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Do You Work in an Office?
Good indoor air quality depends on the actions of everyone in the building. Learn more about what you can do.
Read "An Office Building Occupant's Guide to Indoor Air Quality"
Air inside public and commercial office buildings contains a wide variety of pollutants that can build up and possibly affect the health of people working there. Indoor air problems have the potential to affect the health of many people and significantly reduce productivity.
Early research of the indoor air quality, or IAQ, of office buildings in the United States focused on evaluating problem buildings where occupants had significant complaints about the IAQ. However, such problem buildings could not be compared because there was very little baseline IAQ information about typical buildings.
To fill this data gap, EPA conducted the Building Assessment Survey and Evaluation (BASE) study. The BASE study used a standardized protocol to collect extensive indoor air quality data from 100 randomly selected public and commercial office buildings in 37 cities and 25 states.
This website, outlined below, describes in detail the BASE study, data, highlighted analyses, original data for independent examination, and more.
Contents:
Basic Information and Overview: This section provides a basic description of the study, its goals and objectives, and the information collected.
Methodology: The BASE study was conducted using a standardized protocol. A description of the seven basic activities performed for each of the study buildings is provided here.
Summarized Data: Summaries of select information collected from the 100 BASE buildings studied are available here.
Highlighted Analysis: The data collected provide normative information on several parameters which can be used for further assessment and analysis of IAQ-related issues. Highlighted here are summaries and results of assessments and analyses performed on the BASE data.
Frequent Questions: We have provided answers to what we consider some of the probable frequently asked questions regarding this study.
How to Obtain Data: We have provided a means which will allow independent examination and analysis of the data and to allow for hypothesis development the raw data collected as part of the BASE study.
Publications: The protocol, quality assurance plan, and other supporting study documentation as well as publications describing the study and summarizing select study results are available here.
Glossary: We have provided definitions for some BASE-specific terminology used throughout the study.
Related Links: Links to selected sites with information related to indoor air quality in the office environment are provided here.