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10. 11. 2016

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What is the smell of new?

Tags: Indoor emissions

The growing awareness of the importance of leading a healthy lifestyle leads increasingly us to pay a high attention to the quality of what we introduce in our body especially considering food.
If the attention towards food is undoubtedly very high, there is, however, less awareness of the importance of the quality of air. But if we do some simple calculations, we can easily notice that every day we introduce in our bodies about twelve thousand litres of air, that in one year equals to more than four million litres being, roughly speaking, the volume of two Olympic swimming pools .

We know that air is primarily made up of nitrogen, oxygen and other gases (carbon dioxide, argon, etc.) but there are also substances deriving from different sources and that can greatly affect its quality.

A particularly important aspect in this regard relates to the evidence that most of our daily lives, more than 90% according to some studies, is spent inside buildings (homes, offices, schools, hospitals, etc.). Therefore special attention should be paid to indoor air quality considering that the same is influenced both by the materials that surround us and by our daily activities like cooking, cleaning, personal hygiene, etc.

On these issues ISPRA (the Italian Institute for the Protection and Environmental Research), has recently organized a work-shops involving important Italian institutions such as ENEA, the National Institute of Health, the Ministry of Environment, the University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and the University La Sapienza.

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