If you're concerned about indoor pollution, I highly recommend house plants.
In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air.
Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm).
Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much.
Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.
Is there any sensor/device on the market capable of detecting carcinogenic VOC at a reasonable price?
If not is there a market opportunity to create such a product, maybe integrated into home HVAC systems that can sample circulating air with a mobile app dashboard for monitoring levels?
I've always worried that everything in my house is off-gassing and slowly affecting my health and lifespan negatively.
Do these have any actual impact on health? Like, if I get a house plant, am I going to live a year longer? Two years longer?
That’s the whole problem with all this “health science.” It’s completely disconnected from expected outcomes that you can use to determine whether this is something even worth caring about.
EDIT re: sibling comment debunking impact of indoor plants. See, this is exactly what I mean. When you don’t tie observed correlations to concrete outcomes, all you do is confuse people. It’s not quite junk science, but it’s not helpful reporting of the science.
The "conclusions" people draw from that study have been disproven again and again. The study did nothing to prove that a few specimens of certain kinds of house plants are enough to replace an air filter or change.
yes, i bought a spider plant and boston fern as they're easy to find. both grow like crazy in the sun (fern also needs humidity, so it's in the bathroom).
i'm not sure how well they filter the air, but it's nice to have green, living things around that are hard to kill. =)
I always wonder about small acrylic hairs and such that float about the house. In a bright room just flex your jumper, there's thousands of these weird impurities, and I can't imagine they can be filtered out easily before or after getting into the lungs.
The biggest shocker is when you disturb loft insulation. They claim it's not terrible (specifically if undisturbed), but floating glass strands can't be all that nice.
It all depends on how well your body is able to clean them out and what it does if it remains. Asbestos isn't bad because it's a fiber it's bad because it is hard for your lungs to move and damages the interior.
Indoor air quality means different things to different people. There are so many chemicals and particles that qualify as air 'pollution' that I find it helpful to rank how important they are. This article does a good job of quantifying the damage by pollutant, using a metric called 'Disability Adjusted Life Years': https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/which-indoor-air-polluta...
You can see that while there are a lot of things to consider, PM2.5 is by far the most dangerous. Surprisingly to me, mold is actually the next most dangerous, implying that indoor humidity control is also very important.
I got a laseregg 2, and highly recommend it or a similar monitor. It's been very eye opening to see how various scenarios affect air pollution:
* frying indoors generally swiftly puts things in the unsafe range. Especially if it led to browning.
* a neighbour's bbq would do the same if the window was open
* idling truck on the street for construction? Unsafe range
* surprisingly, the toaster would raise levels if it was on high enough to brown toast
Really helped me make better decisions about when to open/shut windows and how to cook.
I got the laseregg after reading reviews of air quality monitors used in china. Apparently it holds up well to specialized lab sensors. It has a battery and can be moved around
I have serious food allergies and celiac disease in addition to allergies/sensitivities to ingredients of cleaning products. I have problems entering are staying in a lot of environments, pretty much anywhere that I don’t have control over the air or access to fresh air.
The results on the toaster are not surprising. I’ve worried about toast smoke in coffee shops before because small amounts of gluten or allergens can make me sick.
It’s great that they are measuring concentrations of chemicals in the air related to cleaners. Something like someone spraying air freshener or mopping the floor with Pinesol makes me feel ill, and continued exposure will make me sneeze and my eyes turn red and so forth.
It’s amazing how casual people are about this. I sat down at the bar the other day and immediately the bartender started spraying Windex all over and wiping a wall. I had to rinse out my nose, and gained a headache. It definitely ruined the experience for me, but most people don’t think twice.
The possibility is raised that “The dominant source of VOCs in Los Angeles is now emissions from consumer products, including toiletries and cleaning fluids.“ Again, not a surprise. A statistic that quote to people is that about 5% of VOC emissions in the United States come from dryer vents, from mostly unnecessary chemicals in detergent and dryer sheets. Almost every single chemical product that is packaged for consumers and sold in plastic bottles at stores makes me very, very sick. Conditioners, shampoo, clothing detergent, pesticides, air freshener, candles soaps, fabric softener, floor cleaners, dish soap, glass cleaner. The annoying thing is that while the base formulation of these is bad enough, the part that is the worst for me is the completely unnecessary fragrances.
Only if you think of it that way really, considering a) the majority of people don't have problems and b) long-term effects of those products are sometimes not known at all, let alone known by the general public. Don't forget things like allergy information for food etc are fairly recent developments even in the western world. And studies showing/hinting at links between cleaning produtcs and premature deaths etc are also fairly recent I think, so unfortunately the general population isn't really aware of the dangers.
yes, i used to use "simple green" for cleaning because it was advertised as non-toxic, but the resultant sneezing and coughing made me move to even simpler cleaners like dish soap and baking soda.
