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I was just reminded of this by something someone else posted in zir LJ, and I figured I'd put it here rather than cluttering up there.
Years ago, after we had a fire in our downstairs apartment (no injuries to humans or animals, insurance got everything back to normal with no-out-of-pocket expenses to us), I started having dizzy spells and ickyness in our house, and couldn't figure out why. We did some research, and found out that, naturally, residual smoke can cause problems, as can some of the residual chemicals that the fire department used, since the fire was mainly in the kitchen where there are things like oil and electricity and other things that chemicals are better for than water is.
And then we did research on how to fix that problem. We found lots of expensive solutions -- and one cheap one, which, indeed, was reported to be as much as ten times as effective as the expensive solutions. This made the insurance company happy, since they were able to shell out, like, a hundred bucks to clean up the residual airborne toxins.
It turns out that indoor plants do a bang-up job of filtering the air. Plants respirate, and, in doing so, filter and encapsulate airborne particulate matter, and they do this for the entire time during the day when they are awake. If you get enough plants, they don't move as MUCH air as, say, one of those ionizing air purifiers, but certain plants do a better job of hanging on to icky stuff.
We did all the research and I don't remember all the details of everything we found out -- I just remember our conclusions.
First, this is NOT for, like, Kill You Dead Toxins like black mold. We're talking about the Quality Of Life things, not Cause of Death things.
It turns out that there are multiple sorts of things that tend to show up as airborne environmental toxins, from different sources. For instance, things like wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstery, things like that, tend to have various forms of formaldehyde-related compounds that are left over from the manufacturing process, or from how they're packaged and shipped. Not a lot, of course, but enough to cause headaches and dizziness and the like if you're sensitive to them.
I don't remember all the categories and so forth. But we found lists of plants that were especially good at filtering different categories of toxins, looked at how much they cost, how easy they were to care for, and, vitally important for us, the ones that were non-toxic to cats, since, well, cats.
Turned out that spider plants were very near the top in amount of air filtered, and very near the top in how effective they were at filtering out all but one of the categories of common toxins. They're cheap, and nearly impossible to kill. Cats and other animals can munch on them all day without any ill effects, except that they'll make cats puke up hairballs, but they seem to enjoy that. . .
So then we looked at the last category of toxin, to see what was best for filtering that, taking into account price, ease of care, and pet-edibility.
Daisies. Gerbera daisies, specifically.
So, if you are worried that your house may be outgassing icky stuff at you, get some spider plants and potted daisies in the place. As interventions go, it's cheap and lacks side effects. And, according to what we found out, it's more effective than any other reasonable intervention.
Years ago, after we had a fire in our downstairs apartment (no injuries to humans or animals, insurance got everything back to normal with no-out-of-pocket expenses to us), I started having dizzy spells and ickyness in our house, and couldn't figure out why. We did some research, and found out that, naturally, residual smoke can cause problems, as can some of the residual chemicals that the fire department used, since the fire was mainly in the kitchen where there are things like oil and electricity and other things that chemicals are better for than water is.
And then we did research on how to fix that problem. We found lots of expensive solutions -- and one cheap one, which, indeed, was reported to be as much as ten times as effective as the expensive solutions. This made the insurance company happy, since they were able to shell out, like, a hundred bucks to clean up the residual airborne toxins.
It turns out that indoor plants do a bang-up job of filtering the air. Plants respirate, and, in doing so, filter and encapsulate airborne particulate matter, and they do this for the entire time during the day when they are awake. If you get enough plants, they don't move as MUCH air as, say, one of those ionizing air purifiers, but certain plants do a better job of hanging on to icky stuff.
We did all the research and I don't remember all the details of everything we found out -- I just remember our conclusions.
First, this is NOT for, like, Kill You Dead Toxins like black mold. We're talking about the Quality Of Life things, not Cause of Death things.
It turns out that there are multiple sorts of things that tend to show up as airborne environmental toxins, from different sources. For instance, things like wall-to-wall carpeting, upholstery, things like that, tend to have various forms of formaldehyde-related compounds that are left over from the manufacturing process, or from how they're packaged and shipped. Not a lot, of course, but enough to cause headaches and dizziness and the like if you're sensitive to them.
I don't remember all the categories and so forth. But we found lists of plants that were especially good at filtering different categories of toxins, looked at how much they cost, how easy they were to care for, and, vitally important for us, the ones that were non-toxic to cats, since, well, cats.
Turned out that spider plants were very near the top in amount of air filtered, and very near the top in how effective they were at filtering out all but one of the categories of common toxins. They're cheap, and nearly impossible to kill. Cats and other animals can munch on them all day without any ill effects, except that they'll make cats puke up hairballs, but they seem to enjoy that. . .
So then we looked at the last category of toxin, to see what was best for filtering that, taking into account price, ease of care, and pet-edibility.
Daisies. Gerbera daisies, specifically.
So, if you are worried that your house may be outgassing icky stuff at you, get some spider plants and potted daisies in the place. As interventions go, it's cheap and lacks side effects. And, according to what we found out, it's more effective than any other reasonable intervention.