in recognition year after year under her leadership.

We discussed the value of labelling air quality in buildings and the challenges around building the business case. How Air rated is approaching the sector and creating accessible on-ramps for all classes of building. How air quality impacts performance, the bottom line ESG and so much more.

Air Rated
Francesca Brady LinkedIn
Our Air in Review 

Transcript

Simon: 0:01

Welcome back to part two of Air Quality Matters and my conversation with Francesca Brady. One of the interesting things that's factoring more and more and I guess you must see it is the influence that ESG is having on businesses making decisions on inward investment into infrastructure, but also categorising and labelling the performance of assets. I guess that's a very real conversation for you now.

Francesca: 0:44

It is. And coming back to that point about getting a foot in the door, esg is actually a really good vehicle for that, because I think with indoor air quality, yes, it quite naturally falls under E, but if you are strategically and intentionally wanting to exercise the value of doing something for indoor air quality, then you'll promote what you're doing through education, communication, and then it falls into S and I think S is the social, is a difficult section of ESG. So environmental, relatively I say straightforward it's easier to understand what you might be able to do that's going to have a positive impact, a quantifiable impact for environment S ambiguous G governance that also feels very matter of fact, pretty straightforward. Obviously, executing all these things is a different matter, but it's easy to quantify. With social, it's always been a bit of a misnomer. People don't really know how to treat it. If we're doing things we don't want to be seen as greenwashing, and particularly with the social part of ESG, it is the one that's under most scrutiny for greenwashing. So if you're able to quantify it in some way, you can say well, we've done all of this messaging around a data-driven, performance-driven assessment for indoor air quality and X number of people interacted and engaged with this content, then that's quite a nice way to start trying to quantify social impact.

Francesca: 2:37

So, I think, with the likes of Gresbe. So global real estate sustainability benchmark, that is an ESG benchmarking system that a lot of large scale businesses use, particularly those that own global portfolios and that are, I guess, more specifically centered in Europe because it's a European-centric benchmarking system. It's really interesting with that because there is a section in Gresbe for building certifications. So if you go through a couple of rounds of due diligence as an air quality certification provider, then you're listed as an air quality certification that can gain clients who are submitting to Gresbe points towards their Gresbe submission to strengthen their score and, in theory, improve the value of their fund and their assets. Brilliant. Where there is a slight, again, gap in knowledge that we are trying to have conversations with the likes of Gresbe around is, yes, we can be pigeonholed into building certification but actually fit well the well standard aerated. A whole bunch of them spill out over into stakeholder management, into tenant and community, into risk management. But it's identifying the way that it does that in a meaningful manner, not just to gain more points for the sake of gaining more points, but in a very real, tangible way. How does it feed into these other areas?

Francesca: 4:20

Because if you're doing a certification that's geared towards indirect quality, fundamental determinant for human health, there are so many aspects that can fall into, and if the waiting for something like that was greater than I, don't want to discredit any other certifications, something that didn't quite have the same impact as air.

Francesca: 4:43

So and we always talk about this when it's looking at certifications with with an air quality specific certification, everyone in the building cares, so it's not just a specific group of people. Again, I'm not going to talk about any certifications in particular, but you do get those that specific groups of people would have a vested interest in knowing more about or making sure that had a specific type of rating, a few of that way inclined with air quality. Theoretically, everyone should benefit from it. So it would be good to see something like that, something like a healthy building certification that looks at light, water quality, air quality, have a much greater waiting than perhaps some of the others. And that's not to say that, obviously, sustainability isn't as important it is. So I think it would just be a case of, on a case by case basis, understanding, yes, that all of these sit under building certifications. But how much do they feed into? Other areas are also being reported on and wait them that way.

Simon: 5:47

I think that it demonstrates the challenge at a European level, for example, that it's been I say relatively, I mean it was still a no mean feat to get the EU taxonomy embedded and that is, without question, having impacts on investment decisions and ultimately, money makes the world go round and if large investors in real estate are making decisions to invest and divest out of certain portfolios based on the environmental risk that they present long term, because these funds thinking pension fund time frame, so they're looking at everything from a 2030, 2050 perspective anyway, so they're very matter of fact and non emotional in this they're making decisions on the types of buildings they invest in based on how they're likely to be valued in 2030 and 2050, by the nature of how they operate.

Simon: 6:43

But we're seeing, rolling in behind that, the social taxonomy type frameworks where we're starting to frame now exactly what we mean by the social impacts. And what happens subtly in the background is we, we define the framing, but what rolls in behind that are the thresholds and the values and the benchmarks that you have to meet, and that's what we're starting to see now, I think, with the likes of Presby and some of the ratings that they're now valuing the S in the SG and these investment funds are looking at a 30 year track on an asset and going how's this property likely to be valued in 2050, the demographic that's going to be living in it or buying it or renting it or working in it Are they likely to value air quality? Is that going to have an impact in the value of this property? And I think the resounding answer is yes. And so it's not the scene, it's not as public. I don't think that dialogue, but I think if you have those conversations with those organizations, it's front and center.

