Indoor Environmental Quality

People spend more than 85 percent of their time indoors and where they are regularly exposed to pollutants, irritants, and chemicals that can cause and worsen health conditions, such as allergies, asthma, respiratory disease, cancer, bacterial infections, and many others. Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is a critical environmental health and safety issue and everyone is affected.

Cadmus works closely with Federal, state and local agencies, private companies, and non-profit organizations to design initiatives to improve IEQ, occupant health and safety, and building performance. Much of our work focuses on educating specific industry sectors, such as health care insurers and providers and builders and facility managers, to increase awareness and understanding of IEQ risks and management options. We also work closely with public sector partners, including school districts and local governments, to improve IEQ and occupant health in their facilities.

Our multi-disciplinary staff brings environmental science, public health, engineering and architecture, marketing and communication, and other experts to support improvements in IEQ at the facility, community, and state level. We provide training, technical assistance for IEQ upgrades, best practices guidance, communications support, and organizational change consulting to manage asthma triggers, radon risks, multi-source pollution, mold problems, and other common IEQ issues in residential, institutional, commercial, and industrial buildings. Cadmus also supports:

Community-level action to reduce the burden of asthma for children and adults
Individual, organizational, and local initiatives to prevent children’s exposure to secondhand smoke to safeguard children’s physical and mental development
Efforts to improve school IEQ while reducing energy, chemical, and water use to create “green and healthy schools”
The national campaign to double the number of lives saved by reducing exposure to indoor radon to prevent future lung cancer deaths

Project Example: Creating Healthy Learning Environments for Our Nation’s Children

More than 53 million children and 6 million adults spend a significant portion of their days in the more than 120,000 public and private schools in the United States. Many of these facilities are aging and face a variety of challenges related to indoor pollutants and how indoor air quality (IAQ) impacts student and staff health and productivity.

The Challenge

School officials are increasingly burdened with a range of federal, state, and local issues and maintaining good indoor environments often becomes overshadowed by other more pressing concerns. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency engaged Cadmus to develop and deliver tools, training, and outreach strategies to increase awareness of the importance of maintaining healthy indoor environments in our nation’s schools and to motivate schools to take voluntary actions to address indoor environmental quality (IEQ) concerns.

Our Approach

Cadmus’ has supported EPA’s IAQ Tools for Schools program for over 7 years and works with our clients to develop effective strategies and tools to enable schools to adopt comprehensive, proactive IEQ IAQ management programs. In 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held the first IAQ Tools for Schools National Symposium; a gathering of a few hundred key school stakeholders interested in learning more about IEQ. In 2001, EPA engaged Cadmus to help support and promote the Symposium. Cadmus has coordinated the last 7 national Symposia, growing it from a small gathering to the nation’s premiere conference on IEQ issues in schools, with over 500 participants each year. Over the years, the Symposium has evolved from primarily a technical conference to one that showcases highly successful schools based IEQ management programs and provides concrete tools for participants to use to develop their own school IEQ action plans.

To build on the success of the Symposium, Cadmus recently worked with EPA to develop and launch a change campaign based on best practices research and the synthesized experiences of hundreds of school districts actively implementing IAQ management programs. For the campaign, we developed cutting-edge tools, like a Change Package, highlighting key, field-tested strategies that school districts can implement to achieve measurable results to improve learning environments. This change campaign was showcased at the past two Symposia and now forms the underpinning for EPA’s entire schools program.

Our Success

Cadmus’ work to support our clients in promoting healthy learning environments has had a huge impact at the national level. Close to 5,000 school district personnel, education advocates, local government officials, and school facility leaders have attended the IAQ Symposium over the last 7 years. This represents 520 school districts (including 9 of the 10 largest districts in the nation) and 24,000 school buildings (27% of the national public school buildings), and affects the learning environments of almost 16 million students (31% of public school students). Seventy-eight districts have been recognized with the National Excellence and National Model of Sustained Excellence Awards, EPA’s highest school-based honor. The national change campaign has produced 7 nationally recognized, award-winning faculty school districts who are mentoring hundreds of other districts across the nation. Through the Symposium and other outreach venues, Cadmus is proud to help our clients spread the word about the importance of good IAQ in schools and in promoting adoption of the IAQ Tools for Schools program. The 2006 School Health Policies and Programs Study, released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 50% of the nation’s schools have adopted IAQ management practices and, of that 50%, 85% are using the IAQ Tools for Schools program.