The Danish Sustainable Museum Storage Project

In the project ""Sustainable Museum Storage"", supported by the Danish Ministry of Culture (SLKS), six modern low-energy storage facilities for museums, archives and libraries in Denmark are examined for their conservation quality and environmental footprint. The project has a broad focus, including life cycle analysis of the buildings, the operation's energy consumption and the indoor climate and air quality performance. As the project is underway (2024-2025), the results are provisional. Here we present the first results for indoor environmental monitoring. In summary, we observe that although only two out of the six facilities use gaseous air filtration, the level of indoor air pollution is surprisingly low everywhere, despite all being very airtight buildings and with a high load of potentially emitting objects inside (mainly collection items). We attribute this to the fact that the storage temperatures are lower than in normal room conditions, as well as the possible air-purifying effect of mechanical humidity control. The latter is an unexpected but nonetheless positive side effect of using desiccant wheel dehumidifiers, which can remove acids from the air in the same process as removing moisture. The infiltration of outdoor air pollutants is low at all six facilities; we attribute this to the design of the buildings and their low air exchange rate. A summer period monitoring campaign is underway at the time of writing and the results will be ready for presentation at IAQ2024. This project is a continuation of earlier work reported by Ryhl-Svendsen et al. 2012, and Ryhl-Svendsen & Smedemark 2024.