Healthy, sustainable buildings are those that create high quality indoor environments while minimizing their impacts on the outdoor environment. But achieving both can be a challenging goal.

Guidance on how to do so will be presented at the ASHRAE conference, IAQ 2007 Healthy and Sustainable Buildings, which will be held October 15-17, 2007, in Baltimore. The conference will bring together a diverse set of stakeholders including researchers, policy makers, owners, designers, developers, builders, and those who commission and operate buildings, as well as IAQ investigators and remediation, to address these questions.

"The issues of healthy and sustainable buildings are cyclical and interdependent," Lawrence J. Schoen, P.E., chair of the conference said. "Buildings not only impact the indoor environment but they have an impact on the outside environment. Our goal in creating healthy buildings should be to create indoor environments where people are healthy and productive but that minimize impact on the environment."

The conference will emphasize the measured performance of healthy and sustainable buildings and practical methods for their design, construction, operation and maintenance, according to Schoen.

For more information, contact ASHRAE Technical Services at IAQ2007@ashrae.org or www.iaq2007.org.