Fumbling the future of air quality in modern buildings as we fight climate change!

Fumbling the future of air quality in modern buildings as we fight climate change!

Dr. Iyad Al-Attar

Cities are the bedrock of commerce, trade, and business and the engines of knowledge and innovations. They represent an opportunity for inhabitants to embrace a low-carbon way of life while reducing waste in resources, energy, and materials.

Cities can help nations break the cycle of poverty and progress to prosperity and embody a model of development rather than dependence.

Although many believe cities have positioned their nations to become wealthier and healthier than ever, others believe cities’ roads are paved to an environmental hell. Therefore, addressing the growing challenges of urban expansion requires widening the scope of sustainable urban development and remaking existing cities to provide human-centric frameworks.

Public policies alone cannot stem the tidal forces of rapid urban change. An interface of policy and research is required to envision new ideas, methods, and collaborations that can bring about necessary changes to ascend to the heights of sustainable city design.

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The role of academic institutions in the prosperity of their cities has been highlighted throughout history, and universities such as Oxford, MIT, and Harvard are all excellent examples of how post-secondary sites can help their cities grow and thrive.

Today, asking the troubling questions that would reveal the truth about the trajectory of cities planning to embrace sustainability an help to direct how we alter the ways we live, consume consume, commute, generate, and use power are a few undertakings.

The mounting pressure of climate change

If we do not change our environmental course, cities will face the looming danger of climate change in the decades ahead. Many major cities are situated next to oceans, rivers, or both and risk being engulfed by rising water levels. Other towns may face droughts, water shortages, and intolerable extremes of heat.

Escalating global anthropogenic emissions are extremely worrisome. Clustering people in cities polluted by anthropogenic emissions cannot be celebrated as it deteriorates urban air quality and provides ideal conditions for transmitting diseases among inhabitants. Waiting until air quality becomes so concerning that facemasks need to be donned again cannot be a viable plan.

The narrative of Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) technologies does not include air quality; hence, it is no surprise that it is lagging in the building’s priority list, falling harder, farther, and faster in the backburner of the building operation agenda.

So, before demanding a sustainable city or building, it is critical to establish a culture of sustainability among designers, developers, and city inhabitants for air quality inclusion. It is also crucial to consider how a building interacts with the surrounding environment through energy use, heat, and emissions reduction and how much outdoor air is introduced indoors for HVAC purposes.

The luxury of thermal comfort

Air conditioning has enabled rich countries to build cities in hot and humid climates but at an enormous environmental cost. For urban dwellers who can afford it, installing air conditioning units to provide sufficient cooling helps them protect themselves from oppressive heat. In developing countries, air conditioning is a luxury few can afford, which makes working and living in hot, humid, and even polluted environments unbearable for most.

Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, rated the air conditioner as the twentieth century’s most important technological innovation, enabling his nation to live,  work, and prosper comfortably. The success of the HVAC systems has lent credence to the view that the well-being and comfort of inhabitants are the essence of sustainable urban development strategies.

Constructing energy-efficient buildings using advanced insulation materials can help minimize the required heat loads to achieve thermal comfort and optimize the selection of HVAC systems.

The fundamental realignment in constructing healthy buildings is admitting the critical importance of the legislative, technical, and ethical obligations of air quality. Embedding air quality from Day One in conjunction with HVAC technologies, building emissions, and energy efficiency policies is essential to clean air delivery and governance.  

Addressing these targets in the early stage of urban planning avoids the agony of a “retrofitting” budget discussion at the initial operation stage. Furthermore,  for buildings to be healthy, they ought to be equipped with adaptive ventilation and appropriate filtration systems (Figure 1) capable of responding to any variation in IAQ and human occupancy. The technologies are available to do so; it is just a matter of legislating such requirements as pillars of healthy building metrics.

The agony of the pandemic

The attention air filtration technologies recieved during the pandemic has made most believe enhanced air quality has triumphed. The disruption cities faced during the pandemic has proven that climate change is not the only existential risk confronting humanity. The pandemic has revealed how totally unprepared we were to fight virus transmission.

Ultimately, investigating the relationship between infectious diseases and cities must reflect the learnings of the COVID-19 pandemic experience toward a pandemic-proof urban environment. The density of urban living makes cities natural amplifiers of virus transmission. Resilience and adaptation are necessary not only to better respond to future pandemics when they inevitably arise but also to help cities recover from disasters, and ensure urban areas can withstand and thrive despite environmental, economic, and social changes.

