Green Building Practices

Aim to Cure Sick Building Syndrome

By Stephen del Percio, ESQ., LEED-AP

Sustainable “green” building practices can alter more than just the impact that structures have on the natural environment, although that impact is incredibly profound. The nation’s commercial and residential
buildings use more than sixty-two percent of our electricity, consume thirty-six percent of our oil and gas, and are responsible for thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Green design principles can also help mitigate the effects that workers and residents may experience from spending substantial amounts of time inside artificial building spaces. Some of those effects can manifest themselves in what is known as sick building syndrome.

Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) refers to building conditions that give rise to a variety of illnesses suffered by occupants. These conditions usually result from poor indoor air quality and include symptoms such as headaches, nausea, dizziness and fatigue. Significantly, these symptoms disappear once an occupant leaves the building. In a 1984 investigation, the World Health Organization reported that occupants in up to thirty percent of the world’s new and remodeled buildings were suffering from indoor air quality-related illnesses. While SBS is typically associated with office building workers, teachers and residential dwellers have also complained of SBS ailments.

Here in the United States, a study in 2000 performed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, concluded that approximately twenty-three percent of American office workers suffer from some type of SBS symptoms. Importantly, these symptoms dropped by twenty percent when air quality was improved through green design principles. The study also projected that owners stood to realize $6 billion to $14 billion in savings from reduced absenteeism owing to respiratory disease, $1 billion to $4 billion from reduced allergies and asthma, and from $20 billion to $160 billion from improved worker productivity. However, it did acknowledge that “ existing data and knowledge allows only crude evidence of the magnitude of productivity gains that may be obtained by providing a cleaner indoor environments.”

Most litigation resulting from allegations of SBS has involved insurance coverage. Commercial general liability policies are usually written with an absolute pollution exclusion, broadly defining the term “pollutant,” and precluding insurance coverage for bodily injury or property damage arising from the discharge or release of any pollutants within a building owned or occupied by an insured. While the absolute pollution exclusion is generally effective at limiting an insurer’s exposure for environmental claims, some courts have allowed claimants to challenge the language in such policies and obtain coverage in SBS scenarios.

For example, a 1997 Wisconsin case found the term “pollutant” to be ambiguous as applied to bodily injury claims. The insured was the manager of an office building that had a poorly-designed HVAC system. Accordingly, an excessive amount of CO2 slowly built up throughout the office spaces. Workers contended with poor air quality resulting in headaches, nausea, and sinus problems. The insured building manager sought to obtain coverage
from its insurer for the numerous claims brought by building occupants. Both the insurer and the insured had intended for the pollution exclusion clause to have broad application, but the court could not say with any degree of certainty that CO2 should fall within the policy’s definition of “pollutant.” It therefore allowed the insured to obtain coverage for the claims. Sustainable building practices can help prevent not only the underlying claims of SBS by building occupants but also help to reduce the number of coverage disputes between owners and insurers.

The USGBC’s LEED green building rating system recognizes the importance of occupant health and comfort by devoting one of its five credit categories exclusively to indoor air quality. The Indoor Environmental Quality (“IEQ”) credit category has two mandatory prerequisites that every project seeking any level of LEED certification must satisfy. The first, minimum indoor air quality performance, requires that the building meet the minimum requirements of ASHRAE 62-1999, Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality. The second, Environmental Tobacco Smoke (“ETS”) control, requires projects to either prohibit smoking entirely and locate designated exterior smoking areas at least twenty-five feet away from entries and operable windows, or provide a designated smoking area within the building which captures, contains, and removes the ETS from the building. Other credits within the IEQ category are designed to help prevent allegations of SBS and improve occupant health and comfort. Project teams can earn up to fifteen LEED credits for increased ventilation, the use of low-emitting volatile organic compound (VOC) materials (including sealants, paints, carpet systems, and woods), and provide occupants with increased daylight and personal control over thermal systems. VOCs are particularly egregious contributors to SBS because of their high vapor pressures; they can vaporize under normal atmospheric conditions into methane or benzene. The United States Environmental Protection Agency estimates that VOCs in typical indoor spaces can be two to five times greater than as those existing outdoors. At times, EPA has measured that figure at one thousand times greater.

There is currently little hard data on a consistent basis across different types of building stock from owners who have addressed indoor air quality through green design. This is in large part owing to such owners’ fears of incurring liability for not having taken such measures previously. However, that has not prevented some forward-thinking owners from recognizing the importance of indoor air quality and making it an integral part of their green building projects. The Hearst Corporation’s LEED Gold headquarters in Manhattan for example, uses natural ventilation during three quarters of the calendar year to bring fresh air from outside into the building. Moreover, the low-emittance coating of its exterior glass curtain wall, coupled with a paucity of interior walls, allows natural light to penetrate deep into the core of the building’s office floors. Some of New York’s green residential buildings also offer similar design elements. FXFOWLE’s Helena contains low-VOC paints, gaskets to prevent smoke, odors and other pollutants from traveling between apartments, and bathroom and kitchen heat that preheats outdoor air and is sanitized by ultraviolet light prior to being supplied to the building’s corridors.

While SBS will likely always be an issue no matter how green a building claims to be, the promise that new technologies and innovative designs offer in terms of mitigating the effects that buildings – both commercial and residential – have on their occupants is significant and real. Accordingly, the construction industry needs to aggressively push owners of green buildings to furnish data about performance. Doing so will encourage reluctant owners to share both successes and failures and assist construction professionals in comprehensively addressing the problems associated with SBS through sustainable design.