A few years ago, indoor air quality barely got a mention in a typical fit-out brief. Now it’s a genuine consideration for a lot of commercial clients, partly driven by wellbeing standards, partly by clients simply wanting healthier buildings for their staff and customers. Wall panels, as one of the largest surface areas in most interiors, are very much part of that conversation, whether specifiers have fully clocked that yet or not.
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What VOC testing actually checks
VOCs, or volatile organic compounds, are chemicals that can be released from certain materials, adhesives and finishes into the air over time. VOC emissions testing checks how much of this off-gassing a product produces, usually against recognised international standards. A product that’s passed this kind of testing is far less likely to contribute to poor indoor air quality once it’s installed and the building is occupied, which matters especially in spaces where people spend long stretches of time, like offices and classrooms.
BREEAM and WELL, explained without the jargon
BREEAM is a widely used sustainability rating system for buildings in the UK, and it includes credits for indoor air quality, with an exemplary tier reserved for products with particularly low VOC emissions. The WELL Building Standard takes a similar idea further, focusing specifically on occupant health and wellbeing, with its own criteria around VOC restrictions that products can be tested against. Neither of these is compulsory on every project, but they’re increasingly requested by clients who want to demonstrate they’ve built healthier spaces, and they’re becoming a genuine differentiator when tendering for certain contracts.
How this affects your specification in practice
If a project is targeting BREEAM or WELL credits, the interior wall panels is one of the details that genuinely matters, not just a box to tick. Some manufacturers can provide products tested to VOC emissions standards, meeting BREEAM’s exemplary criteria, and compliant with WELL’s VOC restriction requirements, which makes them a straightforward option to specify when those credentials are part of the brief. It’s worth building this requirement into the tender documentation early rather than trying to retrofit it once a preferred finish has already been chosen.
The takeaway for specifiers
It’s worth asking any supplier directly whether their products have been tested for VOC emissions and whether they hold any relevant BREEAM or WELL documentation, rather than assuming a sustainable claim on a data sheet means much on its own. A little diligence here goes a long way toward genuinely healthier buildings, not just ones that look good in a sustainability report, and it’s the kind of detail that clients increasingly notice and appreciate when it’s done properly.
Why this is becoming harder to ignore
A few years ago, indoor air quality credentials were a nice to have that mostly showed up on projects with a genuine sustainability mandate. That’s shifting fast. More clients are asking their design teams directly what a building’s VOC performance looks like, partly driven by growing awareness of the link between indoor air quality and everything from concentration levels to long term respiratory health. For specifiers, that means VOC testing and wellbeing credentials are becoming less of a differentiator and more of a baseline expectation, particularly on larger commercial projects where the client has their own environmental or wellbeing policy to satisfy. Getting comfortable with this area of specification now, rather than treating it as an afterthought, is likely to save a fair amount of scrambling on future projects, and it puts a specifier in a stronger position when a client eventually asks the question directly instead of assuming nobody will.
