The goal of the alliance is to promote the understanding that healthy indoor environments require both professional cleaning and proper mold inspection and remediation. This strengthened alliance will accomplish this through increased legislative and regulatory advocacy and by bolstering public awareness for best practices and an integrated approach to indoor environmental health.

Instead of viewing cleaning and remediation as separate disciplines, the alliance promotes a unified approach to advancing the industries. This next phase of the alliance focuses on leveraging the expertise of both 天美传媒 and NORMI for the mutual benefit of their respective member bases with a focus on:

1. Education & Training 鈥� Shared access to each organization’s cleaning and mold remediation courses, certifications, and joint educational opportunities.
2. Integrated Membership Value听鈥� A structured alliance option allowing members of each organization to access select benefits from the other.
3. Media & Branding听鈥� Cleanfax will be designated as the official publication for NORMI members, with coordinated editorial collaboration and alliance visibility.
4. Advocacy 鈥� Coordinated government and regulatory engagement on issues impacting cleaning, mold remediation, and indoor environmental health.

鈥淭he expansion of this strategic alliance between 天美传媒 and NORMI is an important step toward bringing more attention to the holistic approach to ensuring the health and safety of buildings,鈥� said 天美传媒 Executive Director Kim Althoff. 鈥淭his alliance will help both organizations provide increased member value through joint media, advocacy, and training. We are very excited to build upon our incredible partnership with NORMI and expand these benefits to 天美传媒 members.鈥�

鈥淓xpanding our alliance with 天美传媒 will impact the industry in many positive ways,鈥� said NORMI CEO Doug Hoffman. 鈥淎ligning our resources and expertise will allow NORMI and 天美传媒 to have a broader impact through advocacy and media, the ability to train more professionals, and ultimately to help more people live and work in healthier indoor environments. Our organization is thrilled that we have been able to forge this alliance and know that it will be of great benefit to all of our members.鈥�

Additionally, this agreement will leverage each organization鈥檚 technical expertise, training, certifications, and publications while offering the option for an 天美传媒/NORMI combo membership.

Member value highlights

• 天美传媒 members gain access to NORMI technical bulletins on mold and member pricing for mold assessment and remediation education, events, and certifications.
• NORMI members receive Cleanfax as part of their membership, digital access to select 天美传媒 publications and communities, access to the 天美传媒 Show North America show floor, and member pricing on 天美传媒 education, events, and certifications.

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Hoffman, who has spent decades working in air purification and indoor environmental quality, opened a recent roundtable discussion aboard the Carnival Horizon, the venue of a Restoration Journeys and NORMI Caribbean cruise, by pointing out a frustration shared by a growing number of medical professionals: the gap between clinical study results and real-world performance.

“Clinical studies will tell you one thing about how something might work in a specific setting, like an air purifier in an eight-by-eight box,” Hoffman said. “But that doesn’t tell you anything about how it will work in the actual environment in somebody’s house.”

He illustrated the point with a common scenario: Put an air purifier in a sealed clear box, remove all contaminants, introduce only formaldehyde, and measure what happens. The results look impressive. But as Hoffman pointed out, no one lives in a room with only formaldehyde.

“Who has ever been in a house that has just formaldehyde?” he said. “Nobody.”

That distinction between controlled clinical testing and real-world field studies is at the heart of what Hoffman said a medical board he works with is now focusing on鈥攅valuating whether technologies work based on case studies and field results rather than laboratory conditions alone.

One of those proven technologies, he said, is the chemical-free, fogless sanitization process his company uses. He used the training session to explain the science behind it, starting from the ground up.

Only five technologies

Despite the sprawling variety of air purifiers on the market, Hoffman said every single one of them uses some combination of just five technologies: filters, ionizers, ozone generators, ultraviolet light, and ultraviolet light with a target plate鈥攖he last of which is known as photocatalytic oxidation, or PCO.