I've been exposed to air toxics risk assessments through my work. The problem, in my mind, is not the toxics we're facing in our homes (or even outdoors). It's that humans are really bad at understanding risk. Let's imagine an annual Thanksgiving dinner presents an excess lifetime cancer risk of 2 (made up number -- probably much lower). Many people would find that unacceptable. But why? Many activities we engage in every day present much more material risk. For instance, this article says the odds of dying in a car crash are approximately 10.7 per 100k. That is 10,000 in a million. Yet we gladly get behind the wheel every day.
Noncancer effects are gauged in terms of multiples of the lowest observed effect level or the no observed effect level. If across a spectrum of exposures, we observed no effect at a certain level, that would be our NOEL. Of course, the observed effect could be a runny nose. 100x the NOEL could still be a runny nose (it could, in fact, be no adverse effect at all), but people see 100x the benchmark level and freak out.
In my mind, we really need to reshape this discussion around toxics. People are willing to suffer great costs to avoid hazards that do not, in fact, present material risks.
I got a air quality monitor when we had the California wildfires, and I was shocked to learn that my air quality was worse indoors when cooking than outdoors during the wildfires. (I am now in the process of getting a properly vented range hood instead of the dinky recirculating one we have).
I bought an AQI / PM2.5 monitor and was shocked to find the same thing. I placed it in an upstairs bedroom, far removed from the kitchen, and the PM2.5 readings jump to unhealthy levels within minutes or cooking, even that far away. HVAC systems do a great job of circulating bad air throughout the home. I've also observed measurable CO level increases in the upstairs while running a gas oven, using a low-level monitor.
I've also come to the conclusion that a vented range hood is really an essential for indoor cooking of any kind. It should definitely be the #1 priority for any home to improve air quality.
Air quality sensors don't tell the whole story, and they can only notice particulates of certain sizes.
The worst day for me during the past few years' Seattle-area smoke events didn't register as a bad day on the official air quality reports because the particles were too big. But it was the only time where I actually had to stop and take a taxi 7 blocks because I just started coughing uncontrollably and couldn't carry my groceries home.
I have a sensitivity to certain cooking fumes. I've tried to assess it objectively like it's a nocebo, which would be great if it were.
There are two cafes in SF I used to frequent who do their cooking in the same main space as guests, do not have much if any ventilation, and, if I was there hacking on my laptop around lunch time, I would always get headaches and need to leave. (one is a trendy workspace cafe, that I feel bad naming). It has not happened at other SF cafes despite a lot of working-in-cafes. I also used to have a roommate who didn't like the sound of our ventilation fan and wouldn't open the kitchen back door (to the outdoors) because of the cool air. Anytime she cooked with the oven I would get a headache and need to leave the apartment, while having no problem with the third roommate's cooking who preferred to ventilate.
If you got an air quality monitor you'd likely see shocking levels in those scenarios. I got a laseregg two, and normal frying can send indoor air quality to unhealthy levels if something gets a bit browned. Even with a fan on.
It's portable and has a battery. Quite eye opening to test it in various scenarios.
The dominant source of air pollution for almost all of human history has been smoke of one sort or another (see: historical dramas that show indoor light/heating with candles and fireplaces, https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/), to the extent that I personally doubt banning secondhand smoke indoors would have made much difference to non-smokers' health before open wood fires and coal fires were phased out.
I suppose it's a notable achievement of our society that both industrial pollution and domestic smoke has been reduced so much that VOCs from other sources indoors are our greatest worry.
I've found many houses I've been in to be extremely stuffy and stale inside...I think most American homes fall into a bad middle ground for indoor air quality: well enough sealed to trap indoor pollutants, but lacking the more sophisticated HVAC systems that can efficiently exchange fresh air.
Additionally, it seems that many Americans also really hate opening their windows (and indeed the climate often doesn't really lend itself to opening the windows, in some places ever). I grew up in a drafty old house with no A/C, and even as a kid felt other people's–newer, not drafty, air conditioned–homes had an airless feeling.
It's been interesting to follow the recent studies on indoor CO2 and other air pollution...I don't feel quite so crazy for wanting to open the windows all the time when visiting family.
Agreed, but many houses in the Bay Area were built in the 1920's (both the houses I've owned were). The windows in my house are not sealed well. The double-hung sash windows have space for the rope and I can feel a draft on windy days.
All this talk of CO2 recently has made me value that my house is drafty.
I have used 3M Filtrete room-air purifiers as white noise generators for my kids since they were born > 7 years ago. It’s amazing how much is in the air...
