There are 12 and 39 officially announced premises that shall meet Indoor Air Quality Act for the first and the second batch respectively in Pingtung County. All of the preceding announced premises have installed dedicated personnel, determined an indoor air quality maintenance and management plan and performed regular analyses and results reporting. Some of the officially announced premises which are closed temporarily because of the COVID-19 pandemic haven’t performed regular analyses. They are allowed to postpone the deadline until they reopen and this project will remind them to perform regular analyses and results reporting as soon as possible. Therefore, none of officially announced premises has failed to implement any task within the statutory limitation period and the percentage of regulatory compliance is 100%.
This project has inspected 162 public or private premises including 12 and 38 officially announced premises for the first and the second batch respectively and 112 non-announced premises and executed 1181 times of inspection testing using the direct reading instruments. The incidences of instant high value while inspection testing for CO2, CO, HCHO, TVOC, PM2.5 and PM10 are 4.6%, 0%, 34.6%, 0.2%, 19.2% and 10.6% respectively for this year. Compared with incidences of 2020, only the incidence of HCHO increased by 12.8％ and the others were descending. This year some premises increased the frequency of cleaning and sanitizing with cleansing alcohol due to the epidemic so that the electrochemical formaldehyde direct reading instrument was interfered indirectly and the instant high values followed. It caused the increasing trend in incidences of instant high value of formaldehyde while inspection testing. For that reason, this project used a formaldehyde highly selective instrument to confirm if the premises mentioned above exists HCHO pollution source or not. Furthermore, most of premises were naturally ventilated during opening hours due to COVID-19 pandemic and we founded that the instant high values of PM2.5, PM10 were detected while outdoor air quality was poor. However, premises that need to use air conditioners such as kindergartens, hospitals, childcare centers, fitness studios, study rooms in library etc., most of whom did not maintain enough amount of indoor ventilation rates, were detected with instant high values of CO2.
As regards the promotion of indoor air quality maintenance and management system, we have comprehensively guided 27 premises to determine their indoor air quality maintenance and management plans and tracked 40 premises that maintenance and management plans already established to confirm document contents, 27 of which did not match current situation and the project team help them revise their maintenance and management plans.
With respect to the inspection analyses of indoor air quality standards, 10 key premises were chosen to complete the analyses. There are two premises that fail to comply with the Indoor Air Quality Standards this year. One is Pingtung County Library whose Fungi concentration (2,124 CFU/m3) exceeded the standard value (1,000 CFU/m3 and I/O ratio > 1.3), and the other is Sunflower Nursing Home whose bacteria concentration (1,783CFU/m3) exceeded the standard value (1,500 CFU/m3). This team has guided the above-mentioned premises to find out the pollution sources and recommended them to improve indoor sanitization frequency. In addition, on the basis of the statistical analyses of the inspection analyses of indoor air quality standards over the past few years, pass rates of the carbon dioxide and bacteria analyses declined after the second batch premises were officially announced. The main reason causing the decline is that the environmental protection bureau selected sampling sites for inspection analyses more strictly by enforcing testing in the highly contaminated potential areas during high customer flow hours based on the Indoor Air Quality Analysis Management Regulations for Officially Announced Premises. 15 announced premises that exceeded indoor air quality standards all made improvements within a limited time period and passed the retesting.
As regards the promotion of the self-management mark of indoor air quality (i.e., IAQ self-management mark), this year the project team established inter-bureau guiding mechanism through county government’s Air Pollution Reduction Committee meeting and cooperated with other competent authorities to counsel various types of premises to apply the mark. Furthermore, we assisted the environmental protection bureau in holding a guidance workshop and introduced the self-management mark policy to competent authorities and also collaborated with the Department of Social Affairs and the Long-Term Care Management Center to disseminate mark policy in their meetings. A total of 30 IAQ self-management marks were issued by the bureau this year, 5 and 24 of which were grade excellent and good respectively for officially announced premises. This project also guided a non-announced premises to acquire the mark of good grade.
