Remember, several years ago, NASA carried out a study into the possibilities of filtering pollutants from home air. The study was quite alarming at first glance, as it indicated that homes were highly polluted. In fact, it was better to breathe the air of downtown Manhattan at rush hour than that of a home or office. The reason? Many of the unsuspecting products we use in our daily lives – carpets, aerosols, paints, pressed wood, glues, photocopiers, cosmetics, cigarettes, etc. – give off highly toxic gases. – give off highly toxic gases, such as formaldehyde, benzene, chloroform and even worse.
The Solution? Houseplants!
Fortunately, NASA has also found a solution to this problem: growing houseplants. Plants, it had discovered, have the ability to make air so pure that it’s not worth taking a trip to the Alps to clear the lungs. Home air can be much cleaner. To prove the point, NASA has listed the reactions of the 15 plants tested in an initial press release. End of story… or almost.
Of course, we’ve known all this for a very long time. It’s not for nothing that we call forests the lungs of the earth. We know that plants produce essentially all the planet’s oxygen: without them, we wouldn’t even be able to breathe. The only thing new about this release was that it was more specific about the exact pollutants plants filtered. Since then, other studies have shown that plants do, in fact, clean all airborne pollutants. We could have listed pets and even human beings as pollutant removers: as we breathe, we also filter the air. The cigarette gunk that accumulates in the lungs of smokers and second-hand smokers is a pollutant that the lungs have removed from the smoke-contaminated air!
An Excuse to Buy More Houseplants
What made me smile when this press release first started circulating was that all the media took these two pages as if they were the words of the Holy Father himself. Since then, at least once a year, the same media have come out with the same tired communiqué. No updates, just the same information, ad infinitum. Who hasn’t read, seen or heard that the spider plant (Chlorophytum) cleans the air? So why repeat it?
I have to admit that, even though I already knew all this, as did all the real gardeners around me (we always remember the facts that serve us well, don’t we?), I too succumbed to temptation. I talked about it on the radio, I wrote about it in a column… what can I say? It was too easy a subject not to take advantage of! Plus, it finally gave me an excuse to buy more houseplants.
A Major Update
The problem with all this is that the same information has been circulating all this time… and, as is often the case in the media, it’s poorly explained. In fact, there is no list of the 15 plants that best clean the air. There was indeed a list of the first 15 plants, like the spider plant, that NASA studied, but it got down to 50 plants before it was finally concluded that all living plants cleaned the air.
So your beloved spider plant isn’t necessarily better than your oxalis, which isn’t on any list. In fact, several plants on the first list turned out to be poor air filters, at least compared to others. The spider plant, in fact, was only ranked thirty-eighth out of the 50 plants finally studied (the best of which was the Areca palm, Chrysalidocarpus lutescens!). That’s good, but there’s better! So why praise the spider?
Also, did anyone tell you that filtering the air to purify it comes at a high price for houseplants? Plant damage is not uncommon. The browning of leaf tips and premature aging of lower leaves are largely caused by pollutants accumulating in their tissues: plants’ lungs are their leaves… and leaves suffer as much from pollution as lungs do from smoking! Good for you, then, if your home is well stocked with green plants, because it’s better that the plants filter out the pollution and pay the price with a shorter life than you and your family!
Plants That Pollute the Air
Unfortunately, many plants, while cleaning the air on the one hand, pollute it on the other. Conifers, for example, emit toxic products, fortunately in small quantities… but enough to raise questions about air quality in Quebec, and more particularly in northeastern North America, which is essentially covered by coniferous forests. Fortunately, only one conifer is commonly used as an indoor plant, the famous Norfolk pine (Araucaria heterophylla), and even here, NASA assures us that it clears the air more than it stinks (30th place out of 50).
On the other hand, I’m convinced that the air in my house is very pure, even though I have half a dozen tropical conifers (yes, they do exist, but you have to know where to find them!), because I have some 594 other houseplants to clean the air. There’s no need to go to the country to find pure air: the purest air in town is at home!
Larry Hodgson published thousands of articles and 65 books over the course of his career, in both French and English. His son, Mathieu, has made it his mission to make his father’s writings accessible to the public. This text was originally published in Fleurs, plantes et jardins in January 2000.
Current research has shown that the amount of plants required to effectively clean the air in our homes would be so many it would create unsafe conditions for us to live in. More like a tropical jungle enclosed in a terrarium where mould and fungal spores would proliferate in the increased humidity. Better to grow houseplants because they are beautiful and benefit our mental health.
This is a popular story, but it’s a myth. There have been numerous studies about this since the NASA work and none have been able to show that plants clean the air in our home. Two companies have been trying to develop special GMO plants that better able to remove pollutants, and even these do not work effectively enough to make a difference.
https://www.gardenmyths.com/plants-purify-air-homes/
I loved this post. I had heard in the past about houseplants being good for your home, but I didn’t realize just how good they were. Thanks for the great post, I may have to go out and buy a few more plants!