Air Quality Matters

This week, we sit down with Lisa Greenfield, Regional Programme Manager for the Midwest at the Centre for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about educational environments: What if the single biggest barrier to transforming school air quality isn't our lack of scientific knowledge or technology—but our complete failure to recognise that schools need practical roadmaps, peer networks, and trusted voices who've walked the path before to turn good intentions into real world action?

Coming from a family of educators and having spent almost 20 years in the classroom herself, Lisa brings a deeply personal perspective to this work. After developing allergic asthma from mold exposure in her own classroom, and later experiencing long COVID that kept her out of teaching for three months, she left the profession to make a bigger impact. Now she's building the infrastructure to help hundreds of school districts across the United States navigate the complex journey toward healthier indoor environments.

Key Topics Discussed:

The Fellowship Network: The Centre for Green Schools is launching its largest cohort yet, bringing on 53 fellows from public school districts across the country. These aren't consultants or outside experts. They're facilities managers, finance directors, operations staff, and district leaders who will learn together, implement the Energy Efficiency Indoor Air Quality Toolkit, and become mentors for the next wave. The goal is simple. Build a peer network where schools that have already navigated this journey can guide those just starting out. Because nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. They just need someone to hold their hand and show them what good looks like.

The Stakeholder Ecosystem: Improving school air quality requires buy in from decision makers like superintendents and school boards, implementers like facilities managers, the teachers and staff who work in those buildings every day, the students who spend up to 10 hours breathing that air, and the parents who can become powerful advocates. Each group sees the problem through a different lens. But when you frame it properly, fiscal savings from reduced absenteeism, lower health insurance premiums, improved test scores, better teacher retention, the case becomes compelling across every stakeholder group.

Schools as Workplaces: We often talk about children in schools, but teachers spend entire careers in these buildings. One in 13 students has asthma. But teachers are the ones who may develop COPD, allergic asthma, or long term respiratory illness from decades of exposure. Lisa's story is not uncommon. Too many educators have gotten sick from mold, poor ventilation, or chronic pathogen exposure. These are workplaces. Employers have a responsibility to provide safe environments. Yet air quality is rarely treated with the same urgency as fire safety, water quality, or food standards.

The Funding Reality: American schools face a $90 billion annual funding gap. They are the second largest infrastructure in the nation after roads and highways. Most school funding comes from local real estate taxes, which creates massive inequity. Title I schools, rural districts, and tribal schools often lack the resources for preventative maintenance, let alone major HVAC upgrades. But here's the thing. You don't need to overhaul an entire system on day one. Start with ventilation and filtration. Measure what's happening. Make small changes. Be transparent. Show progress. The roadmap exists. The toolkit is free. The support network is being built. Funding often follows when expectations are set and schools demonstrate genuine effort.

GUEST:

Lisa Greenfield

Regional Programme Manager, Centre for Green Schools, US Green Building Council

https://centerforgreenschools.org/

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Mann + Hummel https://www.mann-hummel.com/en.html

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Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

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Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

This week, we sit down with David Gottfried, co-founder of the US Green Building Council and founder of the World Green Building Council, a movement now spanning 85 countries that has ignited a trillion-dollar green building economy.

What if the single biggest barrier to transforming the built environment isn't our lack of scientific knowledge or technology—but our complete failure to recognise that green building, while extraordinarily successful, is still just putting solar panels on the Titanic unless we fundamentally rewire how civilisation values life itself? Key Topics Discussed: • The Unlikely Origins of a Movement: It's easy now with hindsight to forget just how unlikely the green building effort was back then.

The idea that buildings could be designed, constructed and operated in ways that meaningfully reduced environmental impact was not a given. David walked into rooms as an early green building consultant and faced the same three developer questions every time. Will it slow my project down? Will it cost more? Will it even work?

The movement spent years fighting that perception, proving that green buildings could be more profitable, lower risk, and deliver better performance.

• From Green to Regenerative: Green building has become a multi-trillion dollar global movement. We have rating systems in 181 countries. We've saved monstrous amounts of energy. But the slope of climate change is still steep. CO2 is at 430 ppm when scientists say don't go past 350. Global population is 8.2 billion headed to 10.

A billion people still have no electricity, no fresh water. Countries are dropping bombs. AI is consuming electricity at an exponential rate. Green building is flattening the curve, but it's not reversing it. We need to move beyond sustainability, which is neutral, and embrace regeneration. If you're 500 pounds overweight and you change your diet to be neutral, you're going to be 500 pounds till you die. We need to lose weight. We need to regenerate.

