What If You Live in an Apartment?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 What to Do If You Suspect a Problem in a position to remedy the problem. (See the section "") You can encourage building management to follow guidance in EPA's IAQ Building Education and Assessment Model (I-BEAM) (www.epa.gov/iaq/largebldgs/ibeam_page.htm). I-BEAM updates and expands EPA's existing Building Air Quality guidance and is designed to be comprehensive state-of-the-art guidance for managing IAQ in commercial buildings. This guidance was designed to be used by building professionals and others interested in indoor air quality in commercial buildings. I-BEAM contains text, animation/visual, and interactive/calculation components that can be used to perform a number of diverse tasks. You can also encourage building management to follow guidance in EPA and NIOSH's Building Air Quality: A Guide for Building Owners and Facility Managers (www.epa.gov/iaq/largebldgs/baqtoc.html) (The BAQ is available here as PDF files which can be downloaded and viewed individually or as a single file with all of the PDF files). To obtain the loose leaf format version of the Building Air Quality, complete with appendices, an index, and a full set of useful forms, and the, Building Air Quality Action Plan (www.epa.gov/iaq/largebldgs/actionpl.html) (The BAQ Action Plan is available in HTML and PDF formats.), 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. Related Pages: |