Fred and Little Lola

For my blog post this week I have decided to take on something to go green instead of giving up something. My roommate and I have adopted two new living creatures in our room, two potted plants named Fred and Little Lola.

            NASA has been researching methods of cleansing the atmosphere and they discovered that many common houseplants and blooming potted plants help fight pollution indoors. Through photosynthesis, plants reportedly get rid of significant amounts of harmful gases out of the air. Pollutants are even absorbed and are rendered harmless in the soil.

            Specifically, houseplants have an advantage over other plants at purifying our air. Houseplants are adapted to tropical areas where they are used to growing beneath dense tropical canopies and must survive in areas of low light. This makes these plants ultra-efficient at capturing light, which means that they must be very efficient in processing the gasses necessary for photosynthesis. Thus, they have greater potential at absorbing other gases, such as harmful ones.

            We all knew that plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen during photosynthesis, but now researchers are informing us that they have found many common houseplants to also absorb benzene, formaldehyde and trichloroethylene as well.

            While NASA found that certain type of plants were better than others for absorbing these common pollutants, all plants had properties that were useful in improving overall indoor air quality. Turns out houseplants are more than just a house decoration.

-A

Works Cited:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/yardandgarden/ygbriefs/h110indoorair.html