“If you know what those five technologies are, it doesn’t matter what the air purifier is,” he said. “You know exactly what it does. You know the pros and cons.”

He demonstrated the point with a quick example: If someone brings him a new air purifier he’s never seen, he just asks what it does. If it has a needlepoint ionizer and a filter, he said, he knows exactly what it does, no brochure required.

The deeper organizing principle behind those five technologies, Hoffman said, is the distinction between passive and active approaches.

Passive technologies, primarily filters, work by pulling contaminants toward the solution. You must get the pollution to the filter. If air doesn’t reach it, it doesn’t get cleaned. Active technologies, like ozone, do the opposite. They push the solution out to the pollution.

“If I’m bringing the pollution to the solution, am I standing in the solution or the pollution?” Hoffman asked. “I’m standing in the pollution. But if I’m proactively taking the solution to the pollution, now I’m standing in the solution.”

That framing, which he said clicked for a room full of industrial hygienists he once briefed on an oil rig in Houston, drives his approach to every job. Effective air quality work, he said, always includes both.

The problem with filters

Filters are a good starting point, Hoffman said, but they come with real limitations. The first is simply the challenge of getting contaminants to them. In most homes, there’s a single return for the HVAC system, typically in a hallway, and moving all the air in a house to that one point takes enormous force.

ASHRAE research has found that only about 26% of the air in any given environment reaches the filter. The rest circulates without ever getting cleaned.

“You think about the filter on your air conditioner,” he said. “You turn your air conditioning system off. It’s not filtering the air.”

Even when air reaches a filter, the filter only captures particles larger than a certain size. HEPA filters, which are marketed as trapping 99.9% of contaminants, capture 99.9% of particles above 0.3 microns of the air that reaches them. Smaller particles pass through until enough buildup narrows the gaps.

Brownian motion also plays a role in how HEPA filters capture very small particles. It is not a type of filter but a scientific principle that helps explain why tiny particles can be trapped in the filter media. In fact, four different processes work together inside a HEPA filter to capture contaminants, and Brownian motion is one of them. As particles move randomly and collide with air molecules, they are more likely to drift into the filter fibers and become trapped. Ironically, as a filter loads with particles, its efficiency can increase鈥攂ut that improvement also restricts airflow and can strain the motor. For that reason, filters should be replaced before they become overly loaded, even though doing so may seem counterintuitive.

The best solution, he said, is to combine filtration with proactive distribution, using ducted airflow to move all the air actively and constantly through the environment rather than waiting for contaminants to drift toward a single return.

Ionization: clumping the invisible

The second technology, ionization, works by electrically charging the particles in the air so they aggregate, clumping together until they’re either heavy enough to drop out of the breathing zone or large enough to get captured by a filter.

The most effective form for immediate ionization, Hoffman said, is needlepoint ionization, a highly charged element that sends a negative charge across passing air, reversing the polarity of positively charged particles so they attract each other and aggregate.

“Instead of dealing with 0.3-micron or smaller submicron particles, those particles are getting bigger鈥�2.0, 2.5,” he said. “As you continuously produce ionization, even at lower levels, the larger those particles get.”

Combined with filtration, he said, ionization creates a significant double effect: particles that would have slipped through a filter on their own are now large enough to get caught. Add ozone to that mix, a third technology, and you’ve got a system that doesn’t just capture airborne contaminants but actively destroys bacteria and mold before they reach the filter at all.

“Air quality issues are multifaceted, so you need a multi-strategic solution,” Hoffman said. “By adding three technologies, now you’ve got something multi-strategic.”

Ozone: powerful but scalable

Ozone has a complicated reputation, and Hoffman addressed it directly.

The EPA’s current limit for ozone is 0.05 parts per million. OSHA’s threshold is 0.10. Humans typically start smelling ozone at around 0.02 parts per million, and, as Hoffman noted, the beach smell most people find pleasant and clean usually falls somewhere between 0.10 and 0.15.

