Hello.Please explain why the guidelines for air pollutants concentrations are higher in an indoor environment than in an outdoor environment.Like in case of PM10, 50µg/m3 (24-hr mean) for indoor (WHO, 2005& 2010) and 45 µg/m3 (24-hour) for outdoor (WHO, 2021).Same for CO, 7 µg/m3 (for 24 hours) for outdoor (WHO, 2021) and 7 mg/m3 (for 24 hours) for indoor (WHO, 2005 & 2010).Kindly elaborate with some supporting documents. Thank you.e air pollutants' (PM10, PM2.5, CO, etc.) concentration guidelines (like WHO, EPA, Singapore, etc.) higher indoors than outdoors?
Hello.
Please explain why the guidelines for air pollutants concentrations are higher in an indoor environment than in an outdoor environment.
Like in case of PM10, 50µg/m3 (24-hr mean) for indoor (WHO, 2005& 2010) and 45 µg/m3 (24-hour) for outdoor (WHO, 2021).
Same for CO, 7 µg/m3 (for 24 hours) for outdoor (WHO, 2021) and 7 mg/m3 (for 24 hours) for indoor (WHO, 2005 & 2010).
As we are spending our majority of the time (80 to 90 %) in an indoor environment, and indoor environment are believed to be less polluted compared to outdoor environment in common belief so air pollutants guidelines must be lesser in indoor compared to outdoor environment.
Kindly elaborate with some supporting documents. Thank you.
The explanation may be quite simple - the date of publication of these guidelines is distant in time by more than 15 years. For outdoor air, they have been published recently. For indoor air the guidelines are from 2005 and may be revised soon. I am a member of ISIAQ (International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Qlimate) https://www.isiaq.org/. One of our scientific committees has prepared the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) guidelines database. More information can be found at the links https://ieqguidelines.org/
https://ieqguidelines.org/table.html
I hope these data will be of help to you. Regards, Amelia
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