EU Policies on Indoor Air Quality

Indoor air quality (IAQ) in non working spaces has being deserved a growing attention in EU, particularly, since the 80's. Nevertheless quite some time was needed before IAQ could be recognized as a public health issue. It was only recently that EU adopted several initiatives to the improvement of IAQ under Action 12 of the EU Environment and Health Action Plan 2004-2012. This Action contains two key elements: addressing environmental tobacco smoke (ETS); and developing ways and means to respond to other factors affecting IAQ (dampness, mould, building materials, consumer products, activities indoors, etc.). As far as the exposure to ETS is concerned, two main policy actions were put in place. Activities on ETS are now taken forward, mostly ETS banning in an increasing number of Member States. If the more general issue is how to best deal with the indoor environment as a whole, successive new EU policies on construction products, consumer products, energy performance of buildings and on chemicals refer to IAQ issues suggesting that they could, and probably should, contribute to the IAQ policy development and reinforcement. This integrated vision and approach was one of the conclusions of EnVIE, a project on the formulation of IAQ Policies, which came out with the proposal that the aforementioned policies should be seen as elements of a coherent and holistic IAQ strategy to reduce the public health effects of the indoor air pollution and of the air pollution in general. The present contribution gives particular attention to EnVIE as a major exercise of policy definition for IAQ which hopefully may shortly give origin to a EU Green Paper on IAQ.