Do Air Purifying Plants work?
Air Purifying plants are often advertised as contenders in a NASA study. That study was in 1989. But does that controlled experiment hold good in the real-world conditions of your home?
Air Purifying plants are often advertised as contenders in a NASA study. That study was in 1989. But does that controlled experiment hold good in the real-world conditions of your home?
Kolkata – Plants can and do remove pollutants, but do they remove enough of them to make a difference to the amount of pollutants in our air? If you had two identical homes and one had a few plants growing and the other did not, would you see a difference in the air quality? That is the important question.
Years ago homes in developed countries were quite drafty. Clean air from outside was constantly being blown through our homes, exchanging polluted air with fresh air. At the same time, more and more products in the home are man-made and many of these products give off a constant low level of polluting chemicals. So while our homes have become more air tight, the stuff in our homes are producing more pollutants than ever before! The result is a poor quality of air in our homes, especially in winter.
In order to simplify and understand clearly, we need to look back in time and see where the scientific evidence started. One of the earliest studies was the famous NASA experiment, published in 1989, found that indoor plants can scrub the air of cancer-causing volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene. Later research has found that soil microorganisms in potted plants also play a part in cleaning indoor air. Based on this research, some scientists say house plants are effective natural air purifiers. And the bigger and leafier the plant, the better. “The amount of leaf surface area influences the rate of air purification,” says Bill Wolverton, a former NASA research scientist who conducted that 1989 plant study.
On the contrary the studies, which concluded that a small houseplant could remove a range of toxins, were conducted in labs. A typical experiment involved placing a plant in a small chamber and subjecting it to gaseous molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Experiments ranged in density and time of removal. One showed that in just 24 hours, common household ivies could remove two-thirds of the formaldehyde they were exposed to. The problem with those experiments is that the densely gaseous chambers in the lab didn’t mimic the typical household or office environment.
Many of the blogs and vendors marketing air-purifying plants point to the same 1989 NASA study in which plants in chambers just over two feet wide and long were filled with various gases circulated by a small fan. It’s that 30-year-old study, which showed plants could cut down VOCs in small airtight containers, that led consumers to think perhaps too highly of their houseplants, experts say.
20 best air cleaning plants on Google:
1. Devil's Ivy or pothos (Epipremnum aureum)
2. Dwarf Date Palm (Phoenix Roebelenii)
3. Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)
4. Philodendron
5. Spider Plant (Chlorophytum comosum)
6. Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum morifolium)
7. Rubber plants (Ficus elastic)
8. Boston Fern (Nephrolepis exaltata v
Michael Waring, an environmental engineer and indoor air quality expert at Drexel University, calculated the clean air delivery rate (CADR) for each indoor plant. They were able to judge how well a plant cleaned a room when compared to proven strategies like running a mechanical air purifier or opening a window. According to waring, Plants, though they do remove VOCs, remove them at such a slow rate that they can’t compete with the air exchange mechanisms already happening in buildings.
To reduce VOCs enough to impact air quality would require around 10 plants per square foot. In a small 500-square foot apartment, that’s 5,000 plants, a veritable forest. Which is not very practical of course.
After been running down through time and observing all the experiments over the years we conclude that though plants in general purify air slowly but not completely. So rather than buying an expensive indoor plant for the sake of purifying air, we should instead plant more trees and adopt an eco-friendly lifestyle in order to curb pollution from our man-made devices. - or install another man-made device... a home air cleaner/purifier, such as EarthSmiles.net's own low-cost AirSmiles device!
About the author:
Michael Biswas likes to be Mr GreenMind - which means he's always inventing little things to make the planet a better place! When he's not trying to figure out the secret of prepetual energy, he writes on environmental topics.
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