Sick-building syndrome: Reduced problem-solving ability by rising CO² levels

When CO² levels surpasses 1400, you start to feel your concentration slip and when you start feeling tired.

Most of us already experienced a situation where CO² levels surpasses 1400 (ppm). You start to feel your concentration slip and when you start feeling tired.

This is a result of the increasing CO² levels. Meeting rooms or offices that are not properly ventilated will surpass this threshold every day and cause a 50% reduction in productivity.

It is result of the choice of the employer to provide cheap OR healthy working environments.

As humans breath out, we exhale concentrations of 30.000 ppm CO². When breathing indoor, indoor CO² levels rise rapidly because of us.

As we keep breathing the indoor CO² levels keep rising. When levels of 950 CO² are reached, our productivity and problem-solving effectiveness is reduced with 15%. We will make 15% more errors, causing us to loose even more time resolving the errors we created due to poor air quality.

This is why ventilation of indoor spaces is so critical to keep our own productivity and those our children in the schools at it highest levels. Lower CO² levels basically means better scores.

In meeting rooms conditions change the fastest because there are more people in a smaller air bubble. In most meeting rooms CO² levels will quickly surpass the 1400 ppm threshold, meaning that we become 50% less effective at problem-solving.

Wanna learn more:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548274/
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.1510037#r39