Houseplants improve indoor air quality – Fact or Fiction?

Be it on a neatly tucked away side table, lining the window sills or swaying in the evening breeze of your balcony, indoor plants are now amongst the most popular home decoration choices. Not only do they make space look brighter and bigger, but they also help purify the air inside your home, leaving you with a fresher and cleaner environment. But to what extent?

While research and studies exist showing that plants are capable of scrubbing the air of pollutants and harmful chemicals, and it is also widely known that they are producers oxygen, little to no fact exists to their actual impact on Indoor Air Quality. Even the most famous NASA experiment, published in 1989, that tested the capability of indoor plants to remove harmful organic chemicals from the air, were conducted in small, sealed environments. Yes, plants do help remove pollutants from the air and pump oxygen into it, but that doesn’t mean they can effectively improve Indoor Air Quality (IAQ), because these studies wouldn’t apply to the real-world scenario.

“There’s a phenomenal amount of air coming in and going out in most houses,” says Stanley Kays, a professor emeritus of horticulture at the University of Georgia. “From what I’ve seen, in most instances, air exchange with the exterior has a far greater effect on indoor air quality than plants.” In most cases, the air inside our homes completely changes every hour, depending on ventilation. Most plants used in the above-mentioned experiments were grown under optimal conditions, which in turn improve their toxin-degrading abilities; a phenomenon that is probably not replicable inside our homes due to temperature, light and humidity fluctuations that any household would witness.

Plants are an amazing way to boost mood and add freshness to the house, but at this time, it is impossible to say with conviction that they help improve air quality over time. ActiveBuildings can make that promise with their economical and equally easy-to-install air quality monitoring solutions, which they use to make sure your home can have the best possible indoor air quality based on your existing systems. They’re on a mission to improve India’s indoor air quality one square foot at a time.