If you thought growing a houseplant could purify the air, you're wrong!

The speed of cleaning up volatile organic compounds of plants is so slow that they are almost neglected.

Filling your house with plants may make you happier, but it will not help you breathe any cleaner unless you have to grow an extremely large number of plants.

An important study collected over the past 30 years has just been published, confirming that planting indoor plants has little effect on cleaning the air.

Growing plants indoors almost does not clean the air.(Photo: JAC).

Using data from a series of studies over many years, the scientists concluded that with a typical 140m ² house, you need 680 pots of plants (5 pots / 1 square meter) to achieve effective air cleaning. the equivalent of opening a window.

Certainly, that's not the way to use space effectively.

If you want to improve the air quality equivalent to a basic air filtration system, you need to plant about 100 plants per square meter. Nobody has enough time, space and patience to do this.

'Many people have misunderstood for a long time , ' said environmental engineer Michael Waring at Drexel University. ' Planting plants is good, but it does not clean the air fast enough to have an effect on indoor or office air quality .'

Growing plants indoors to clean the air has been popular since 1989 when NASA conducted a study to see if plants can clean carcinogens inside the ISS space station.

They placed a tree inside an area less than 1 cubic meter in size and the results were beyond imagination. Within 1 day, the author of the study found 70% of air pollutants were removed.

However, a small compartment on the space station is very different from the real air inside large houses. Over time, NASA research was discarded.

In nearly all subsequent research, scientists have demonstrated that the rate at which plants clean up volatile organic compounds (VOCs) while gas is so slow is almost neglected .

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