The rate of removal of volatile organic compounds by plants is so slow that it is almost not taken into account.
Filling your house with plants may make you happier, but it won’t make the air you breathe any cleaner, unless you have to grow a huge number of plants.
An important study collected over the past 30 years has just been published, confirming that indoor plants have very little effect in cleaning the air.
Indoor plants have almost no effect on cleaning the air. (Photo: JAC).
Using data from a series of studies over many years, the scientists concluded that with a typical 140 square meter house, you need 680 potted plants (5 pots per 1 square meter) to achieve the effect of cleaning the air. is equivalent to opening the window.
Sure, that’s not an efficient use of space.
If you want the same air quality improvement as a basic air purification system, you need to plant about 100 trees per square meter. No one has enough time, space and patience to do this.
“Many people have misunderstood for a long time,” said environmental engineer Michael Waring at Drexel University. “ Planting is good, but it doesn’t clear the air fast enough to have an effect on indoor or office air quality .”
Growing indoor plants to clean the air became popular in 1989 when NASA conducted a study to see if plants can clean up carcinogens inside the ISS space station.
They placed a tree inside a cavity less than 1 cubic meter in area and the results were beyond imagination. Within 1 day, the study’s authors found that 70% of pollutants in the air were removed.
However, a small capsule on the space station is very different from the real atmosphere inside large houses. Over time, NASA research was scrapped.
In nearly all subsequent studies, the scientists demonstrated how quickly plants cleared volatile organic compounds (VOCs) while gases were so slow that they were almost ignored.