Methodology for assessing human health impacts due to pollutants emitted from building materials

• Pollutants are emitted from building materials during the ‘use phase’.
• A method for assessing human health impact due to these pollutants was proposed.
• The method can predict human health impact at building design phase in advance.
• The result of the method was almost identical to that of health risk assessment.
• The methodology is useful to improve the accuracy of life cycle assessment.

Pollutants, which are emitted from building materials during the ‘use phase’, may have significant adverse impacts on human health. This study proposes a methodology for assessing the impacts on human health due to pollutants emitted from building materials during the ‘use phase’. The proposed methodology estimates the amounts of pollutants emitted from building materials by applying the emission factors measured by chamber tests to the emission models. Then, the human health impacts are derived by multiplying the intake fraction and human health effect factors by the amount of pollutants emitted from building materials. In case study, the human carcinogenic potential (HCP) (6.74E-05 casecan) calculated by the proposed methodology was almost identical to the HCP (6.80E-05 casecan) calculated by the health risk assessment. It turns out that the proposed methodology is capable of producing reasonable results. The proposed methodology can be expected to assess the human health impacts of buildings more accurately in LCA. In addition, the proposed methodology will be useful to improving the indoor environment of buildings because it can predict the impacts on human health during the building design phase.