Sorry, proud plant parents: Potted perennials don’t actually improve air quality.
After analyzing decades of research, a Drexel University environmental engineering professor is debunking the myth that botanicals can help purify indoor air.
“This has been a common misconception for some time,” according to Michael Waring, associate professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering. “Plants are great, but they don’t actually clean indoor air quickly enough to have an effect on the air quality of your home or office environment.”
With the help of doctoral student Bryan Cummings, Waring reviewed dozens of studies spanning three decades for findings recently published in Nature’s Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology.
Yes, potted plants can remove airborne volatile organic compounds (VOC) in small, sealed chambers over periods of hours or days.
But the experiments that helped create the myth of houseplants as air purifiers—specifically a 1989 NASA study—were conducted in a contained environment “that has little in common with a house or office.”
“Many of the researchers conducting these studies were not looking at them from an environmental engineering perspective, and did not understand how building air exchange rates interplay with the plants to affect indoor air quality,” Waring said.
The natural air change rates of a home or office dilute concentrations of VOC faster than plants can extract them from the air.
So while they may help spruce up an otherwise dull space, that fluffy fern, trendy fig, or hanging air plant isn’t really pulling its environmental weight.
It would take between 100 and 1,000 plants per square meter of floor space (emphasis mine, because holy crap!) to compete with the cleaning capacity of a building’s air handling system—or even just a couple open windows.
“This is certainly an example of how scientific findings can be misleading or misinterpreted over time,” Waring explained. “But it’s also a great example of how scientific research should continually reexamine and question findings to get closer to the ground truth of understanding what’s actually happening around us.”
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