Want to help the environment in your living room or office? The Wellness
Letter, from the University of California at Berkeley, reports on the
amazing powers of the hardy spider plant. These plants can help reduce
common airborne pollutants and improve the general quality of the air.
An excerpt from this article follows:
---------------------
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF SPIDER PLANTS
As we reported in 1986, a NASA scientist, B.C. Wolverton, who was
looking for ways to cleanse the air in space stations, discovered that
houseplants actually remove pollutants from the air. Indoor air often
contains carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide released from gas stoves
or furnaces, formaldehyde from furnishings or building materials, and
smoke from cooking or tobacco use. It turns out that houseplants,
besides looking nice and adding a bit of oxygen to the air, may actually
perform a service.
For some reason, spider plants, one of the hardiest, most ubiquitous
of houseplants, actually seemed to do the best job. Wolverton
concentrated on three pollutants: formaldehyde, benzene, and
trichloroethylene (TCE), which can come from treated wood, furnishings,
carpeting, clothing, cleaning chemicals, and other common domestic
sources. Not only spider plants but some daisies, chrysanthemums, bamboo
palm, English ivy, philodendron, and golden pothos also did a good job
removing these chemicals. This additional research was reported in a
1989 study Wolverton conducted for NASA under the auspices of the
Foliage for Clean Air Council, a nonprofit group underwritten by the
decorative houseplants industry.
It's also been shown that potting soil itself absorbs pollutants and
removes them from the air. Indeed, a study in Environmental Pollution in
1989, authored by Thad Godish of Ball State University in Muncie,
Indiana, showed that defoliated spider plants achieved higher reductions
of formaldehyde than those with leaves, and that potting soil is
effective, too--but not for long. What combats the pollution is not just
one element, but the chemical interaction among soil, roots, plants, and
the microorganisms in the soil.
---------------------
So begins this issue's featured article from The Wellness Letter.
This article and others from The Wellness Letter and additional publications
are available free from The Electronic Newsstand, a service which
collects articles, editorials, and table of contents from over 50
magazines and provides them to the Global Internet community.
Access to The Electronic Newsstand is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week via Gopher, an information navigation and retrieval technology from the
University of Minnesota.
For those without a local Gopher client program, The Electronic Newsstand
provides a telnet account which will allow you to use a text based Gopher
client to access our service.
To access The Electronic Newsstand,
via Local Gopher Client:
Hostname: gopher.internet.com
Port: 2100
via the Gopher Home Menu at U of Minn:
Other Gopher and Information Servers/
North America/
USA/
General/
The Electronic Newsstand (tm)
via Gopher Link Information:
Name=The Electronic Newsstand
Type=1
Port=2100
Path=1/
Host=gopher.internet.com
via Telnet:
Hostname: gopher.internet.com
Loginname: enews
Password: <not required>
via World Wide Web:
URL: gopher://gopher.inter.com/
If you have any suggestions on how we might improve this service, or
need more information, please email staff at enews.com
--The Electronic Newsstand Staff
