The Research

Welcome to Green Your Air, the place to buy plants that naturally filter the air you breathe.  We've put together some of our favorite plants that absorb and filter your air of harmful chemicals and airborne toxins. Fresh air, green plants and a healthy atmosphere for you and your family to grow within. Whether you're decorating the baby's nursery, livening your living space, freshening your work area or sending a thoughtful gift, Green Your Air's NASA certified plants are what you need. 

Is the indoor environment really that polluted? Isn’t the indoors where we go to protect ourselves from the dirty outdoors?

We say yes it is, and yes, it should be!

-       Modern scientific research has shown that the indoor environment can be as much as 10 times more polluted than the outdoors.

-       The United States EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) ranks indoor air pollution as one of the top 5 threats to public health.

-       Today, people spend as much as 90% of their lives indoors.

What makes the indoor air quality so poor?

Here are the 3 main reasons:

1.     Buildings have become hermetically sealed

2.     Modern furnishings are made of synthetic materials

3.     Human bioeffluents

You might be asking what hermetically sealed buildings are, right?

During the energy crisis in the early 1970’s there was a huge push in keeping homes and buildings more efficient.  Hermetically sealed is just a smarter way to say airtight.  Around this same time, people started noticing widespread problems in indoor air quality. Simply said, we need our air to be circulated. Buildings should be airtight, because we need to conserve energy, but we need a way to naturally filter and keep the indoors ventilated.

What’s wrong with my home furnishings?

- Most furniture is no longer made of natural materials. They are made primarily of synthetic, or artificial, materials, held together with toxic glues and resins.

- New carpets contain a whole host of chemicals including toluene, benzene, formaldehyde, ethyl benzene, styrene, and acetone, chemicals that are known to cause cancer and produce fetal abnormalities in test animals. Scary, right?

- Even electronic devices emit various VOCs or volatile organic compounds.

  What are human bioeffluents?

-       Bioeffluents are substances emitted through normal biological processes, making humans a contributing factor in poor indoor air quality.

-       Space scientists say that in addition to carbon dioxide, humans release as many as 150 volatile substances including carbon monoxide, hydrogen methane, alcohols, phenols, methyl indole, aldehydes, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, volatile fatty acids, indol, mercaptans and nitrogen oxixes (dioxides).

Plants Clean Air and Water for Indoor Environments

Public Safety Originating Technology/NASA Contribution 

Although one of NASA’s goals is to send people to the far reaches of our universe, it is still well known that people need Earth. We understand that humankind’s existence relies on its complex relationship with this planet’s environment­—in particular, the regenerative qualities of Earth’s ecosystems. 

In the late 1960s, B.C. “Bill” Wolverton was an environmental scientist working with the U.S. military to clean up the environmental messes left by biological warfare centers. At a test center in Florida, he was heading a facility that discovered that swamp plants were actually eliminating Agent Orange, which had entered the local waters through government testing near Eglin Air Force Base. After this success, he wanted to continue this line of research and moved to what was at the time called the Mississippi Test Facility, but is now known as NASA’s Stennis Space Center. 

He was funded by the Space Agency to research the environment’s natural abilities to clean itself as part of what is now Stennis’ Environmental Assurance Program. The goalswere to clean the Center of chemicals left behind through wastes and to supply information to NASA engineers about closed-environment “eco” support that may prove helpful in designing sustainable living environments for long-term habitation of space. A tertiary goal was to provide usable technologies to NASA’s Technology Utilization Program, essentially making the research available to the American public.

The first step for Wolverton’s research was to continue the remediation work he had started with the military. He was tasked with using plants to clean waste water at the NASA Center. To this day, Wolverton’s design, which replaces a traditional septic system with water hyacinths, is still in use. His research then turned to using plants to improve air quality. 

In 1973, NASA scientists identified 107 volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air inside the Skylab space station. Synthetic materials, like those used to construct Skylab, give off low levels of chemicals. This effect, known as off-gassing, spreads the VOCs, such as formaldehyde, benzene, and trichloroethylene, all known irritants and potential carcinogens. When these chemicals are trapped without circulation, as was the case with the Skylab, the inhabitants may become ill, as the air they breathe is not given the natural scrubbing by Earth’s complex ecosystem. 

The BioHome at NASA’s Stennis Space Center was 45 feet long, 16 feet wide, and used common indoor house plants as living air purifiers.

Around the same time that Wolverton was conducting his research into VOCs, the United States found itself in an energy crisis. In response, builders began making houses and offices more energy efficient. One of the best ways to do this was to make the buildings as airtight as possible. While keeping temperature-controlled air in place, this approach reduced circulation. Combined with the modern use of synthetic materials, this contributed to what became known as Sick Building Syndrome, where toxins found in synthetic materials become concentrated inside sealed buildings, making people feel sick.

The solution Wolverton sought was not to make indoor environments less energy efficient or to move away from the convenience of synthetic materials; rather, the plan was to find a solution that restores personal environments. The answer, according to a NASA report later published by Wolverton in 1989, is that “If man is to move into closed environments, on Earth or in space, he must take along nature’s life support system.” Plants. 

One of the NASA experiments testing this solution was the BioHome, an early experiment in what the Agency called “closed ecological life support systems.” The BioHome, a tightly sealed building constructed entirely of synthetic materials, was designed as suitable for one person to live in, with a great deal of the interior occupied by houseplants. Before the houseplants were added, though, anyone entering the newly constructed facility would experience burning eyes and respiratory difficulties, two of the most common symptoms of Sick Building Syndrome. Once the plants were introduced to the environment, analysis of the air quality indicated that most of the VOCs had been removed, and the symptoms disappeared.