Francesca: 7:51

It is. And coming back to one of your very first questions about whether I thought COVID was a pro or a con for indirect quality awareness and change, the reason I much prefer this introduction via ESG, via productivity benefits, is that they all have a much longer term play. At the forefront of the conversation With COVID, obviously, none of us are naive enough to think this will never happen again. But for the most part, when you can't see it, it's not really happening. But when you are constantly valuing assets, constantly valuing funds, constantly looking at productivity metrics, that's something that's always at the front of conversations and it's a really healthy thing to have. And it's good that you have these pension funds, because they own a huge amount of real estate across the world. It's great that they're getting on board with it. Because if they're making changes at asset level and occupiers start to see, okay, well, the asset's doing this.

Francesca: 8:59

So if we kind of want a standardized approach to things, maybe those landlords need to be talking to the occupiers and saying we probably need to get on the same page with this, Because what you don't necessarily want to end up happening is the landlords got their own kind of siloed strategy, the occupiers doing their own thing as well.

Francesca: 9:18

Actually, those two groups of people should be working much closer together and be on the same page when it comes to interventions, management, operation, continuous performance and assessment. They all need to be working and harmony together rather than this kind of siloed approach. So if the decisions are being driven by ESG impact on valuation and you get the landlord buy-in and then that filters down to occupiers, that's great Because also it'll filter down to the decision maker level of occupier, rather than having this almost perceived desire to get the mass population to care and then have decisions made from the ground up, which is just so, so slow. So it feels like this is a much faster, more efficient, longer term strategic route for profound change, as opposed to waiting for everyone to catch up with the messaging around indirect quality.

Simon: 10:21

Yeah, and ultimately you've got to understand who your stakeholders are, and so many, so much of the built environment is a split incentive scenario, so we have to be able to frame the use cases for all the types of stakeholders in those spaces to build a business case. Yeah, break down the philosophy for me of the air rated standard. What was your kind of mission when you first conceived of this rating and the gap that you saw that it needed to fill?

Francesca: 10:55

So I think selfishly, my academic background was indirect quality. So when I first started out in my career, it wasn't necessarily diving straight first into indirect quality, but it was going into the smart buildings world and then some of the sensors had indirect quality data. So it was like okay, well, I know about this and how can I communicate this? In a way that perhaps isn't being used right now, because it was all geared towards operational efficiency. So if CO2 goes above a thousand, you need to get it down below 800. And it's like well one, what is CO2? Because maybe the understanding for most people with CO2 is greenhouse gas. So like it's the same gas, different contexts in the internal environment. So what is it? Where does it come from? How can I reduce it? Because I don't even know what CO2 is in the first place. So it was all around the communication with indirect quality. And then one, two, skip a few had a few conversations around fit well and the well standard. I took my fit well ambassador exam and there was a little bit on air quality. I obviously studied a lot more the air quality stuff, personal interest, and then it was a conversation with a chat called Olly Spurx who works at CPRE and he basically said could you have an EPC? This is where that energy performance certification conversation came from. Could you have an EPC? But for air it's like an air performance certificate. And I was like, from a scientific perspective, yes, you can, and I know how to make that. And then when we were talking about okay, well, why is this more attractive than things out there that already have air quality as part of what they do? And it was more about when you're looking at lots of different aspects of a healthy building, sometimes the message is really diluted because you're having to talk about water, light, air, nutrition, mental health all in the same couple of sentences. We were like, if we've got a laser focus on indirect quality, what's stopping us being the de facto for people to come to with regards to air quality? That's a great position to be in. But also we can keep the communication and the education so specific that it's meaningful, it's easy to understand. We don't just randomly start talking about circular economy or material selection. It's all very much geared towards indirect quality, major, the number one determinant for human health. I come back to that again. So it was so important to everyone in the building air quality we could have a laser focus, we could enter the market in the healthy buildings realm at a lower price point, because we were looking at one aspect of a healthy building and whilst a healthy building is much more than just air quality, it was a really good entry point Because if we could get to all buildings, not just the flagship buildings, the shiny big buildings in London I know this is one of your points Earlier when we were having this brief for the call was how do you tap into the regional assets and the little kind of the occupier with 10 desks down in a tiny office in Southampton?

Francesca: 14:34

How do you get into them and promote healthy buildings or something around healthy buildings to an occupier of that size and make it accessible? And we were like well, brilliant, that's what we can bring to the healthy buildings world. Is the very accessible from a simplicity perspective, from a communications perspective and, more importantly, from a price perspective. How can we be the accessible one? That is like the gateway drug Wrong phrase to use. Probably, I'm sure, but we can be the stepping stone and then if an organization wants to explore health in a broader sense, then there are certifications for that.

Francesca: 15:12

So it was a great position to be in, because we weren't directly competing with certifications in the healthy building arena because, fit well, look at 10 different parameters, the well-stand, look at 12.

Francesca: 15:30

So we weren't.

