A poor indoor air quality (IAQ) is now recognized as a potential factor affecting occupants health. There are three basic strategies to improve IAQ: source control, improvement of the ventilation and use of air cleaners. Usually, the most efficient way to improve IAQ is to eliminate the different pollutant sources or to reduce their emissions. In order to precisely measure emissions from building products and estimate the potential heath impact of emitted pollutants, standardised analytical methods are needed. The aim of this paper is to present the new standards prepared by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the measurement of indoor air pollutants and their application to the characterization of emissions from wood products. The prestandard ENV 13419, subdivided in three parts, has been prepared by the CEN technical committee 264 : ??ENV 13419-1 : Building products - Determination of the emission of volatile organic compounds - Part 1 : Emission test chamber method, ??ENV 13419-2 : Building products - Determination of the emission of volatile organic compounds - Part 2 : Emission test cell method, ??ENV 13419-3 : Building products - Determination of the emission of volatile organic compounds - Part 3 : Procedure for sampling, storage of samples and preparation of test specimens. The two first parts of the prestandard ENV 13419 specify a general laboratory test method for the determination of the area specific emission rate of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from newly produced building products under defined climate conditions in a test chamber (Part 1) or cell (Part 2). The third part specifies for solid, liquid or combined products, the sampling procedure, transport and storage conditions and preparation of test specimens. In France, those European prestandards have been translated by the French Normalisation Association (AFNOR) in three experimental standards : XP ENV 13419-1, XP ENV 13419-2 and XP ENV 13419-3 [1-3]. In parallel to the ongoing work at CEN, the technical committee 146 of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has prepared the draft international standard ISO/DIS 16000 related to indoor air. Part 6 of this standard specifies a method for the determination of the emission of single volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) from building materials using test chambers and cells [4]: ??ISO/DIS 16000-6 : Indoor air - Part 6 : Determination of volatile organic compounds in indoor and chamber air by active sampling on TENAX TA sorbent, thermal desorption and gas chromatography using MS/FID. It is intended that, after the final voting stage, the CEN prestandards (Parts 1-3) will be taken over by ISO and that Part 6 of the ISO standard will be taken over by CEN as the fourth part of the ENV 13419 prestandard. As an example, the volatile organic compounds emissions from preservative treated wood samples were characterised according to the CEN ENV 13419-1 prestandard describing the emission test chamber method and to the ISO/DIS 16000-6 prestandard for the analytical method. Two representative wood preservatives (hydrodispersable and petroleum solvent formulation) were tested for this purpose. The VOCs concentrations in the test chamber were monitored during 6 days following a simulated curative wood treatment.

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