Hi everyone!
We're fast approaching the end of our Kickstarter campaign and we've really enjoyed your feedback and answering all of your very insightful questions. One question keeps popping up every so often, so we thought we'd put together a little bit of information on the subject:
'Do plants actually clean my home's air?'
This week we wanted to debunk a myth that came from a study waaay back in the 1980's by the nice folks at NASA. This study has been quoted countless times over the years by people promoting plants as air purifiers. However, when you look closer, you'll see that their study used plants in conjunction with activated carbon (which is what really did the air cleaning magic)
Although we'd love to be able to fill our homes with exotic plants and enjoy cleaner air than the French Alps, this sadly isn't true :( From a quick internet search you wouldn't guess that was the case, with many popular home decor sites quick to promise the amazing air purifying abilities of their plants.
As plants are static and don't have any air being pulled through them, they just can't physically remove any of the harmful particulates that are floating around in our homes. In a study by Nature, they ascertained that:
"The distribution of single-plant CADR (clean air delivery rate) spanned orders of magnitude, with a median of 0.023 m3/h"
So to put that into perspective, Briiv is rated at 70 m3/h, which if your were to do a direct comparison, it equates to 3,042 houseplants to a singe Briiv! As much as we'd love to live inside a mini-forest, it's not exactly...practical.
Today NASA grows plants aboard the International Space Station for fresh food and to “create a beautiful atmosphere,” noting their health benefits lie in their ability to improve our mental state.
Although plants may not clean the air of particles as much as we thought, they do one important thing exceptionally well, and that's to lock away CO2 as they grow and release oxygen through photosynthesis.
I hope you found this interesting and if you'd like to read a bit more into the subject, there's a very good article that National Geographic published last year on this.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and if you have any questions in the final days of the campaign, please do let us know!
Thanks everyone and stay safe.
Sean & Team Briiv