Francesca: 15:31

We were indirectly competing because we're competing for the same budget, organization's budgets.

Francesca: 15:37

But what we wanted to promote was okay, we are part of the healthy buildings puzzle, we want to work with you, we want to form crosswalks, we want to do as much as possible that's collaborative and we want to work in harmony with you guys. Not against you, because that's not the purpose of us coming to play. But if you can have these big flagships, much larger scale buildings that do the big fancy certifications, and then but you can have one that benchmarks the entire portfolio, from your biggest 40 story asset down to your little half a floor in Southampton, then that's great because you can benchmark all your assets with one metric. Surround air quality is a really good measure to have and that's kind of where we thought we had a part to play in this world and actually it's worked out really nicely because we've never had anything but good conversations with other certification providers. It's never been a us and them. It's always been okay. How can we work better together, knowing that most of our clients are gonna pursue aerated or an air score and another.

Simon: 16:50

That's really interesting and it's very analogous actually to conversations I have in a number of sectors where there's an omnipresent nature to air quality that it doesn't distinguish between assets. Every asset you own you need to be thinking about ventilation and air quality. So it's a fascinating, like you say, gateway drug or starting point to bring something with laser focused that is ultimately systemic because there isn't a part of your organization it doesn't impact on. So what you know fascinating conversation with housing I often have is that look, start with a ventilation strategy, an air quality strategy for your assets, because it will impact on your voids teams, on your reactive maintenance teams, on your new development teams, on your condensation damper, mold teams. There isn't a part of your organization. Your customer service teams, even, and your housing officers all of them have the potential and have an interest in outcomes when it comes to ventilation and air quality.

Simon: 17:54

Start there, because often what a lot of this stuff is with these standards is the starting point for framing change management, organizational change management, ultimately, because you don't get to change the built environment without changing the organization in some way and the danger is if it's too broad a stroke when you start, it's a two-year change management, 10-year change management process. That is just overwhelming. Whereas if you can say, look, this is really important, we'll put a laser focus on this. Start here and you may will find that actually some of the policies and framing processes that you put in place to deal with this, you can replicate in other ways for other things like sound or light or nutrition or whatever it is.

Francesca: 18:45

It's one of those things. I was listening to a podcast the other day that was talking about procrastination. So you're not doing things, you're not making decisions because something feels too much. It's overwhelming, and I do feel like business decision makers can be put in the same position where and it's not even just talking about healthy buildings is overwhelming. That that is overwhelming as a concept if you don't come from the space, but also you're not just having to only think about that, you're thinking about so many other things. So if it's saying, okay, well, air quality is step one, so this is where we're going to start and you only need to spend this amount of time, this amount of money to make this much improvement, so let's just start there. And it's not like you're saying to them this is where you start, now go off and do it. It's like this is where you start, this is how you do it, let us help you.

Francesca: 19:41

Because I think that's what's lacking in some of the revisions, adjustments, amendments to regulation is that a lot of them will say, okay, you should do this. They don't really tell you how to implement it and in most cases, they don't go far enough. So and this is kind of tangential now, but particularly with something like part f yes, great, it was revised. Yes, great, co2 monitoring's in there. Is that it? Because really it was. It took a decade to update. Are we now going to wait another decade before temperature and humidity are included in that? Are we going to wait another decade before you undertake annual assessment for PM 2.5 and specific speculated VOCs?

Francesca: 20:32

It's, it's one of those things that if you were a business decision maker, you'd be like okay, well, here's what I need to do off follow regs, but it's, it's just not quite enough, which is where it's our responsibility. Is the air quality industry to say here's a bite-sized chunk, here's exactly how you do it and it's up to you to find the budget. You, you're in charge of where you pull the money from. But here's exactly what you need to do, and we're going to make it as straightforward as possible so you don't get that kind of procrastination. I don't know what to do, I don't know where to start, so I'm just going to ignore it, because I think that is probably how a lot of people feel. It's like, oh, I don't have to do anything, so I won't. No one's asking me just yet, so I won't do anything. It's like what's just a matter of time.

Simon: 21:14

So actually you're delaying the inevitable, and let us help you get there before that happens and, interestingly, because it's bite-sized, you can also bring some rigor to the process that you might not be able to bring if you were trying to do 12 other things at the same time as well. So, yeah, that's where you in air rated. You have a number of approaches or number of types of badges, if you like, you can aim for or try and get to, but they're all based on a very particular process and a rigor that you bring to it. So it's a defined outcome. This isn't just saying I've got ventilation check, I've got co2 monitors check yes, correct, and it's with what we were doing.