“Some say ozone will kill you,” he said. “The reality is the length of time you’re exposed to it and your personal sensitivity to it are bigger problems than the actual level.”

Chemically, ozone (O3) is an unstable molecule. When it encounters other compounds like formaldehyde, it donates its extra oxygen atom, altering the target molecule’s structure. With enough exposure, it oxidizes the contaminant and breaks it down into basic components. With pathogens, the mechanism is different but equally effective: Ozone disrupts the RNA and DNA of bacteria and mold, stopping reproduction.

Hoffman described swab testing that demonstrates the effect: Swab a surface, send it to a lab, document what’s growing, then run ozone in the room for 12 to 24 hours, and swab the same area again. After treatment, nothing grows.

“It’s pretty amazing what ozone can do and how powerful it can be,” he said. “It’s just that too much of it, uncontrolled, is the problem.”

The solution is scalability. The small corona discharge ozone generator he demonstrated, rated for up to about 900 square feet, has a dial that lets users adjust output. The goal is maintaining a level that’s actively working on surfaces and air without reaching concentrations that become problematic for occupants.

UV and the catalytic leap

Ultraviolet light at wavelengths between 184 and 256 nanometers is germicidal鈥攊t destroys bacteria, viruses, and mold. But UV on its own, Hoffman said, has a significant limitation: Its effective kill range extends only a couple of inches from the lamp, and microbes must be exposed to it long enough for it to do damage.

“At 2,000 CFMs in an HVAC system, the bugs hardly get a sunburn,” he said. “It just can’t be there long enough to be destroyed.”

In practice, he said, UV lights installed in HVAC systems work well on the surfaces immediately surrounding the lamp, particularly on the A-coil, but leave everything else largely untouched. He described inspecting systems and seeing clean strips where lamps were positioned with contamination in between.

The breakthrough came from combining UV with a target plate. The technology traces back to Beijing, where researchers discovered that titanium dioxide painted on the sides of buildings was reacting with sunlight to keep the surrounding sidewalks clean.

That observation led to what is now called PCO technology: a UV lamp positioned close to a plate coated with titanium dioxide, creating a catalytic reaction that produces oxidizers鈥攏ot ozone. These reactive compounds travel downstream into the environment and proactively address bacteria and mold.

Modern versions of the technology use a honeycomb plate rather than a flat plate, maximizing surface area to produce more oxidizers, with multiple metallic coatings, reflector plates, and other refinements. Hoffman noted that his company’s current PCO units use a quad-metallic coating, LED instead of traditional UV lamps to avoid the roughly 10,000-hour lifespan limitation of UV bulbs, and what he called dielectric barrier ionization rather than needlepoint.

Multi-cluster ionization: the South Korea connection

That last technology鈥攄ielectric barrier ionization鈥攃ame from a trip Hoffman made to South Korea years ago to deliver indoor air quality training. While he was there, the company that had brought him over revealed the real purpose of the visit: They had developed a new ionization technology and wanted to find a U.S. partner.

Unlike needlepoint ionization, which produces single negative ions that discharge and stop working once they’ve interacted with something, the dielectric barrier ionizer produces a clustered positive-and-negative ion pair. Those clusters, Hoffman said, continue working after each interaction鈥攕pinning out, hitting the next surface, then the next鈥攔emaining active in the environment for a much longer time.

“Instead of that ion going out and hitting something and being done, this clustered ion goes out, hits something, and then keeps going,” he said.

His company was given the rights to the technology for the U.S. and Canada and trademarked it as multi-cluster ionization. Combining it with the PCO probe鈥擴V or LED light, honeycomb target plate, and dielectric barrier ionizer鈥攑roduced a unit that incorporates four of the five air purification technologies in a single device.

The technology first found commercial traction in South Korean casinos, where smoking remains common. Hoffman said you can walk into one of those casinos and not smell anything.

Chemical-free fogging: closing the loop

All that context, the five technologies, passive versus active, surface testing versus air testing, was Hoffman’s foundation for explaining what he called chemical-free fogging.

