The Plants and their Benefits

There are several books about natural air purification. The best one we found is "How to Grow Fresh Air" by B.C. Wolverton. This book is a great resource because it ranks the plants by effectiveness and ease of care. It gives care information and tells you about what kind of chemicals it removes from the air. We used it to choose the plants for our system. We chose the golden pothos, several kinds of dracaena, snake plant, dumb cane, ferns, and several kinds of palms. When creating an air purification system it is important to balance the kinds of plants you include for optimal oxygen transpiration and so that you are removing the chemicals you are bringing in from your air. Golden pothos are the power house of VOC removal. They metabolize most of the chemicals new plastic, new carpeting, electronics, and dry cleaning emit. A lot of people experience respiratory irritation when they go inside a building. This is called Sick Building Syndrome. It can be very severe, especially in new buildings and for people with preexisting respiratory illness. Pothos can be a great way to combat some of these symptoms. The best way to create a small scale system is to put the plants where you spend the most time, for example, near your bed or desk. A plant can clean the air most effectively in a 6 to 8 foot radius around it. So putting them where you spend the most time and then having good air circulation will be most beneficial and cheapest if you are working on a budget.

Starting this Project

This project started as a conversation between Andrew, Tim, Nathan and myself. We were discussing the TED Talk given by Karmal Meattle. He had been diagnosed with serious respiratory issues because of the air quality in New Delhi and wanted to do something about it. He started to look at a NASA study on how plants can drastically improve the air quality in sealed spaces. He then started to bring plants into all the buildings his architecture firm built, and has now made a business out of these "green buildings". So all of us looked at each other and all the new materials in this center and said, "Wouldn't it be awesome to build on of these systems." So we did a lot of research and determined that the best plants for our space were golden pothos, snake plant, and palms and dracaena. These plants are ideal for their air cleaning properties and the ease of their care. They work together in a very special way. Snake plants go through respiration at night and palm trees and dracaena go through respiration during the day. The pothos are very special, they not only create oxygen but the also metabolize chemicals such as VOC's, TCE's, and other harmful chemicals. These things can cause respiratory irritation, cancer, allergies, and asthma. It is very important that the people who work in the Center for Student Innovation at RIT can breathe in clean air and stay healthy. These systems can easily be adapted to smaller scales for the home or personal office.
Here is a link to the TED Talk that started all of this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air.html