While there are benefits to gardening even if it’s just potted houseplants, purifying the air might not be one of them. Sure, you may have heard in the past that it would offer you some kind of cleaning effects but findings seem to say something else entirely.
A review that covers about 30 years worth of research was recently brought to light and it shows that houseplants don’t purify air at all. They do not work as air removers within our homes on any real level and if they’re doing anything at all it’s not much in regards. If you really wanted to work to purify your home’s air you’d need to literally fill it with plants and even then the effects would be mynute.
In a press release on these findings Michael Waring an associate professor of architectural and environmental engineering in Drexel’s College of Engineering said as follows:
“This has been a commom misconception for some time. 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.”
“The CADR is the standard metric used for scientific study of the impacts of air purifiers on indoor environments, but many of the researchers conducting these studies were not looking at them from an environmental engineering perspective and did not understand how building air exchanges rates interplay with the plants to affect indoor air quality.”
“This is certainly an example of how scientific findings can be misleading or mininterpreted over time, 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.”
While working with plants can improve your mood and should be something you continue to do if you want to, you need to be aware of this and work to understand it. While throughout the years we have been told many different things as time passes we are finally starting to figure out the truth. Sadly, cleansing air with plants inside your home is a lot harder to do than most would ever imagine and in many cases you would be better off just buying a few air purifiers to use instead.
What do you think about all of this? Do you think it will make you want to keep plants more or less now that it’s been brought to your attention? I personally will still be keeping my few plants around. Potted plants can be fun and all, but they’re just not what a lot of people make them out to be.