The process uses these PCO and ionization technologies without any chemical agents. Instead of introducing a disinfectant into the environment, the equipment sends oxidizers throughout the space, addressing surfaces and air simultaneously.

At least 85% of the testing done on these technologies, Hoffman said, has been conducted on surfaces rather than air, simply because surface results are easier to quantify. But the logic holds. If the technology demonstrably cleans surfaces, it’s also working on the air in between.

In practice, Hoffman said chemical-free fogging is built into both sanitization and remediation protocols. During a remediation project, it runs inside containment throughout the cleaning process. After containment comes down, the entire structure gets treated.

That last step, he said, is one the industry often skips, and shouldn’t.

“If I had a two-story house and my second floor was under containment for a remediation project, and I was living on the first floor, when the job is done and they break down containment, I’ve now contaminated the second floor, because it’s a whole lot cleaner than where I was living,” he said. “Once a remediation project is done, the entire house needs to be sanitized.”

The approach has been particularly successful with chemically sensitive individuals, those who can’t tolerate conventional disinfectants, he said. Because the process uses no chemicals, those clients can return home without the reactions that typically follow treatment.

That success, along with the field and case study data Hoffman’s company has compiled, drew the medical board’s interest he mentioned at the start of the session. They’ve recognized the difference between laboratory results and real-world outcomes, and they’re starting to evaluate technologies the same way Hoffman has for years.

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“We’re at a turning point,” Hoffman said during a recent roundtable discussion aboard the Carnival Horizon, the venue of a Restoration Journeys and NORMI Caribbean cruise to Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. He described the last two years as a watershed moment for how remediation work is scoped, regulated, and verified.

The direction of travel is unmistakable鈥攁way from inconsistent state licensing and toward something with potentially greater reach: federal and state mandates that steer the public toward credentialed professionals, with defined expectations for assessment, protocols, and outcome verification.

Not just mold

Hoffman is careful about framing. The industry tends to lead with mold because it’s visible and familiar, but the real problem is broader. “What we’re dealing with is an indoor air quality problem, from a broad standpoint,” he said. “It has to do with bacteria, and viruses, and particles, and a lot of other things that are going on in the environment.”

Mold, in this view, is a useful proxy, an indicator that points to a larger contamination picture. “We know that when we’re cleaning up a mold issue, we’re also cleaning up other problems that exist,” Hoffman said.

That framing matters because it redefines what success looks like. If the work is treated as cosmetic cleanup, success is whatever appears clean. If it’s treated as microbial contamination control, success requires evidence.

Hoffman returned to that distinction repeatedly: the industry must stop relying on what looks clean and start proving what is clean.

The assessor as architect

The most consistent thread running through Hoffman’s remarks is the centrality of the assessor, not as a formality, but as the backbone of competent remediation.

“The right way to do it is the assessor should be the architect of the project,” Hoffman said. “He’s the one who should do the pretesting, write the protocol, and then make the post-remediation testing.”

He acknowledged that this model is far from universal. Independent pre- and post-testing, where the assessor drives the scope and verifies the outcome, happens, but not consistently or often enough. That gap between best practice and common practice is precisely what emerging legislation is beginning to close.

Focus on public health

Some in the industry once hoped that widespread state licensing would professionalize the field. That hasn’t completely materialized. As Hoffman mentioned, only five jurisdictions maintained active licensing: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, the District of Columbia, and New York. Arkansas and Virginia had passed licensing laws but suspended them, lacking the infrastructure to enforce them.

But Hoffman argued the replacement trend may be more consequential than licensing ever was. Rather than creating regulatory boards to oversee contractors, states are now directing their public health departments to handle mold-related inquiries, folding exposure concerns, symptom reporting, and referral pathways into existing public health infrastructure.

