A Methodology to assess economical impacts of poor IAQ in office buildings from DALY and SBS induced costs

Abstract

Indoor air quality is a major issue that concerns everyone. Indeed, human being spend more than 70% of time in indoor environment. Indoor pollutants are responsible for many chronic diseases such as lung cancer or leukaemia, but it also has short-term outcomes, it can cause headache, coughing, running nose, etc, it affects daily concentration and productivity of office workers. Considering the numerous consequences of indoor pollution, a will to quantify induced costs seems logical. In 2003 a study conducted in US concluded a global 41 billion € cost, in France, total cost of indoor pollution for the whole nation was estimated around 19 billion € in 2014. Nonetheless, for an individual person or a whole building, the point of view is not the same, and therefore, integrated costs will differ from those for a nation. This work aims at proposing a methodology to estimate IAQ costs in office buildings, with a function that accounts for pollutants concentration and number of workers. This proposed methodology permits calculation of costs for Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY). A distinction is made for each individual pollutant cost, accounting for healthcare costs, life years lost and productivity loss. An original part of this work consists in also integrating Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) costs. Preliminary results show a higher cost for SBS compared to DALY.