Some Houseplants are Effective at Removing Harmful Gasses from Indoor Air

Submitted by GAtherton on 26 August 2016

Volatile organic compounds (VOC) are commonly found in the indoor environment, both in the home and at work. They are gasses that are emitted by building materials, furnishings, flooring materials, burning fuels as well as many microbes that grow in our homes and ourselves! They tend to be ignored as they are not acutely toxic at the levels we normally experience in the home and thus have few short term health effects for most of us, though some people are more highly sensitive to them.

Continued exposure to VOC can have multiple health impacts including respiratory irritation, eye itching & soreness, throat and sinus discomfort and skin rashes, but perhaps more severely nose bleeds, nausea, vomiting, headaches, dizziness, memory impairment and more. For people who already have a chronic respiratory illness such as asthma and/or aspergillosis this additional airway irritation can have a major impact on quality of life.

It is routine to suggest that VOC buildup can be prevented by adequately ventilating your home and paying attention to the VOC levels in items you bring into your home but these can be expensive and/or inconvenient options. Perhaps there is something simpler we can do?

It has been known for some time that plants will absorb VOC and efficiently remove them from the air in our homes. NASA released a listing of plants that could do this together with an indication of some of the VOC’s that could be absorbed – unsurprisingly NASA were interested in ensuring the VOC did not build up in the strictly confined interiors of their space stations.

More recently a research group in State University of New York at Oswego led by Vadoud Niri have measured the rate and type of VOC that can be removed from the air by specific plants in more detail.

Announced at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS):

The researchers tested five common house plants and eight common VOCs, and they found that certain plants were better at absorbing specific compounds. For example, all five plants could remove acetone—the pungent chemical that is abundant at nail salons—from the air, but the dracaena plant took up the most, around 94 percent of the chemical.

“Based on our results, we can recommend what plants are good for certain types of VOCs and for specific locations,” Niri says. “To illustrate, the bromeliad plant was very good at removing six out of eight studied VOCs—it was able to take up more than 80 percent of each of those compounds—over the twelve-hour sampling period. So it could be a good plant to have sitting around in the household or workplace.”

Niri says the next step in the research is to test these plants’ abilities in a real room, not just a sealed chamber. He would eventually like to put plants in a nail salon over the course of several months to see whether they can reduce the levels of acetone that workers are exposed to.

Moulds and other microbes as well as wet materials in damp homes also release VOC and it is known that VOC levels tend to correlate with respiratory illnesses such as asthma though evidence remains inconclusive due to poor experimental design (Nurmatov et.al. 2015). It is possible that some improvement of quality of life for some respiratory disease patients may be possible if their VOC exposure was reduced. Patients might like to try introducing some of the highly absorbing plants mentioned in this article into their homes. NB household plants must be carefully maintained in the homes of pe

ople who are sensitive to moulds and other microbes as rotting plant tissue and disturbed soil can release fungal spores into the air.