Francesca: 21:58

We were like, okay, well, we've got a, so an air quality performance certification. But we also realize that design can play a massive part in the resultant air quality that you have in a space. So we developed a design product, so we had something that could be implemented from day one, because we have had conversations using our air score, design and operations certification all the way back in the planning stages for planning submission. So it was like how can we prove that we're going to deliver the best, most future proof building? Okay, well, we'll just spec in a dno, because that will help showcase that we're trying to future proof things. We're ahead of the curve. We've thought about sustainability, yes, but we also thought about healthy buildings and we were like, okay, so design, design is sorted, but that's kind of the, the core design of the building. Then we developed the dno interiors. So that's looking at the interior design. So material selection, it's. It looks at assessing the air quality post construction, pre occupancy, it looks at where you're going to put partitions in a space, lots of different things that would again impact the resultant air quality, without knowing what that's going to look like yet. And then we've got our annual certification, which promotes this ongoing approach to air quality testing. So again where you've got other certifications that say, okay, do do a test post completion, pre occupancy, and then there's no mention of anything going forward.

Francesca: 23:41

We really wanted to promote the fact that it is basically, in a really unglamorous way, like an MOT for a building. So if you're going to make the effort of taking a car down to the shop to make sure that it's still roadworthy, we should probably making sure our buildings are still work worthy. Every year, and on an even better, more kind of sophisticated level, can we introduce ongoing monitoring. So that's where our monthly escort came from. So it's this iteration to say here's something for the architects, the designers, the developers, all the way through to the people who are going to be using the space.

Francesca: 24:21

And then again, it's just a case of picking and choosing what's right for you at the right time. So if annual assessment is all that you have budget for right now, you don't have to do continuous monitoring, but it's really good practice to check your space once a year and across different seasons. So let's start there and then you can get a feel for what these monitors look like and how they, how people are interacting with them in your space, and you can maybe make budget available for them in two, three, five years time, but it's just making people aware that these things exist in the first place, making them comfortable with how they look in the space, how you might communicate, doing something like this and the change management around that, but just making it super straightforward in terms of what you can do, what that looks like and what the outcomes are. With specific regard to one thing, to air quality and so do these different standards.

Simon: 25:15

Are they more of a pick and mix that people choose at the beginning, or are you kind of creating on ramps for people that where they can, or you can always upsell and say, well, like, look, we started here, but actually we're finding this is this has real value? We're gonna, we're gonna increase to monthly monitoring and and so on and so forth it is.

Francesca: 25:34

It is that upsell and, from a from our business perspective, brilliant, because we want people to come to us for all things air quality, we want to promote ultimate, ultimate best practice, which would be ongoing monitoring plus this kind of more formal official certification every year.

Francesca: 25:53

But we realize in some cases that's just not going to be viable, for whatever reason. But it is. Also it's good for organizations that do want to push themselves, because they see what the endpoint looks like. They see what the most brilliant all singing, all dancing solution looks like and then they know where to start. So they know what the starting point is, which is usually nothing. But if they are, they conduct an escort and they know that they have the money to do ongoing monitoring. They also know they're going to do a heavy refurbishment in five years time. Then they can track the performance of their space on an ongoing basis for the next five years, knowing that this design for interior certification exists. So they can implement that at the five-year mark and then understand, with a wealth of data and this design certification, exactly how to optimize their space at this heavy refurb point where there is more budget available. So it's working out how to best use that budget when the inevitable happens, when there's going to be a, an opportunity to have any of your.

Simon: 27:02

I'm trying to think how to frame this with it without it sounding like a gotcha, but oh, be done no, no, I'm just we're trying to create on ramps.

Simon: 27:14

For the rest of the vast majority of the built environment and the general consensus out there is a lot of the built environment performs very badly. Ventilation has never been an essential pillar to decisions within most workplaces. There's almost no annual inspection of ventilation systems from a performance perspective. The consensus is, if you went out and checked, you're not going to like the results. Would it be fair to say that the customers that you're getting or the types of organizations that are going for badges kind of know they're in a good place already and it's about tweaking and optimizing? Have you had anybody come through where you've gone to do the tests? And it's been holy god. Have you? You know, I'm not sure you want to, I'm not sure you want the, the score up for this one, yeah, kind of thing like you've got a bit of work to do, have you? Have you found yourself?

Francesca: 28:14

in that environment yet.

Simon: 28:18

Yes, okay, interesting.

Francesca: 28:19

So it's. I mean to begin with in the first, because we established December 2018, formally launched March 2020. For our sins In the first couple of years, it was oh, this is about air quality. Okay, well, we're going to put our best buildings forward first, which is fine. Again, it's one of those. If this is what you need to do for us to get in there, do it. We'll do your best buildings.

Francesca: 28:50

And then we had this example of an organization that had a big, very wide ranging portfolio, everything from completely hermatically sealed box, completely mechanically controlled, all the way down to naturally ventilated in not the best areas. So they took the risk of saying, okay, we would like to do a couple of what we think are our best buildings we never know until we monitor them and we want to do the ones that we think are not going to perform so well, because we want to understand the two ends of the spectrum that we're working with. And, from our point of view, we were like, okay, that's great. It's great that you want to take the leap of faith and also, you don't have to publish the score if you don't want to. So, if you undertake the assessment and you find out that it hasn't even got certified. At least you've done it, at least you know. So if anyone comes to query it, if anyone brings in their own monitor and says this place is, then it's like yeah, we know and we are trying to do something. Here's the evidence of us having done a test and here is, hopefully, the roadmap to improvement, and it might be a five year roadmap, but at that point I think people are accommodating the fact that, yes, these things are going to cost money to fix. What are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do in six months time, nine months time? And what is going to happen in five years time, where more budget becomes available to make those mechanical changes or the heavy, the heavy duty changes? So that was really interesting to see in the first instance, but it hasn't been an exceptional example.