• The Architecture of Love and the Codes for Life: David's new book, Regen360, synthesises decades of experience, 200 conversations with AI, 2,600 pages of transcripts, and a lifetime of reflection into 15 fundamental codes for regenerative civilisation. Each code is distilled into a simple equation. If it destroys life, then it is false. Truth equals oxygen. Love equals regeneration. Wealth equals health on planet Earth. These aren't abstract philosophies. They're operational frameworks for rewiring capitalism, governance, technology and human behaviour. The book is David's last lecture, his modern elder contribution, interwoven with personal stories, memoir, and a call to action for the next generation.

• The Role of AI and the Next Generation: David used AI, specifically ChatGPT and Claude, as thought partners to synthesise his ideas, challenge his assumptions, and structure the book. AI can be the differentiator of governance, helping us move from the hot amygdala survival wiring to the smart prefrontal cortex. But AI also consumes electricity and CO2. The tool is phenomenal, but it creates externalities. The book is written for everyone, but especially for college students, the next generation who will inherit this mess. David is teaching sustainable finance at Stanford next spring, but he'll be talking to the soul in the student. He's sorry for the world his generation is handing over, but he's here to help, with tools, maps, compasses, and Regen Circles to create base camps for the change agents climbing the mountain of Earth.

GUEST: David Gottfried https://regen360.net/

Author, Regen360: An Operating System for Regenerative Earth

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

MANN +HUMMEL https://www.mann-hummel.com/en.html

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/) Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website.

This week, we dive into a fascinating study published in Railway Engineering Science titled Study on Air Quality Improvements in Train Compartments by Coordinating Exhaust of Multiple Air Outlets, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about ventilation in mass transit: What if the single biggest barrier to protecting passengers on high speed trains isn't our lack of technology—but our complete failure to recognise that static, one size fits all ventilation systems can never deliver both thermal comfort and effective infection control across changing seasons?

Key Topics Discussed:

The Physics of Human Thermal Plumes: Most modern trains pump fresh conditioned air in from vents in the ceiling. But where does that stale air go? Usually it's exhausted through vents down near the floor. This study used CFD modelling to look at what happens if we rethink that. What if we coordinate exhaust at both the top and the bottom of the carriage? Human bodies create thermal plumes. We are basically 100-watt heaters and warm air naturally rises off us, carrying our exhaled breath upwards. In the summer, when the air conditioning is trying to cool the cabin, if you exhaust the air entirely from the top of the carriage, like near the luggage racks, you are working with that natural thermal plume. The hot, polluted air rises off the passengers and gets sucked right out of the top vents. The study found this significantly improves the cooling efficacy and efficiency. You aren't forcing hot air down past passengers to reach the floor vents. It also clears out pollutants near the passengers' breathing zones much faster.

The Winter Problem: In the winter, the scenario flips. You're trying to heat the cabin. If you pull all the air out from the top vents, you are just sucking all that nice buoyant warm air straight out of the roof before it reaches the passengers, leaving their feet freezing. It creates massive temperature stratification and makes people incredibly uncomfortable. The study found that in winter, a 50 50 split using both the top and the bottom exhaust provides the best balance. The bottom exhaust pulls the warm air down to feet level, maintaining thermal comfort, while the top exhaust still helps capture the rising respiratory pollutants.

The End of Static Ventilation Design: This proves that static one size fits all vent designs is dead. You cannot have a ventilation system that operates the exact same way in January as it does in July and expect optimal results for both comfort and importantly infection control. We need dynamic systems. If you want to truly manage the risk of airborne transmission in mass transit, while simultaneously hitting our net zero energy efficiency targets, train manufacturers and frankly designers of any large, densely occupied space, need to implement variable exhaust systems that adapt to the season, the thermal load and the occupancy.

The Future of Mass Transit Ventilation: It's a brilliant example of how nuanced, targeted and responsive our ventilation strategies need to become to protect public health in the built environment, especially technical ones like trains. You can imagine the exact same thinking being applied to buses, to aeroplanes and so on. This is the frontier of mass transit air quality management.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40534-025-00398-0

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/)

Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

This week, I step back from the interviews to share a personal reflection on a question that has been nagging at me for some time, sparked by recent encounters with dubious manufacturer claims, the fallout from a prominent Cambridge professor scandal, and my own complicity in wielding peer review as a weapon against innovation: What if the single biggest barrier to progress in air quality and the built environment isn't a lack of good ideas or new technology—but our complete failure to recognise that the gold standard we use to validate truth, peer review itself, is fundamentally broken and built on sand?

