Effects of Phone Booths' Composition on Health and Development of the Composition Definition Process

Abstract

Open-plan offices have become popular in the recent decades and along with the popularity, noise has become a general problem in the offices around the world. Framery Oy, the case company of this thesis, manufactures phone booths that are being offered as a solution to the noise problem in open-plan offices. The case company has faced demands from the customers to have knowledge about what materials and substances the phone booths are composed of. To fulfill this demand the company has recognized that it needs Health Product Declaration (HPD) documents for their products. In practice these documents declare what materials and substances compose the phone booths.

This thesis studies what are the materials that compose the phone booths, how the composition determination process could be developed, do some of the materials cause hazards for the health of the end user and is there any alternatives for these hazardous materials. As a result the composition of the booths was recognized, a generalized process model was developed to help define the material composition of a product, two different possibly hazardous materials were recognized and few less hazardous alternatives were found for these two different materials.