Francesca: 30:33

It's been more and more common now that people are feeling more comfortable with the process and more comfortable about the control that they have, because it's their data. We're not going to start publishing things left or right in center. We're not going to publish people's scores if they don't want them to be published. We've got a record of all buildings with valid certification. So in terms of policing. That's how we do it.

Francesca: 30:56

But if someone doesn't want to talk about the fact they got silver because it's not gold and it's not platinum or what they wanted to get, then that's fine, because they probably thought about ways in which they can get to their targeted score or their desired score, or they're happy with their entire portfolio at least being silver or above, which has been the case in some other organizations as well. So, yes, I think to begin with it was definitely a risk averse decision. I say risk averse. It's probably quite risky doing something that's voluntary to do with something that you can't see anyway. But of those risk takers, they were being risk averse in terms of putting their best buildings forward first. But, yeah, once they felt comfortable, it was okay.

Francesca: 31:41

Well, let's unlock the rest of the portfolio because we want a benchmarker and actually, for those ones that are underperforming, if we can get a gauge on how below par they are, how much investment is actually going to be required to get them to what we deem to be the minimum viable standard for our fund or our portfolio?

Francesca: 31:59

What are we going to do with them? Are we going to get rid of them? Are we going to keep them and make the investment? If so, what does that look like? But it was a really healthy decision making situation at that point because they were doing everything completely data backed and it was a very black and white case by case basis. Okay, this one's underperforming, but they would also benchmark it against other things like energy consumption and lots of other metrics and have this kind of leak table of building performance in so many different regards. And if they had a building that was performing badly for a number of things, then maybe that's something that they would look to invest in that will get rid of. But at least the decision was being made from a point of data collection.

Simon: 32:47

That's really interesting and I mean it's a massively overused saying, but you can't manage what you don't measure.

Simon: 32:53

And but, to coin a sports term, I think what's probably more important is that you can't be what you don't see.

Simon: 33:05

And I think for a lot of organizations there's this fear that you know extremes make bad law. So, like just having examples of high performing buildings with badges and disaster assets that you divest from doesn't really teach you anything about the middle ground, which is where the low hanging fruit is and where the chances to make material differences to people's lives are predominantly. You know, tweaking, tweaking a LinkedIn headquarters building in Dublin isn't going to do much overall. It might, like you say, might move them from a gold to a platinum or something, but ultimately you're not having a big impact where the big impact is in the long tail of the assets out there in the industry. So what I think of my ask would be is we need more case examples and better articulated examples out there in the built environment of organizations that did all right, you know, but could do better. And this was their journey and this was, this was their fear when they started. And this what this is what the roadmap actually looked like, because that will resonate.

Simon: 34:15

I think with so many more people than as nice as it is to have a shiny glass clad image in a brochure with a platinum badge on it, that doesn't resonate with the vast majority of the workforce, I think.

Francesca: 34:31

No, it doesn't.

Francesca: 34:31

And I think what we saw was where, where our certification was being, or our assessment was being, applied to regional assets which were kind of the mid tier ones, maybe the slightly poorer performing ones they were able to do it Because the cost it wasn't going to break the bank to do, because if you wanted to undertake some of these certifications, just to understand the current state of play, it's a really expensive exercise.

Francesca: 35:05

So a lot of the time it's and it's all well and good to do an air quality assessment. You can do an air quality assessment and maybe get a gauge for how you're performing. But if you're not from the air quality space, you might just be delivered a report that's got pages and pages of tables, of numbers and some things in green, some things in amber, some things in red, and it'll just be so difficult to understand. Which is where we were like okay, let's come up with a single metric being the air score, so it's going to be a number out of 10. And then a classification. So actually all you need to look at is that and you can understand the performance of your indirect quality.

Simon: 35:45

You don't need to know what the specific level of CO2 was unless you want to, and you're you and we can call that out until you're collecting a range of air quality parameters, both at the low cost sensor ongoing monitoring position, but also in the the more annualized kind of more detailed breakdown of VOC's and what have you maybe explain a little bit of that to people so they understand the general frame of what air score is measuring?

Francesca: 36:19

Yeah, so we will take data, as you say, from low cost commercial grade sensors. The parameters that we look at from those types of sensors will be things like temp and humidity, because they are very well done in those types of monitors. So the one that is the black sheep of the air quality world is VOCs. When we are talking about how to make air quality more relatable and we are talking about, pm 2.5 doesn't mean anything. Particulate matter of the diameter of 2.5 microns or less doesn't mean anything. Fine dust, fine dust, and it comes from these sources. That's what someone needs to know. When we were talking about VOCs, we were like okay, so VOCs are things that you can smell. However, they can be anything from formaldehyde, which is coming from kind of like highly processed manufactured woods, like MDF, or it could be the smell of someone's lunch. So where you've got something like PM 2.5, pm 2, like fine dust, is just dangerous. Its composition might be different, but it's just the nature of what it is makes it dangerous. Co2 is one gas and there is one message around that temp, humidity, same with them.

