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If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants. In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as
by pdog 7y ago
If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants.
In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air.
Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study
- rayiner 7y agoDo these have any actual impact on health? Like, if I get a house plant, am I going to live a year longer? Two years longer? That’s the whole problem with all this “health science.” It’s completely disconnected from expected outcomes that you can use to determine whether this is something even worth caring about. EDIT re: sibling comment debunking impact of indoor plants. See, this is exactly what I mean. When you don’t tie observed correlations to concrete outcomes, all you do is confuse people. It’s not quite junk science, but it’s not helpful reporting of the science.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- martey 7y agoFrom https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-plants-clean-air-best-none-them/584509/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p... Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much. Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bannus 7y agoWow, you beat me to posting this exact quote!
- buildzr 7y agoIn many places new homes today include HRVs or similar ventilation systems which would likely do more than plants. I keep mine on 'intermittent' mode where it runs 15 minutes per hour all day.
- nextos 7y agoThat is spot on. The only solution is to build houses with better materials that release less VOCs and/or use an air filter with a good activated carbon stage. Carpets have become very popular. But cheap ones release tons of VOCs due to fire retardants and anti-stain treatments. I've switched to a house built in the Scandinavian style, with oiled wooden floors and simple soap-treated furniture. Not only beautiful, but also lacks the typical brand new smell. Theoretically much better in terms of nasty VOCs.
- swampthinker 7y agoMost modern European housing also has to abide by strict energy efficiency and air leakage standards, so they come with heat-recover air exchange systems.
- verelo 7y agoI came here to say exactly this. I'm in Toronto Canada and just renovated a duplex, i was required to install ERV's to exchange the air. VOC's from off-gassing is unavoidable with present building materials, so the best we can do is replace the air as often as possible to minimize the impact. They're not expensive, and the impact to air quality is massive.
- lxmorj 7y agoAir leakage standards in which direction?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- clairity 7y agoyes, i bought a spider plant and boston fern as they're easy to find. both grow like crazy in the sun (fern also needs humidity, so it's in the bathroom). i'm not sure how well they filter the air, but it's nice to have green, living things around that are hard to kill. =)
- hoorayimhelping 7y agoThis is the key line from that Wikipedia page: >but was conducted under sealed space station conditions and research conducted since has shown mixed results in the home or office I love houseplants, decorating an indoor space with them provides me a huge psychological boost. But it's not doing anything physically.
- kaybe 7y agoI feel it changes the humidity and smell, that's not nothing.
- sizzle 7y agoIs there any sensor/device on the market capable of detecting carcinogenic VOC at a reasonable price? If not is there a market opportunity to create such a product, maybe integrated into home HVAC systems that can sample circulating air with a mobile app dashboard for monitoring levels? I've always worried that everything in my house is off-gassing and slowly affecting my health and lifespan negatively.
- londons_explore 7y agoMass spectrometers are the tool to use. Current devices are all very expensive because they're lab equipment, but there is no theoretical reason for the expense. I'm sure you could design a $1 device with a servo, photodiode and spark gap.
- soulofmischief 7y agoThe "conclusions" people draw from that study have been disproven again and again. The study did nothing to prove that a few specimens of certain kinds of house plants are enough to replace an air filter or change.
- orloffm 7y agoSurprisingly, these are the exact same plants that are ubiquitous in all post-Soviet governmental institutions.
- Trivoyage 7y agoMums are on NASA’s list of top air-purifying plants.