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Indoor plants improve health, clear indoor air
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Here’s a weekend project for you and your family: visit area nurseries and plant shops and bring some new indoor plants into your home or office to help clear the air. Asparagus fern, purple waffle plant, English ivy—these plants and more can help remove harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the air in indoor spaces and improve air quality and your health.
The state of indoor air quality
According to the newly released Forbes “America’s Most Toxic Cities” report, the Phoenix metro area has 203 facilities that release toxic elements into the environment. While that doesn’t sound good, chances are your indoor air is not too good either. Indoor air is reportedly up to 12 times more polluted than outdoor air in some areas. Competing with the pollutants spewed into outdoor air by factories, vehicles, construction, and other sources, are indoor pollutants that emanate from paints, plastics, cleaning solutions, adhesives, clothing, building materials, solvents, furniture, draperies, carpeting, varnishes, and tap water.
Heading the list of indoor pollutants are VOCs, which include benzene, xylene, hexane, heptanes, octane, decane, trichloroethylene (TCE), and methylene chloride. VOCs have been linked to asthma, nausea, cancer, and neurologic, reproductive, developmental, and respiratory disorders. The World Health Organization reported that indoor pollutants are responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths per year.
Indoor plants and phytoremediation
In the current study, which was conducted at the University of Georgia and published online in the August 2009 issue of HortScience, researchers analyzed the ability of 28 species of indoor plants to perform phytoremediation, a process by which plants remove VOCs from the air. The researchers limited themselves to five of the more common and harmful indoor VOCs, including benzene and toluene (plastics, tobacco smoke, cleaning solutions, petroleum-based indoor coatings), TCE (tap water, insecticides, plastics), octane (paints, adhesives, building materials), and alpha-pinene (synthetic paints, odorants).
Among the 28 indoor plant species tested, purple waffle plant (Hemigraphis alternate), English ivy (Hedera helix), variegated wax plant (Hoya camosa), and asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus) ranked best at removing VOCs from the air. The purple heart plant (Tradescantia pallida) was the best for its ability to remove four of the VOCs. Other plants that performed especially were include the weeping fig (Ficus benjamina) and the Ming Aralia (Polyscias fruticosa), a type of small evergreen.
The study’s authors concluded that bringing indoor plants into your home, office space, or other indoor areas can significantly improve the quality of indoor air and thus improve your health.
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