Francesca: 37:52

With VOCs, it was becoming very complicated where we saw high levels of sensor readings to be like we don't think this is anything to worry about because you don't have a newly fit out space, you don't have air fresheners, you don't have any point sources that we can see. Your levels are very high and we would say don't think there's anything to worry about. But we know that that's not much of a comfort when you're looking at really high readings coming through on the sensor. So very quickly we were like we can't continue with sensor data for VOCs so we flipped to passive sampling because again it was a low cost solution. But it was a low cost, robust solution.

Francesca: 38:34

So we have passive sampling, which essentially they're like these metal tubes that get shipped to site. They sit there. We put them next to a sensor so we can benchmark the lab data versus the sensor data. We put them there for a period of three weeks. They just sit there passively, comes with the name collecting air running through them and then we ship them off to a lab and the lab will come back with a TVOC, total volatile organic gas reading and top five organic gases. And the top five help us say okay, well, your predominant gases were limonene, citronella, things that we know come from cleaning products or air fresheners, which aren't actually fresheners, cleaning products and air fresheners. Are you using these, in which case substitution or elimination of these particular things will probably improve your indirect quality if these levels are high.

Francesca: 39:33

If it was things like or different gases that allude to the fact it's coming from coatings and building materials, then you've got a slightly different issue and it's not something that can't be overcome, but it just needs to be treated with differently. So it was a way of saying, okay, you don't have to, or we don't have to, look at air quality or VOC data from sensors anymore. We're just going to take the lab results. You can see patterns and trends using sensor data. So it goes.

Francesca: 40:01

If you've got recently fit out space and the ventilation is off, then overnight you're probably going to see things trending upwards as materials are offgassing and releasing these gases and there's no ventilation to dilute it. First thing in the morning, when ventilation comes back on, you see it drop off again to a much lower level, much lower concentration. So sensor data is still valuable, so not undermining it in that way, but it's valuable for a different reason. So we're not using it for concentrations, we're not using it to determine where these VOCs are coming from. We're just using it for patterns and trends, probably mostly related to occupancy and ventilation.

Simon: 40:39

Interesting. So are you, because you've got that split between low-cost ongoing monitoring or low-cost monitoring for a period of weeks as part of the score and you're going to the trouble to put in some passive samplers as well, to break open the TVOC Pandora's box a little bit and see what's there.

Simon: 41:02

While you're doing that, do you start to have a look at some of the other things in more detail as well? Do you find yourself getting sucked down into? Well, actually, it might be interesting to put an NO2 passive sampler in while we're there, or a RAID sampler while we're there, or a sulfur dioxide, or you name it any number of interesting pollutants that you may not have confidence in a low-cost sensor to give you accurate data on, but you might have more confidence in a lab grade measurement to give it. So, are you expanding? Are you finding yourself expanding out or being asked to?

Francesca: 41:42

Yes, so more the desire to expand out from an internal scientific perspective. So, mostly in the air quality department, marketing don't want to talk about any more parameters, they don't have to. Sales don't want to talk about any more parameters, they don't have to. Our clients don't necessarily want to be bombarded with any more information if they don't have to be. It would be in cases of if we were working on an inner city project and we said, okay, we've monitored these five parameters VOCs in a bit more detail. Our suggestion would be we do a little bit further testing, if you want to, in these other key areas. So NO2 would be a prime one to look at. In a city location you might not look at NO2, you might look at Ozone maybe if it was a suburban or rural location. So all of these suggestions are made in the report. So it leaves the door open to those that want to know more, without us kind of ramping up the scale of what we're doing to again maybe lose the engagement that we're starting to get around. People now know what CO2 is, what the drivers for CO2 are. They are understanding better the conversation that we're having around VOCs. I think once we get to a critical point of education. Then there's going to be this quite natural integration to our core product of more parameters.

Francesca: 43:16

For now, it's best practice would suggest that, at least on an annual basis, you also monitor NO2, because you're in a location where it would be appropriate to measure this. It wouldn't be overkill at all. Also, if you've got a construction site nearby, we might want to do deeper testing into PM so you can start to understand the composition of PM 2.5. It's not just skin flakes, it's construction dust and actually what does that make? What is that made up of and how much more serious is that?

Francesca: 43:46

So, yes, there is this kind of in the air quality side of things. It can feel like a runaway train. So you just start getting really excited and like, oh my god, we should start introducing lots of different things. We just need to be careful about how much we do and when we do it, in terms of undoing some of the good work that we've done around the communication and understanding, with pulling people, drag them kicking and screaming up to a point where they understand the five fundamental Parameters that we've advocated for, and then we'll start to introduce other things, because this comes into your or you spoken about it before, but it was also on your LinkedIn post the other day. With this research that's been done by was the.

