When people consider the safety of a room, they generally think about the surfaces and objects around them, yet the greater threat to health floats unseen in the atmosphere itself, prompting three organisations to join forces and change that.
RESET, The Safer Air Project and the Public Health Action Network (PHAN) announced this month an international collaboration to build the RESET Safer Air Accessibility Index (RSAAI), a tool designed to make the safety of indoor air, including any air cleaning technology in use, visible for the first time.
Indoor air quality is an urgent public health priority, given that many pathogens and pollutants travel through the air and most exposure happens indoors, where ventilation is often inadequate or mismatched to the space.
The Australian Centre for Disease Control identifies air quality in buildings as a core public health issue – linking it to respiratory disease, inflammation, infectious disease, heart disease, cancer and premature death – and confirms that the risk extends to people without existing chronic conditions.
Plum Stone, CEO and founder of The Safer Air Project, points to the amount of time people spend indoors as the reason the initiative matters. “People shouldn’t have to become indoor air experts,” says Stone. She explains that people living with chronic health conditions or disability face greater consequences from poor indoor air, and that the RSAAI aims to give everyone the information needed to judge whether a space suits them.
A single score for every layer of protection
Despite the health risks tied to poor indoor air quality, no simple method exists for checking whether the air in a given room is safe to breathe. Carbon dioxide readings offer a useful proxy for ventilation rates and infection risk, but once a space adds air cleaning technology, that measurement only tells part of the story, without a way to show what the technology achieves for the room’s safety and accessibility. Particulate matter readings carry the same limitations. A portable air cleaner can remove viral aerosols from low ambient particulate levels without moving the reading at all, while the room grows safer.
The RSAAI aims to close that information gap with a single score combining every layer of protection in a space: natural and mechanical ventilation, filtration, portable air cleaners and air disinfection technologies, showing how much safer a room is than an unventilated baseline.
Stanton Wong, executive director of RESET Standard, explains that buildings have grown sophisticated when it comes to cleaning indoor air while occupant information lags behind. “Our role is to develop transparent, data-driven methods,” says Wong, adding that the RSAAI will build on RESET’s existing Viral Index framework to create a shared way of communicating how accessible healthy indoor air is within a space.
Tarz Ludwigsen, CEO and founder of PHAN, says supporting the RSAAI represents a direct investment in making risk visible and something people and institutions can act on. “We’re creating a clearer way for people to understand the air they share,” says Ludwigsen.
The initiative reflects a shared commitment across the three organisations to treat clean indoor air as a matter of environmental accessibility, recognising that cleaner air can reduce health risks and make shared spaces safer and accessible for everyone.
Making the numbers mean something for facility managers
ISSA senior director Dr Gavin Macgregor-Skinner says the move toward a single index carries real weight, because modern buildings – built tightly for energy efficiency – lose natural ventilation and let pollutants build up, while indoor air metrics stay siloed across ventilation rates, filtration ratings, humidity, particle counts and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). He says air cleaning has operated for years as an unregulated add-on, and that a single index brings accountability, forcing evidence of both efficacy and safety, instead of allowing air cleaning to remain a marketing claim. “Most people have no idea how clean and safe their indoor air is,” says Macgregor-Skinner.
He also mentions ISSA’s Making Safer Choices program, which deploys 320 IAQ monitors across buildings, as evidence of how large the translation problem has become. Each pollutant, from carbon dioxide to VOCs, carries its own measurement unit, health basis and acceptable threshold, and none of those measures is designed to work with the others, leaving facility managers without a simple way to answer whether a room is safe at any given moment.
Macgregor-Skinner says facility managers need the ability to calculate whether a combination of ventilation, filtration and air cleaning meets a defined target for a space and its occupancy type, and that documenting an upgrade such as a MERV-13 filter installation proves an input has occurred, not that measured conditions such as particulate levels or carbon dioxide have improved during full occupancy.
He concludes that occupants tend to judge air quality by smell, temperature or a sense of stuffiness instead of actual contaminant levels, and that ambiguous or absent communication about known air quality issues gets read as concealment after the fact, undermining trust and the case for future investment in effective measures.
