IAQ audit of BioOrg vs conventional cleaning products at a BMW Facility

BMW Jorssen

Conventional cleaning products are a routine part of building maintenance, but they come with a less visible side effect — the solvents and volatile organic compounds many of them contain can degrade the air quality of the spaces they're meant to keep clean. BioOrg, a Belgian biotech company, developed a probiotic cleaning alternative — the Biofilter — on the premise that biology can do the job chemistry has been doing, without the same impact on indoor air. To put that to a credible test, BMW brought in Airscan as an independent auditor to measure how the two approaches actually compared inside one of their facilities.

The Brief

BMW needed an independent, structured evaluation of how BioOrg’s probiotic Biofilter performed relative to conventional cleaning products in terms of impact on indoor air quality — specifically indoor dust concentrations — across a working facility with real operational variables in play.

What We Did

Airscan developed a tailor-made sampling plan for the facility, designating a combination of test rooms — cleaned with BioOrg products — and control rooms using conventional cleaning, with both indoor and outdoor measurements taken across all locations. The plan accounted for the specific conditions of the site: proximity to a national highway, activity from the car workshop, daily occupancy levels, and other factors that could introduce variability into the readings. That level of planning was what allowed the results to be attributable to the cleaning product rather than background noise from the building’s environment.

How It Works

Comparing test and control rooms within the same building, over the same period, under documented site conditions is the methodological foundation that makes findings like these defensible. With enough variables controlled for, the difference in air quality data between the BioOrg rooms and the conventionally cleaned rooms can be read with reasonable confidence as a product effect rather than circumstance. The same dataset also yields information about the building itself — how the HVAC system is distributing air, where concentrations are building up, and where operational adjustments would make a difference.

Outcomes

The comparison between test and control rooms produced clear data on how BioOrg’s Biofilter performed relative to conventional cleaning in terms of indoor dust concentration. Beyond the product evaluation, the dataset surfaced several optimisation opportunities in the facility’s HVAC operation and weekly cleaning schedule — adjustments that BMW could implement to maintain the best achievable air quality in the building on an ongoing basis.

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