Francesca: 44:27

University of Nottingham. Yeah, and it's like the top four Equality Equality pollutants that will impact your health and it included, read on, and included and I too am part of the matter was there as one of the four or one of the five, but the other ones also need to be introduced. But again, it's just, it's kind of a slow introduction.

Simon: 44:52

And the risk is is that you know what you're not trying to do is create a standard. I mean, you know, we know we've got the introduction in the UK, for example, of 40102, which is going to start to frame much more of that rigorous air quality standardization around buildings. But you're trying, as a brand, I guess, to tread that fine line between Letting the geeks rule the world, which there's always a propensity to do. Because we all talking to Stephanie Taylor earlier in the week from the states and I was like saying how do you, how do you stop yourself looking at the data and getting involved? You know what. You're trying to scale something you can't. It's not a consultancy business you're running. It's a. It's, it's a. There's this fine balance between wanting to understand everything and accepting that there are some things that you can't.

Simon: 45:46

You've got to provide information in a way that scalable and understandable, because the fact of the matter is as fascinating as it is to know if it's benzene or toluene that's present in a room, you've lost the room the moment.

Francesca: 46:03

Absolutely yeah, but it's and it's enough to say, okay, well, these things are from personal hygiene products, so your dominant organic gases are coming from things like perfumes and deodorants and stuff. People are okay cool, so it's is grouping them in a way that, yeah, makes it relatable, makes it easy to understand. I think, again, with them, it it also looks at, so it's more indoor environmental quality, because it also looks at noise, it looks at light. So, again, it it treads the line of being more holistic than what we're trying to do, and what we're trying to do is Is basically a communication, education and engagement tool. So we want to be stuck on buildings and communicated to the people in the buildings or visiting the spaces in a really straightforward to understand why.

Francesca: 47:03

Because the word escort I think it's air quality is already very acronym heavy. It's very data heavy. I think if you introduce something to just sound makes it sound more complicated than people just lose interest. So, particularly when we have done very specific, very tailored messaging to the type of company they are so with, one company is Ali, it was Tobacco products. So in some ways it's great that they want to understand the air quality in the space where the people work. They're not exactly advocating for good air quality or good breathing quality with the products they produce, but it was a very Interesting example of okay, how do we position this for this organization who are fundamentally ruining people For what they want to communicate as? So that was an interesting one.

Francesca: 48:22

But in in another case we had A company that works in the beauty space. So again, when we sat down to talk about the results of the score and what is PM 2.5? What of your sees, all this sort of stuff, the minute we started losing the room it was like, okay, what does this mean to the beauty industry? So, actually, air quality, or there are, there are types of air pollution that can cause inflammation and premature aging of the skin, and immediately they were like yeah, yeah yeah, and it was like what?

Francesca: 48:55

did you know that some of the Products that you guys sell have anti pollution Properties, so they protect your skin? If it's like a foundation, they protect your skin against UV. They also are anti pollution. And they were like, are they? And I was like well, here's a link to one of the products that you sell. It says anti pollution on it.

Francesca: 49:17

So not only can you spin it to be an internal we're looking after our people message, it's also oh, by the way, do you understand the link between air pollution and Premature aging and Spots and acne and all these other things where it can feed into the brand messaging. So it's like what they're practicing and what they're preaching. So it just and it made sense to them because they could immediately resonate with them. They were like okay, so it's not to do with productivity. Forget that when we talk to the professional services, that's about productivity. When we're talking to the people who have done this because they thought it was a positive thing to do for employee well being, but actually you can make it Work for the business in the sector there and then it suddenly unlocks a whole, a whole set of new potential and a whole different set of value they didn't even know existed that's really interesting, really interesting.

Simon: 50:13

And how do you see this broadly playing out then over the next, say five years, for both kind of air quality awareness and branding of Air quality within buildings and important and how aerated or fitting with that over say, the next five years or so?

Francesca: 50:34

So I mean, I genuinely think it will follow a similar trajectory to energy performance ratings, energy performance certificates, because it will become not I hope it will it will become a fundamental pillar of how we track performance of assets. Air quality will be up there with one of those things. The fact we're so fixated on energy is honestly quite bizarre when you think that air quality doesn't get the same attention. I appreciate there are other drivers around energy, but air quality needs to feature in that conversation. So I think, honestly, in the next five years we could see air quality on the brink of mandatory reporting, to the point where you've got something like an EPC, an AirPC, an AirScore type of mandatory requirement that will in itself drive the value of assets. So it won't feed into something like Gresb that ultimately dictates the value of an asset or a fund. It'll be that one specific thing that starts dictating the value. So yeah, in the same way that you've got an EPC, you've got an MOT. It probably needs to be EPC-esque in its uptake and its regulation, but it needs to be MOT-esque in the frequency that it's reported on. So a mix of those two, as I say, very unglamorous things.

