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'''ACVA''' is the abbreviation of '''[[Air Conditioning & Ventilation Associates]]''' and '''HBI''' comes from '''[[Healthy Buildings International]]''' which were two companies created by [[Gray Robertson]] (ACVA with [[Peter Binnie]]), one of the most successful scam-artists in America.  Robertson managed to construct a very lucrative business on a global scale by not finding a problem that everyone knew existed -- that of second-hand smoke, or passive smoking -- or in technical terms Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS),  He became the top air-testing businessman in America through not finding second-hand smoke at levels that constituted a health danger.  

When office buildings began to lose opening windows after World War II, the indoor air quality (IAQ) began to depend on the efficiency of the air-conditioning.  Gray discovered that, rather than recommend that people only smoked outside, he could solve the eye-watering and irritation problems that bothered non-smokers by recommending very expensive upgrades to office air-conditioning systems.

See also Gray Robertson:[https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/npby0019] Reg Simmons [https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/tobacco/docs/]
<table style="width=100%" bgcolor="eeeedd" border=1  rules=all cellpadding=5 align=right>
<tr bgcolor="cccccc"><th>COMPANIES & EXPLANATORY </th></tr>
<tr><td>[[ACVA]], [[ACVA|ACVA Atlantic]] and [[Healthy Buildings International|HBI]]</td></tr>
<tr><td>[[Gray Robertson]] and [[Peter WH Binnie]]</td></tr>
<tr><td> [[Reginald B. Simmons|Reg Simmons]], [[Simon Turner]], [[Jeffrey Seckler]]</td></tr>
<tr><td>See [[Indoor Air Quality testing|IAQ testing]] for other staff/companies.</td></tr>
<tr bgcolor="cccccc"><th>Depositions:</th></tr>
<tr><td>[[Gray Robertson]] & [[Reginald Simmons]]</td></tr>
</table>

This won him favour with three groups:
* the tobacco industry whose sales were being threatened by the rising recognition that non-smokers were also getting increased rates of lung-cancer, heart problems, emphysema, etc, from other people's smoke.
* the office renters and managers, who had problems with owners not wanting to upgrade and maintain their air-conditioning systems.
* the sheet-metal unions and equipment contractors who developed a lively business upgrading very expensive roof-top units and building ducting, that wouldn't have needed an upgrade if people hadn't filled offices with stale tobacco smoke.

Robertson ran a large company which used dodgy equipment to fake air quality testing which discounted smoke as a problem, and recommended costly upgrades to the '''HVAC''' (Heating, Ventilation & Air Conditioning) equipment.  He received a lot of business from the tobacco industry itself (mainly from the Tobacco Institute).  The Institute was often the first port of call when the manager of an office faced a rebellion of non-smoking workers who felt they were being poisoned by the air. 

The Tobacco Institute virtually acted as an agent for Robertson: but later so many other scam artist entered this field that he had to share the business with others. They all offered the same solution which was to increase the rate of air-exchange between indoor environments and the outdoors. This was done to dilute the tobacco smoke in the air, but the owners and renters were told that it was to solve the probems of a "Sick Building".  An energy crisis existed at the time, and so increasing air-exchange rates was done against much resistance from building operators -- who suddenly saw their heating and cooling bills rocket to stratospheric levels.

Robertson was also helped by two extraneous factors:
* In 1976 the American Legion convention in Philadelphia had an outbreak of a strange, and moderately dangerous form of bacterial pneumonia cause by a poorly maintained water-cooled air conditioner unit on the top of the convention center. Some of the older Legionnaires died, which allowed the tobacco industry and [[Gray Robertson]], to begin promoting [[Legionnaires' disease]] as a major health threat.  He used this as a threat to promote the retrofitting and upgrading of building systems against the financial interests of the owners.
* Another tobacco lobbyist, [[Theodor D Sterling]], who ran a business called TDS Ltd in Canada, had invented a term '''building sickness''' for the same reasons as Robertson, and this was later change to a universal catch-cry of "Sick Building Syndrome".  It was one of those fake terms like "Nanny State" and "PC" which took off around the world as a short-hand answer to a complex problem -- and fostered by the same tobacco companies.