What if You Live in an Apartment - A Guide to Indoor Air Quality, Part Three

Welcome back to our Guide to Indoor Air Quality series. Last time, we focused on the different ways outdoor air enters a house. Time for part three...

What if You Live in an Apartment?

Apartments can have the same indoor air problems as single-family homes because many of the pollution sources, such as the interior building materials, furnishings, and household products, are similar. Indoor air problems similar to those in offices are caused by such sources as contaminated ventilation systems, improperly placed outdoor air intakes, or maintenance activities.

Solutions to air quality problems in apartments, as in homes and offices, involve such actions as: eliminating or controlling the sources of pollution, increasing ventilation, and installing air cleaning devices. Often a resident can take the appropriate action to improve the indoor air quality by removing a source, altering an activity, unblocking an air supply vent, or opening a window to temporarily increase the ventilation; in other cases, however, only the building owner or manager is in a position to remedy the problem. (Stay tuned for our upcoming post: "What to Do If You Suspect a Problem")

You can encourage building management to follow guidance in EPA and NIOSH's "Building Air Quality: A Guide for Building Owners and Facility Managers". To obtain the looseleaf-fomat version of the Building Air Quality, complete with appendices, an index, and a full set of useful forms, and the newly released, Building Air Quality Action Plan, order GPO Stock # 055-000-00602-4, for $28, contact the: Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO), P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954, or call (202) 512-1800, fax (202) 512-2250.

Next in this series... Indoor Air and Your Health.

*Content provided by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency. CPSC Document #450. This document is public domain.*