California moved first. Illinois, Iowa, North Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, and New Hampshire have since shown similar momentum. In Illinois, Hoffman noted a particularly significant emphasis: “It’s not just about a mold problem, it’s about the mold effects that somebody might be suffering.” In other words, the focus is on illness, not property damage.

Equally significant is what these systems are beginning to specify: When states recommend certifying bodies, they’re naming the IICRC and NORMI. That’s not licensing, but it functions similarly鈥攃redentials serving as a practical gateway to legitimacy, with or without a formal licensing requirement.

A national security issue?

If state-level change is gradual, federal action could move faster, and the catalyst is military housing.

“The military privatized housing has been an absolute disaster,” Hoffman said. “Billions of dollars flowed over the years with minimal oversight and no enforceable standard ensuring remediation was done correctly. Money moved. Problems didn’t get fixed. And military families had little recourse.”

The legislative response is now accelerating on two tracks.

The first is the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed on Dec. 18, 2025, which gives Congress 180 days to develop guidance documents covering how remediation work should be performed and how contractors should be compensated.

The second is a bill introduced by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal shortly after: the Mold Act, or Military Occupancy Living Defense Act. Hoffman described it as among the most consequential pieces of legislation the industry has ever faced.

The bill requires that an assessment be completed before any remediation begins, which means no more dispatching crews to scrub visible mold without first establishing the scope and cause. It mandates that remediation follow a defined process aligned with the IICRC S520 standard. It requires post-remediation clearance testing, annual monitoring, and reporting. And critically, it specifies that anyone performing assessment or remediation must hold and maintain a certification from the IICRC, NORMI, or ACAC.

“You can’t just go in and do remediation because there’s visible mold,” Hoffman explained.

The scale of the problem and the workforce demand it will generate is staggering. Hoffman cited 185,000 military homes currently in need of remediation. When he hears concerns about whether the workforce is ready, his answer is direct: “We have a trained workforce and certified assessors.”

At a press conference, Hoffman described hearing from a military family whose four children had been made sick by conditions in their housing so severely impacted, he said, that they would never be able to qualify for military service themselves.

That story captures why this legislation has traction. When mold exposure becomes a readiness problem, a public health crisis, and a taxpayer accountability failure all at once, the government doesn’t just pay attention; it acts. It writes requirements.

And those requirements, increasingly, start with the assessor.

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As part of the agreement, NORMI will serve as InterNACHI’s exclusive mold training provider. InterNACHI will also be recognized as the NORMI-endorsed home inspector trade association. The goal is straightforward: give home inspectors a reliable way to receive proper mold assessment training through an established education provider.

InterNACHI, founded by Nick Gromicko, represents more than 100,000 home inspectors worldwide. Through the partnership, members will be able to enroll in NORMI鈥檚 mold education programs, including training that leads to the NORMI Certified Mold Assessor (NORMI CMA) credential. This training supports inspectors who want to add mold assessment services and need credentials in states that require licensing.

鈥淲e see this alliance as a major step forward for consumer protection and professional credibility,鈥� said Doug Hoffman, NORMI executive director. 鈥淏y combining InterNACHI鈥檚 reach with NORMI鈥檚 depth of scientific, technical, and regulatory expertise, we are creating a clear pathway for inspectors to expand their services responsibly and compliantly.鈥�

InterNACHI members who participate in NORMI training will receive discounted tuition and access to NORMI鈥檚 technical materials, protocols, and reference resources. These materials are intended to support inspectors during training and later in the field.

鈥淭his exclusive partnership allows us to work together developing guidelines for the MOLD (Military Occupancy Living Defense Act), in support of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), and gives our inspectors access to the gold standard in mold and indoor environmental training,鈥� Gromicko said.

Demand for qualified mold assessors continues to grow as homeowners, buyers, and regulators pay closer attention to indoor air quality and environmental health concerns. Both organizations said the partnership is a practical response to those changes.

NORMI and InterNACHI said the agreement is expected to benefit inspectors, remediators, regulators, and consumers by improving access to consistent mold education and clearer standards.

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