By bringing your garden indoors and growing the right plants on your office wall (along with sophisticated technology), you could rid the air of several common toxic pollutants, new research shows.
The findings come from scientists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia, who were investigating whether a vertical wall system populated with houseplants could capture a mixture of noxious compounds from petrol fumes.
Ultimately, over the course of a typical workday, the plants reduced levels of some notorious cancer-causing compounds to below 20 percent of baseline levels.
The research was funded by crop production company Ambius, which enlisted the help of the UTS team. For the experiments, a collection of houseplants mimicking Ambius’ small vertical plant wall system were kept in sealed chambers.
Although the lab setup is nowhere near the size of public spaces, the idea is that installing vertical gardens could help improve indoor air quality by complementing energy-intensive ventilation systems that purge stale air from office buildings, hospitals, and classrooms.
It’s worth noting that the new findings have not yet been peer-reviewed previous research has shown the potential of indoor plants to suck up gaseous compounds, often referred to as volatile organic compounds or VOCs.
However, studies of herbal “cleaners” have typically looked at the removal of individual chemical species – not complex mixtures – under controlled conditions and at levels not comparable to real-world exposure.
While this new study also used sealed chambers, common household plants – devil’s ivy (Epipremnum aureum), arrowhead plants (Syngonium podophyllum) and spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum) – against gasoline vapors, a significant source of mixed VOCs.
“Plants can not only remove most of the pollutants from the air within a few hours”, says UTS Environmental Scientist Fraser Torpy: “They are the most efficient at removing the most harmful gasoline-related pollutants from the air.”
Torpy and his team tested the Ambius vertical plant wall system using nine custom-built Plexiglas boxes containing four or no plants. A small amount of gasoline evaporated in the chambers, and the researchers measured the gas content.
Due to a slight reduction in gases in the control chamber, a leak in each of the test boxes could not be ruled out. Still, the researchers are confident that over the eight-hour test period, the systems removed about 43 percent of all VOCs and almost all three particularly harmful chemical classes: alkanes (98 percent removed), benzene derivatives (86 percent), and cyclopentanes (88). Percent).
Removing these air pollutants, which can have “significant health effects,” could have “significant implications for maintaining a healthy indoor climate,” the research team writes in their report.
benzene compounds are highly carcinogenic and can enter schools and buildings hundreds of meters away from gas stations and rise above safe levels. Researchers have too known for a long time that people who live near petrol stations are more likely to develop cancers such as leukemia.
Torpy and colleagues point out that parking garages attached to office buildings and apartment buildings are another cause of indoor air pollution.
With more research, vertical gardens may be able to help. “We also found that the more concentrated the toxins in the air, the faster and more effectively the plants were able to remove the toxins. This shows that plants are adapting to the conditions in which they grow.” says torpy
Consider that these vertical greening systems, which often include a significant number of potted plants attached to air pumps, are a whole step above our handful of beloved houseplants that sit on our kitchen shelves. you would need thousands to make the air in your home cleaner.
A modest collection of plants alone cannot clean the air fast enough to affect air quality. say researchers. But they can lift the spirits.
Also the experimental setup of airtight boxes goes back to the first NASA studies which also monitored plants in sealed chambers – which of course is very different from the interior environment of a large office building with its pumping ventilation systems.
However, commercial interest in green wall technologies is likely to grow over time Pandemicwhich highlighted the importance of indoor air quality on a global scale.
Torpy and his co-authors – This time I’m writing in a peer-reviewed journal – indicate that further research is needed to test large commercial systems in different buildings. Only then can we fully understand if plants can act as air purifiers, with benefits over traditional ventilation systems.
This includes looking at the type of plants and air filters used, the long-term effects of pollutants on soil microbes, and whether plants are reaching a saturation point.
See if plants rid the air of chemicals outgassing from synthetic materials — the kind of compounds that give your car its properties new car smell – is another pathway that researchers are keen to pursue, as it was not measured in the current study.
The UTS report is Available online.