Key Topics Discussed:

The Ideal Versus the Reality: In theory, peer review is the guardian of rigorous science. Experts with time and resources deeply interrogate methodology, check references, and provide robust feedback. Papers that genuinely move the field forward are accepted. But the mechanical reality of 2026 is very different. Manuscript submissions have exponentially outpaced the pool of available reviewers. Academics are trapped in a publish or perish hamster wheel. Peer review is unpaid, unrecognised, and unrewarded. Studies suggest just 10% of reviewers handle almost 50% of the global peer review workload. When you have a small pool of incredibly time poor reviewers who are fundamentally overwhelmed, corners get cut.

The Business Model Problem: Over the last decade, there has been a massive shift towards open access and article processing charges. Publishers now make money based on volume, not subscription exclusivity. When authors or institutions pay upwards of two to four thousand pounds to publish a single paper, the publisher is financially incentivised to publish more, not publish better. This environment has given rise to paper mills, highly sophisticated profit driven organisations that manufacture fake or desperately low quality research and sell authorships to desperate academics who need to meet publication quotas.

The AI Closed Loop: Paper mills are using generative AI at industrial scale to produce convincing fake papers that slip past exhausted human reviewers. In response to burnout, an increasing number of time poor scholars are using AI to read papers and write their peer reviews. We are rapidly approaching a closed loop where an AI writes a substandard paper to meet a human's academic quota, submits it to a profit driven journal, and another AI reviews and accepts it on behalf of a burned out human reviewer. The fundamental human element, the actual peer in peer review, is being automated out of existence.

The Consequences for Our Field: In air quality, health and the built environment, bad data passing as peer reviewed science or misleading claims backed up by pseudoscientific marketing has real world consequences. It leads to bad public policy, misallocation of millions of pounds of funding, inadequate ventilation standards, poor building performance and ultimately public harm. We cannot afford a foundation built on sand. We need to rethink the metrics of academic success, recognise peer review as core scholarly labour that needs compensation, and create alternative pathways for validating independent innovation. If we know the traditional peer review monopoly is struggling, we cannot lazily dismiss independent lab data simply because it doesn't carry a specific journal's logo.

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/)

Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

This week, we dive into a comprehensive review published in the Science of the Total Environment titled Integration of Air Quality Monitoring Systems with Hybrid Electric Vehicles for Emissions Control in Smart Cities, to explore a question that fundamentally challenges how we think about urban air pollution: What if the single biggest opportunity to tackle air quality in our cities isn't just making vehicles cleaner—but transforming them into intelligent, mobile monitoring networks that actively adapt their behavior based on real-time pollution data

Key Topics Discussed:

Adaptive Green Zones: Currently, hybrid cars are incredibly smart internally. They switch between internal combustion engine and battery based on efficiency, charge levels, and acceleration. But they are completely blind to environmental conditions outside the windshield. Imagine integrating a miniaturised air quality monitoring system into the car using IoT sensors and vehicle to everything communication. If a smart vehicle drives into a heavily polluted urban zone, say outside a school at drop off time or a congested city centre, the onboard AI reads the local air quality data and automatically forces the car to switch entirely to battery power. It shuts off the combustion engine. It stops contributing to the local pollution hotspot instantly.

AI Driven Eco Routing: By linking up with smart city infrastructure and using machine learning, these vehicles can use AI driven eco routing. Your GPS wouldn't just find the faster route. It could find a route that minimises your exposure to highly polluted areas, spreading the traffic load and protecting the occupants inside the cabin. It turns the vehicle from a passive polluter into an active dynamic participant in urban air quality management.

The Technical Hurdles: It's not as simple as strapping a sensor to a bumper. We need incredibly robust, low cost sensors that don't lose their calibration every time a car goes over a pothole or experiences a shift in humidity. There's a massive communication challenge. Do we use 5G or DSRC? The latency has to be milliseconds for cars to communicate effectively. And then there's data privacy. Tracking a car's location, speed, and the air it's driven through raises questions. We need standardised, highly secure cryptographic protocols so that data can be shared with city infrastructure without compromising driver privacy.

The Future of Urban Air Quality Management: This is the frontier. The future of clean air isn't just about sticking static expensive reference sensors on a few lampposts around the city. It's about leveraging the millions of vehicles already on the road, turning them into dynamic moving networks of data that physically alter how our cities operate in real time. It's a huge technical challenge, but the payoff for urban health could be transformative.

A comprehensive review on the integration of air quality monitoring systems with hybrid electric vehicles for emission control in smart cities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.180022

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Lindab (https://www.lindab.ie/) - S&P UK (https://www.solerpalau.com/en-uk/)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) - Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast) - Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - iE Electronics (https://www.eielectronics.ie/) and iAir Group (https://iair-group.com/)

Zehnder https://www.zehndergroup.com/en

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.