CO in indoor environments: From environmental and health risk to potential renewable carbon source.

In the developed world, individuals spend most of their time indoors. Poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has a wide range of effects on human health. The burden of disease associated with indoor air accounts for millions of premature deaths related to exposure to Indoor Air Pollutants (IAPs). Among them, CO is the most common one, and is commonly used as a metric of IAQ. Indoor CO concentrations can be significantly higher than outdoors due to human metabolism and activities. Even in presence of ventilation, controlling the CO concentration below the Indoor Air Guideline Values (IAGVs) is a challenge, and many indoor environments including schools, offices and transportation exceed the recommended value of 1000 ppm. This is often accompanied by high concentration of other pollutants, including bio-effluents such as viruses, and the importance of mitigating the transmission of airborne diseases has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the relatively high CO concentration of indoor environments presents a thermodynamic advantage for direct air capture (DAC) in comparison to atmospheric CO concentration. This review aims to describe the issues associated with poor IAQ, and to demonstrate the potential of indoor CO DAC to purify indoor air while generating a renewable carbon stream that can replace conventional carbon sources as a building block for chemical production, contributing to the circular economy.