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"Healthy Buildings, Healthy People: A Vision for the 21st Century"
The Vision for Healthy Buildings, Healthy People
Healthy Buildings, Healthy People
OAR/ORIA/IED (6609J)
402-K-01-003, October 2001
Contents
All across our Nation, people live, work, and learn in healthy indoor environments. The environments within our buildings help us reach our full potential for good health and productivity. No one is excluded: we create healthy buildings at every income level and help all our children grow up to be healthy adults. We understand the importance of healthy indoor environments, create a demand for them, and expect them as something that everyone deserves. By choosing designs, ventilation systems, materials, and products wisely, we are able to create healthy buildings while substantially reducing energy use, cutting material costs, and raising productivity. The Nation’s success in improving human health indoors serves as a model for better building design and construction, rehabilitation and maintenance, and product development around the world.
Healthy Buildings, Healthy People: A Vision for the 21st Century addresses the future of indoor environmental quality. In preparing Healthy Buildings, Healthy People, EPA sought the advice of many, both within the Agency and outside, to develop the vision, goals, guiding principles, and potential actions presented in the report. Healthy Buildings, Healthy People lays out a blueprint by which agencies and individuals across the country, and around the world, can focus their efforts towards improvements in the indoor environment and health.
Healthy Buildings, Healthy People challenges all of us to work together to improve the quality of the indoor environment, and serves as a basis for discussion and education among professionals in public policy, health, building sciences, product manufacturing, and environmental research. It has already served as an impetus within EPA to take on program initiatives focusing on childhood asthma, characterizing the effects of building and consumer products on the environment, increasing the demand for cleaner indoor products for use in schools, creating standards of care for existing buildings, and designing guidance for new schools. EPA is also integrating good indoor environmental quality concepts into the Energy Star® label program for commercial office buildings.
EPA wants to thank the many stakeholders who gave of their valuable time to participate in several workshops to create the vision and brainstorm the action plan, or to provide thoughtful comments on the draft document. During this collaborative process, we learned a great deal from stakeholders. For example, we need to further understand indoor sources of pollutants and their health effects, integrate building design and maintenance, encourage federal buildings to be "model" indoor environments, support the development of new product technologies, and educate the public. Also, federal agencies; state, local and tribal governments; health and community organizations; and industry and other private groups need to work together closely to improve the Nation’s health. We hope that Healthy Buildings, Healthy People will be instrumental in this process.