Kelly: (00:06 )
welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09 )
the podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13 )
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility, and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Robb Aldrich

Kelly: (00:19 )
and I’m Kelly Westby.

Robb: (00:21 )
This week I’m talking with Maureen Mahle, who’s the managing director of sustainable housing services here at Steven Winter associates or SWA as you’ll pRobbably hear us call it. She’s been here for at least 12 years, has been involved in green building programs since leed for homes came out and many programs since then. I believe I read, she has certified over 12,000 homes or housing units since she started here. This episode we’re focusing on health and green buildings, which is a big topic, an important topic, a topic around which there’s a lot of different advice, a lot of different programs, advising not necessarily the same things. it can be overwhelming to many. It is overwhelming to me at times, but you have to start somewhere. So that’s, that’s what we’re going to talk about. Here’s my interview.

Robb: (01:17 )
We’re here to talk about buildings and health or green buildings and health, which is a huge topic. So we’re going to scratch the surface and do an overview. And of course, health is a huge part of green buildings. It’s one of the tenants. But there’s a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. There’s a lot of, there are a lot of different programs that say a lot of different things. And I know you’ve given it quite a bit of thought. it’s a huge topic. But having you give us a primmer or an overview of some of the issues and what some of the programs are good for and not so good for, that would be great.

Maureen: (01:58 )
Absolutely. So I guess I’ll start by saying I have absolutely no training and topics surrounding health whatsoever. I’m not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever. My mother was a nurse. That’s as close as I get. but in my role working on buildings and advising people who work on buildings, I actually have a lot of influence over human health as do all of us in this industry. So that’s kind of the base turn that got me interested in. This is starting from the place of: we’re not health experts and yet we have a big impact on health. Therefore, we have a duty to figure out some basic things and more importantly to start taking action. Even if we don’t have everything figured out. If we wait until we know the absolutes, we’re never going to get anything done. And we could potentially do more damage in the near term and in the longterm.

Robb: (02:56 )
Gotcha. So code built buildings, what do codes do for us? Do codes give us any kind of basic level of health protection?

Maureen: (03:08 )
codes get into ventilation, which is important, mostly focused only on new construction. There are very few codes that retroactively address ventilation and buildings and ventilation is what we’re doing to basically remove pollutants. Ventilation levels set by code are intended to be sort of minimally safe. And there is a difference as we’re starting to find out between minimally safe and optimally healthy. Right? So there is actually a pretty big gap there. I can throw it out right now- one of the pieces of research around this is the cog effects study. And we’ll link that in the show notes for this. But you know, long story short and summarizing, you know, very, very briefly, it’s sort of like if you double your ventilation, you might be twice as smart roughly. So that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about is the difference between surviving, which is what code is aimed at, and living your life to the fullest and sort of like being in peak operating condition as humans, we want our buildings to be in peak operating condition.

Robb: (04:21 )
So not only just