The inSIGHT Initiative.
An international research and surveillance network studying the infrastructure modern buildings depend on but rarely see, and the hygiene threats tied to it, from a single room to the systems that serve whole cities. Green Drain is proud to support it.
The parts of a building nobody looks at still need looking after.
Cleaning schedules, audits and inspections focus on what is in plain view: counters, floors, hands, equipment. Far less attention goes to what sits behind the walls and under the floor.
That hidden infrastructure, the drainage, wastewater and water systems and the networks linking every room and every building to the next, is part of every modern building, and it rarely gets the same scrutiny. The inSIGHT Initiative was set up to give it sustained, expert attention.
No setting is outside its view. Hospitals and care homes, restaurants and food plants, hotels, schools, airports and stations, homes, and the municipal networks that serve them all fall within it, along with the codes and regulations that shape them and new research as it is published, wherever the network operates.
Watch closely, weigh the evidence, share what holds up.
The Initiative works in three steps, always in the same order.
Watch
Track developments in science, engineering, regulation and public health that touch building infrastructure and water environments, country by country and setting by setting. Reports from members, published inspections and incidents, regulators and the research literature all feed a growing map.
Weigh
Scientists, clinicians and engineers in the network examine what that map shows, using structured analysis and the standards of peer-reviewed research, and separate what the evidence supports from what it does not.
Share
What holds up becomes practical material: briefings, position statements and technical guidance for the people who design, operate and regulate buildings.
Rigorous, open and useful.
Its own questions
The network decides what to study and reports the findings as they come.
Only what the data show
Conclusions go as far as the evidence allows, and gaps in the evidence are named.
Shared in the open
Methods and surveillance results are published so others can test them and reuse them.
Made to be used
Every finding ends up in a form that facility teams, designers and regulators can put to work.
A network that brings building science and public health together.
Its members come from public health and infection prevention, laboratory and environmental science, and engineering and facilities work: fields that seldom compare notes. Together they report what they see, join and review studies, and bring the results back to their own organizations and countries.
Associates
Free and open to anyone who works with building infrastructure or follows it, and wants to be involved from day one.
Members
Researchers and practitioners who share observations, join studies and apply the Initiative's work in their own.
Fellows
Experienced researchers and practitioners who help set research priorities and review what is published.
Institutional partners
Universities, hospitals, public-health agencies, professional bodies and operators that host research, contribute data or put guidance into practice.
Follow the Initiative.
Associate membership is free. Join the waitlist, read the work or get in touch on the Initiative's own website.