However, we cannot fumble the future of our cities by stumbling upon requiring vaccinations and mandating facemasks to navigate future pandemics. Cities must rise to their potential and contribute to a fair and sustainable world for societies to be cohesive and for cities to be pandemic-proof built environments. We must fix our relationship with our planet by overhauling urban design, rebuilding the knowledge economy, and accelerating sustainable development.

The pandemic revealed and amplified decades of epic errors, centuries of bad habits, and negligence in air quality practices. The pandemic was also a compendium of poorly implemented standards, maintenance hacks, inappropriate filter selection, and quick-fix installation. But filtration alone cannot render our building envelopes safe to occupy, irrespective of our outdoor air pollutants.

While air filtration technologies (Figure 2) can remove various pollutant types, their availability does not justify the pace of current anthropogenic emissions. Meanwhile, widely used practices such as cleaning diffusers, ducts, and coils give an ominous glimpse of the consequences of adhering to old maintenance hacks. Furthermore, disposing of loaded filters remains a pressing waste issue that hardly adheres to the circular economy metrics.

Ultimately, engineering the filtration requirements and selections must be emphasized to extend the filter life cycle through sustainable performance and operation.

Conclusion

Throughout history, cities have emerged as the driving force of human progress and prosperity. Today, humanity is witnessing the fastest-growing pace of urbanization and population growth. To accommodate such an enormous boom, the emphasis must shift to efficient processes, modern infrastructures, and responsible inhabitants to tackle tensions such as land consumption, air pollution, congestion, wastage, and overconsumption of natural resources. The essence of sustainable urban development must be the transformation of cities into commerce, knowledge, technology, and innovation hubs to attract people, investments, and prosperity. Development, profits, and prosperity are not mutually exclusive. Hence, we should build cities based on waste reduction and minimal reliance on fossil fuels while granting renewables a more significant role in the global energy mix. While we may live in architecturally different cities, we share common dreams and challenges of living in clean, green-built environments. Air quality inclusion must emerge as a foundation for urban planning and a pillar of global economies to safeguard our well-being so we can live, grow, and urbanize without polluting. We cannot fumble the future of sustainable buildings when we possess the technologies, innovations, knowledge, and collective intelligence to build safe, equitable, and sustainable cities. Humanity has to do what it takes to combat climate change and grant our children a chance to fight for their rights to a safer planet than the one we inherited. Perhaps we can be inspired by George Eliot, who once said, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Dr. Iyad Al-Attar – Biography:

Dr. Iyad Al-Attar is a mechanical engineer, air quality consultant, and a Visiting Academic Fellow in the School of Aerospace, Transport, and Manufacturing at Cranfield University for air quality and filter performance relevant to land-based gas turbines. Dr. Al-Attar is also the strategic director, instructor, and advisory board member of the Waterloo Filtration Institute.

In 2020, Eurovent Middle East appointed Dr. Al-Attar as the first associated consultant for air filtration and most recently he became the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) patron for EUROVENT.  A strong advocate for global government to play a significant role in the governance of embedding air quality monitoring and enhancement as a pillar of the built environment, just like water and sanitation, he has published many articles addressing filter design and performance for HVAC and land-based gas turbine applications, emphasizing the chemical and physical characterization of airborne pollutants.

Dr. Al-Attar received his engineering degrees (BSc, MSc, Ph.D.) from the University of Toronto (Canada), Kuwait University, and Loughborough University (UK), respectively. Dr. Al-Attar is reading for an MSc in sustainable urban development for air quality inclusion at the University of Oxford. Dr. Al-Attar’s current research at the University of Oxford addresses the importance of air quality inclusion as a rudiment of sustainable urban development. His research is expected to provide guidelines for engaging HVAC systems to enhance IAQ through appropriate filtration, deploying air quality sensing infrastructure, and sharing the data with the concerned authorities, enabling human occupants to know the air quality they are exposed to.

Dr. Al-Attar is a columnist in many international magazines such as the Filtration News USA, EUROVENT Middle East Newsletter, Climate Control Middle East Magazine, Caloryfrio, Spain, and has published many articles in Filtration + Separation, UK, ES Engineering, USA. His publications cover air quality, particle characterization, sustainable filter design, and performance, which were translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. Dr. Al-Attar is an editorial member/referee in the Filtration Society (UK) and the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Dr. Iyad Al-Attar is also Canada & UK Correspondent of MAHABAHU

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