Inside job: Curbing natural gas emissions seen as key to improving indoor air quality
Jul. 15—ANDERSON — Multiple studies in the last 30 years have found that Americans, on average, spend nearly 90% of their time indoors.
Despite dozens of initiatives that have varied in scope and success, that number hasn't changed in a generation. In recent years, though, attention has increased on the issue of the quality of the air people breathe in buildings, where concentrations of pollutants can be two to five times higher than normal outdoor concentrations, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Campaigns by groups including the Sierra Club, the American Lung Association and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) have recently focused on potential adverse health effects that can accompany the use of gas appliances including furnaces, stoves and water heaters.
These appliances, according to a 2019 Sierra Club campaign video, "release invisible but dangerous pollutants that cause asthma and respiratory problems, especially in children."
Cooking and heating with natural gas is getting more scrutiny for its contributions to nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide levels inside the home. As of 2020, about 38% of the country's households used natural gas for cooking, according to census data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
However, efforts by environmental groups to generate legislative action toward regulating gas appliance emissions more strictly have been slow to find traction at both the federal and state levels.
Instead, guidelines in a patchwork of building codes — which often vary from city to city — are frequently relied upon when installing gas stoves.
"If something is a new build or an improvement, you would then get that engineering control to help evacuate any of those combustion byproducts that would be generated from that activity," said Matthew Cook, director of occupational safety and industrial hygiene at Indiana University. "Any significant changes (to mandate tighter regulations) require funding, so it becomes kind of a policy question."
Even in government-funded housing, guidelines can be vague. Carbon monoxide detectors are required in all 132 public housing units in the city of Anderson, according to Kevin Sulc, chief operating officer for the Anderson Housing Authority. The Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority also provides guidance on required standards for interior air quality.
"Most of our appliances are electric," Sulc said. "That's all regulated on the manufacturing side. They have to pass certain ratings on appliances and furnaces and so forth. We follow that like anybody else does."
The Indiana Department of Health oversees an indoor air quality program, confined to schools and state agencies, that responds to complaints about air quality and provides "technical assistance to local health departments in support of their investigations," according to the IDOH website. But the state has no enforceable laws or regulations that address indoor air quality.
The situation is similar at the federal level, where both the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the U.S. Department of Energy are researching ways to curb emissions, strengthen safety standards and provide more tools — including proposed stronger efficiency regulations — to reduce health risks.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is also considering revising its minimum energy standards, which would apply to new construction of all the department's supported housing.
"If updated, these standards would ensure that HUD-assisted and insured housing would have adequate ventilation and not use materials or chemicals that are harmful to residents, improving indoor air quality," said Monica Smith, spokesperson at HUD's Indianapolis field office.
The agency, Smith added, works with public housing authorities across the state to encourage energy efficiency investments and other measures to reduce utility consumption.
While some advocates are focused on moving completely away from gas-fired appliances, experts caution that rapid migration to all-electric devices for cooking and heating carries its own set of unanswered questions.
"Obviously if you're using an electric stove that eliminates (chemical emissions) right at the source, and you're not going to have that potential exposure concern that you would from a gas stove," Cook said. "But the other component to that is burning of fossil fuel versus utilizing an electrical source which may or may not have been originated from fossil fuel generation.
"Is it feasible to expect a change?" he continued. "I don't know. That's more of a policy opinion, and opinions like that can get highly political."
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