Sustainability

Why is maintaining indoor air quality a sustainability challenge?  With winter temperatures often below -30°C (-22°F) and summer temperatures frequently above 35°C (85°F), the North American climate can only be described as extreme. To maintain an adequate and economical work environment, modern buildings are as airtight as possible. The upside of being airtight is a limit to the cost of heating or cooling the space while providing a comfortable work space for the occupants. The downside of being airtight is that any pollutants arising within the space - from building materials, activities or the occupants themselves - may accumulate. This accumulation of pollutants can influence the enjoyment, productivity, and potentially the health of the occupants in that space.

To avoid the build-up of VOCs and other indoor air contaminants, most buildings bring in outside air through a ventilation system to displace a proportion of the inside air. This is the modern equivalent to opening a window. Conditioning the introduced air requires substantial energy and therefore represents a significant cost to the operation of the building. The heating or cooling of this new air means the building manager faces the choice of either allowing the operating cost of the building to increase or allowing indoor air quality to decrease. Under normal operating conditions, between 20 and 30% of the energy consumed by the building is used to condition the outside air required to ventilate the space.

We supply an alternative approach which achieves the desired goal of improving the quality of indoor air, without consuming large sums of resources to treat incoming air.

NEDLAW Living Walls offers a natural solution. Rather than introducing large amounts of so-called fresh air from outside, we incorporate into the building itself the features responsible for making outdoor air fresh in the first place. Basically, dirty air, drawn in from indoor space, makes close contact with the constantly-flowing water within the wall. Pollutants are moved from air to water - all the while improving air quality. Once dissolved into the water, pollutants are attacked by biological components in the wall itself, and are metabolized into a harmless state. It is important to realize that it is the biological components within the wall and not the green plants themselves (which facilitate the process) which are cleaning the air.  The Living Wall has the potential to generate clean indoor air for as little as 10% of the energy required to bring the same amount of outside air into the building during the heat of summer and the cold of winter. Passing the circulating air within the building through a Living Wall is an alternative means of refreshing the indoor air without bringing new expensive outside air into the building.

With the growing concern of climate change and the need to develop sustainable strategies for urban environments, building sustainably means more than just green building materials, construction techniques, and site selection. It also means choosing systems that will create healthier environments using materials and methods that consume less energy than present technology.  The sustainable idea with regards to an active biofilter is to improve the environment within a building while increasing energy savings.