[kemaru]

The problem with the current EU-wide rating system is that it assumes the interior is ventilated as required by other regulations. Furniture materials are assigned an emission class (E0, E1, E2) based on the steady-state VOC concentration in the test chamber (EN 717-1 and others).

Virtually no home manages to hit the minimums for ventilation (25 m³/h per person, IIRC), especially during winter. So even though an E1-class particle board is labeled as safe with regards to VOC emissions, in practice the room will reach far higher pollution levels than that category allows.

It also doesn't control for the amount of material present, so you can have a small properly ventilated room covered floor to ceiling with E1 particle board furniture, but achieve E2 or worse VOC levels in the air.

Backstory: former employer spent $$ to integrate a VOC sensor into their residential HVAC/HRV solution. The idea was to increase ventilation when odors are present and reduce ventilation when the air was clean again. The engineer prototyped and tested the device in their pre-war home (brick, stone, old wood). All good. They had the first batch manufactured and sent out to customers in brand new homes full of modern materials (engineered wood, vinyl flooring etc). The sensors were permanently saturated (reading maximum VOC value) and the project ended up being canceled, because newly built homes were their entire customer base.