Two years of Covid restrictions have given employers a taste for just how complex managing airborne pandemics will be in future. But smart managers have already understood the business benefits of supplying hospital-quality air management in our offices. From property owners looking to secure high-end, long-term tenants, to CEOs hoping to attract and retain scarce skills, indoor air quality must be more than a regulatory tick-boxing exercise. 

“How we ventilate our buildings has a significant impact on the transmission of airborne diseases, and the pandemic has placed the spotlight squarely on how we manage air quality in the built environment. Unfortunately, based on current regulations, most building management and business leaders are focussed only on odour and dust control and thermal management, with little regard to how they could be making significant and possibly lifesaving changes, thanks to technical advances over the last few years,” explains Edward Hector, MD of the SFI Group. 

Governments requiring more action 

The need to better manage the quality of air workers breathe has long been on the regulatory radar. In response to the pandemic, the South African Department of Labour has published a new Code of Practice, which includes a focus on increased ventilation rates in order to reduce the viral load in occupied spaces. 

This has been the response of many global regulators, with Belgium taking it a step further, publishing a ventilation plan applicable to all places open to the public, including bars, restaurants, cinemas, etc.

“The Belgian regulator has the right idea. We certainly have the ability to significantly cut down the spread of airborne diseases through better air-quality management,” Hector shares. 

Emerging technology used in hospitals could hold the key 

For many years, particularly in the USA, hospitals made use of Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVC-GI) to kill pathogens that caused Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs), spread in the air conditioning systems. The technology has proven itself especially effective with UVC GI lamps used in air-handling plants, reducing HAIs by up to 70%. 

Refinement of the technology now makes it suitable for commercial use. One of South Africa’s major banks has already retrofitted all the air-handling units for some of their larger offices around the country.

“The bank was looking for a way to protect and reassure their staff when they returned to the office after working remotely for many months. They investigated various technologies and found UVC to be a well-proven technology, and one that did not require any system design changes. Multiple sample swab tests were done on the coils and drip trays before and after installation to check the microbial count, which indicated just how effective UVC GI lamps are in this application,” he shares. 

Hector says the installation of UVC GI lamps requires no modifications to the existing system design and can be retrofitted into air-handling units. In the event of air-handling units not having sufficient space, they are installed within the ducting, causing little to no system downtime.

“For property owners looking to differentiate themselves in a severely downturn market, offering indoor air quality that will slash the chance of airborne contagions is a low-risk, high-return solution. For business owners looking to offer the safest possible environment for their most valuable asset – their team – providing the best air to breathe should be the minimum requirement,” Hector says.