What do space travel and potted plants have in common?
They are both key components in a research program investigating the ability of indoor plants to reduce indoor air pollution. NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Administration in America) decided since space travel requires astronauts to spend a lot of their time inside, they needed to find a way to keep the air they breathed as clean as possible. What NASA scientists discovered was that living plants are extremely efficient at absorbing air borne contaminants.
In the home, these contaminants or toxins, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), come from things like car fumes coming in from outside, furniture glues, cleaning fluids, timber finishes, cooking residuals, paint finishes, gas appliances, cigarette smoke and the list goes on and on.
How Many Indoor Plants Do You Need to Breathe Easy?
Professor Margaret Burchett and horticulturist Dr Donald Wood at The University of Technology (UTS) in Sydney, Australia have been studying the method and rate in which plants take up VOCs from the air around them and have found that you don't need many pot plants to improve air quality. Good news for householders.
Professor Burchett discovered through her research, you only needed one large plant in a 300 mm (12 inch) pot, or three smaller pots on a window sill in a large living room (15 square metres or 3200 square feet) to make a measurable difference to the VOC levels in that room. They found a reduction could be measured in as little as 48 hours.
Which Plant Varieties Make the Best Indoor Air Fresheners?
According to the UTS study some of the best plants that have been found to fight indoor pollution are:
The Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)
Kentia palm (howea forsteriana)
Darcaena (Dracaena marginata)
Janet Craig (Dracaena deremensis)
Devils ivy (epipremnum aureum)
However, as it was also established during the research that it's the micro-organisms in the growing medium rather than the plant leaves that absorb most of the pollutants in the surrounding air, any potted plant with a good root system should do the trick.
The importance of the plant is that it has a healthy relationship with these micro-organisms in the soil so that they can flourish and grow. So all that's necessary for householders to improve their air quality is to ensure a healthy houseplant. And, says Professor Burchett, since these micro-organisms are so small it doesn't matter if you want to mulch your plant or cover the earth with stones as air will still filter through and be cleansed.
Alexandra Neuman - Hi I am Alexandra Neuman a Zimbabwean born British citizen with a Hungarian father and a French mother. I started my career at the ...
Join the Conversation