Francesca: 51:58

I do see the future of air quality. It's here. We now know too much. I feel like the indoor air quality industry is very vocal. We are kind of stuck in our echo chamber but we are very vocal. But people know too much now. They know it exists, they know it can be monitored, they know it can be benchmarked. It's something that won't be ignored now that the business cases are starting to present themselves as well.

Simon: 52:21

Yeah, it's a hard lid to close that box on, really for sure.

Francesca: 52:27

Definitely, and it would be strange if people wanted to. I don't think you can. I think it's that kind of asbestos situation with it. Now it's like, okay, we understand it, we know it's the hazards around it. We also know the benefits of doing things with it. So with something like asbestos and lead that used to be in paints, it was like God, we need to get rid of this because it is literally killing people With this. It's like, yes, on the very sinister side, it's not doing people any good at all to be in poor working environments or poor living conditions, but also there are so many benefits. So again, coming back to that messaging around yeah, there's all this horrible stuff, but we shouldn't become fixated on that, because here are the amazing things that can be delivered if we do it and we get it right.

Simon: 53:15

Yeah, and I think to your point about the priority that's been placed on energy.

Simon: 53:19

One of the challenges the air quality community has had has been drawing a straight line to cost of poor health. So because we operate within buildings predominantly, which is what we've been talking about, the budgets that are used to improve buildings have been based on reducing carbon emissions and improving energy performance. So they come from a different government department and pool of money than what air quality really is, driving efficiency and savings in, which is health and environment and other parts. So I think that's why the work of Ben Italos is so important is creating things like dali metrics for air quality puts it in the same camp as drinking and smoking and road traffic deaths and all of the other population level risk metrics that you can say hang on a minute, If we can improve air quality at a population level, this is the rate of return of investment into that space. So it should be coming from the health budget and the built environment budget. We're constantly competing basically for energy performance budgets and I've been saying for years nothing beats no ventilation for energy savings, you know.

Francesca: 54:49

Yeah, which is definitely not the message.

Simon: 54:52

No, no for sure.

Francesca: 54:53

We want people to hear. And what about? What about air rating?

Simon: 54:57

What's kind of next on the horizon for you guys there?

Francesca: 55:00

Well, I think with what we're doing, we're getting the kind of attention from our big big clients that means that we are sticky enough that they want to keep going with annual assessment, because I think that was always the fear is, people would do it once, think they understand their building. Stop doing it. We're like, well, things can change. So and also, if you keep doing it, then it will promote ESG or promote CSR or do all these good things. So we're seeing a lot of stickiness with our big big, big big landlord clients and also some big occupy clients.

Francesca: 55:37

I'm hoping what we can start to do is get into some public sector buildings, start doing more around the. This kind of mandatory requirement for air quality testing, regardless of whether it is aerated air score or a different seal of approval for buildings, but just something that works not only on a UK scale, because a lot of our clients are internationally in their reach, something that works on a global scale. So you don't just have an EPC, which is something that, like, people understand in the UK, but if you said EPC is someone in America, they might not get it. We want this kind of broad global seal of approval for buildings that is mandatory, and I know that is a big ass and it is a big thing to drive towards, but I think it is, particularly in property, with these big portfolios, the only way really to start truly benchmarking and truly understanding asset performance.

Simon: 56:39

That's a really really interesting point, so that is my hope for aerated and, of course, it makes it more affordable if it turns into a recurring revenue model, because you can bake the cost into a longer term relationship with people rather than having a one hit wonder. Where you like you say they get a certificate. What value is an EPC? Even five years down the road, 10 years down the road, you lose its building performance value if it's not a recurring. Yeah, yeah.

Francesca: 57:10

And if it's recurring, you also incentivize people doing something about it in the interim. It's like we're coming back, yeah, like at least have to make sure it's still maintaining the quality it was when you did the test last year.

Simon: 57:24

Yeah, crap. Did anybody replace the filters the last year? Yeah, it was the last time we did that because the air school was coming back next month yeah.

Francesca: 57:33

And it's so much. It's different because I remember being at school and whenever Offset were coming, the flowers would come out in reception. We'd be like they're never usually here and everyone was on their best behavior with an air quality assessment.

Francesca: 57:45

Everyone could be on their best behavior, sure, but like you'll still be, you'll still be found out if it's not performing the way it should. So it's one of those things you have to be mindful of the entire time. It's not just one thing. 24 hours in advance, oh God, they're coming in tomorrow, aren't they To do their installation. Okay, well, we need to suddenly ramp up the events. I mean you could, but it's one of those things that you should be mindful of the entire year, as opposed to just being putting things in place 24 hours before we get there. So, yeah, it's, hopefully. It's one of those things that does well. It is here to stay, hopefully for most people. I just think the way that you do that is by slowly getting towards a mandatory point, a bit like Bream, because Bream, to begin with, was voluntary and then it became mandatory for public sector, still voluntary for private sector. That's fine, but that's exactly the same position that we want to get ourselves to, but on a global scale, as I say.