Maintaining Indoor Quality - Singapore
As mentioned in the previous post, I will be talking about what some efforts the government in Singapore has taken to tackle the problems of indoor air quality (IAQ).
According to Chan (1999), the government has statutory laws imposed on the designs on air-conditioning systems by the Building and Common Property ( Maintenance and Management) Act, Environmental Public Health and Land Title (Strata) Act.
Furthermore, The Ministry of Environment has also issued the ENV Guidelines for Good Indoor Air Quality in office premises. Other than that, the Workplace Safety and Health Council (WSH) has come up with a guideline to help people manage IAQ in buildings and offices through their IAQ Management Programme. The WSH acknowledges the importance of IAQ in buildings (thankfully), stating the problems of sick building syndrome and issues with productivity. WSH regulates that organisations are required to conduct Risk Assessments to identify, evaluate and control any safety/health risks to the people in the work space. However, all these are not statutory laws and thus are not compulsory for organisations to abide to.
Some of the IAQ factors that the Risk Assessment include : Balance of air movement, humidity levels, CO / CO2 levels, VOC and particulates levels. It also suggests technologies to implement to tackle various problems like using different filters (electret, carbon , electrostatic etc ), using photocatalytic oxidations etc, which I personally find very interesting.
While i am glad that there are some laws and regulations put in place to encourage buildings to upkeep and maintain their IAQ, I believe that more could be done to raise the awareness about the importance of IAQ. Currently, only mostly the subject matter experts or building experts know of the importance of IAQ, whereas most of the general public might not know. If we take a look at the National Environmental Agency of Singapore's website, there are little information about IAQ - their topics of pollution cover outdoor air, water, land, noise etc, but nothing much on IAQ. Therefore, we could see that the government does not place much priority on educating the mainstream public on the importance of IAQ.
In 2007 , Zuraimi et. al found that children in childcare centres in Singapore that are air-conditioned face high prevalence of respiratory illnesses. Such an example show that having knowledge and being aware of IAQ issues can help to protect people, like in this case, the vulnerable younger generations.
Therefore, I feel that there is still a need to raise awareness and also educate the public on IAQ and how to maintain good IAQs to the general public. Even though there are already effort put in by the government, some places like the childcare centres still faces problems from IAQs, therefore educating the public can make people more conscious and take action, such as ventilating indoor spaces and maintaining their air conditioning units frequently.
References:
Chan, P. (1999), Indoor Air Quality and the Law in Singapore. Indoor Air, 9: 290–296.
Zuraimi, M. S., Tham, K. W., Chew, F. T. and Ooi, P. L. (2007), The effect of ventilation strategies of child care centers on indoor air quality and respiratory health of children in Singapore. Indoor Air, 17: 317–327.
Workplace Safety and Health Guidelines (2016) Workplace Safety and Health Council