I believe growing up in a dusty environment contributed to my asthma...
The narrative in this article is heavy, but basically if I understand this right..cooking food indoors pollutes the air, and because you are in your kitchen indoors, you're polluting your own living space's air?
I am on the fence about research like this. On one hand, as an engineer by training it's hard for me to countenance the idea that any research (properly conducted) could be bad. On the other hand, people have been cooking indoors since time immemorial, and even things like toasters are more than a century old. If they were dangerous, we'd know by know. The risk is that such research gets oversold by the media into a panic, as we have seen time and again. Look at what "science" has done for nutrition in the last few decades--upset a bunch of traditional norms, without offering any meaningful advance. Are VOCs (for the most part, "smells") going to be the subject of the same circus as salt and fat?
People in some countries have been cooking with indoor wood-fired stoves forever, yet we know for sure that these stoves are bad for respiratory health. That doesn't mean all the research is wrong!
I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.
science isn't easy. if we could just trust our intuitions there would be no point.
your sentiment reminds me of the surgeon mentality before germs were discovered. "ive been operating on people for years and saving their lives -- no way could i be giving them an illness just through my hands!", and yet that turned out to be true.
the low hanging fruit are gone but there is a lot left to explain in terms of health. for example millions of people die from many kinds of cancers every year for which we have no idea why.
Why would we "know by now"? If the symptoms aren't immediate and highly specific, couldn't it have gone for millennia unnoticed? Maybe this is the by now.
I've always tried to air my home out as much as I can while cooking. Pretty much all windows are open. Article reaffirms my core avoidance of things like toasters/microwaves.
The article does mention toasters as a particularly bad culprit, but the word `microwave` doesn't appear anywhere in the text. Curious how you have arrived at this connection between two very different devices.
It took me a while, but I eventually ended up getting a indoor air quality monitor. I'm in California, and when the fires happened, I expected my brand new condo building to have decent filtration. According to my Awair monitor (http://getawair.com)... my indoor PM2.5 (Fine Dust) went up to 150 ugm3. 150! We definitely had a chat with the building after that.
But yeah, cooking, cleaning, air fresheners... all of them negatively affect my home air quality. Just need to ventilate at the right times. After the DHH video about this topic, I pulled the trigger and got the monitor, which fortunately also tracks CO2 and chemical (VOCs).
I'm glad to see 2 topics about air quality trending today. I had to finally register to get in on the one topic I actually know about.
[+] [-] pdog|6 years ago|reply
In NASA research[1], common house plants were found to remove toxic agents such as benzene and formaldehyde from the air.
Some of the best air purifying plants: Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant), Dracaena reflexa (song of India), Nephrolepis exaltata (Boston fern), Sansevieria trifasciata (snake plant), and Chamaedorea seifrizii (bamboo palm).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study
[+] [-] martey|6 years ago|reply
Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much.
Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.
[+] [-] hoorayimhelping|6 years ago|reply
>but was conducted under sealed space station conditions and research conducted since has shown mixed results in the home or office
I love houseplants, decorating an indoor space with them provides me a huge psychological boost. But it's not doing anything physically.
[+] [-] sizzle|6 years ago|reply
If not is there a market opportunity to create such a product, maybe integrated into home HVAC systems that can sample circulating air with a mobile app dashboard for monitoring levels?
I've always worried that everything in my house is off-gassing and slowly affecting my health and lifespan negatively.
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
That’s the whole problem with all this “health science.” It’s completely disconnected from expected outcomes that you can use to determine whether this is something even worth caring about.
EDIT re: sibling comment debunking impact of indoor plants. See, this is exactly what I mean. When you don’t tie observed correlations to concrete outcomes, all you do is confuse people. It’s not quite junk science, but it’s not helpful reporting of the science.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] soulofmischief|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orloffm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|6 years ago|reply
i'm not sure how well they filter the air, but it's nice to have green, living things around that are hard to kill. =)
[+] [-] Trivoyage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downtide|7 years ago|reply
The biggest shocker is when you disturb loft insulation. They claim it's not terrible (specifically if undisturbed), but floating glass strands can't be all that nice.
[+] [-] frutiger|6 years ago|reply
In the case of your lungs they get delivered to the great acid bath that is your stomach.
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jly|6 years ago|reply
You can see that while there are a lot of things to consider, PM2.5 is by far the most dangerous. Surprisingly to me, mold is actually the next most dangerous, implying that indoor humidity control is also very important.
[+] [-] graeme|6 years ago|reply
* frying indoors generally swiftly puts things in the unsafe range. Especially if it led to browning.
* a neighbour's bbq would do the same if the window was open
* idling truck on the street for construction? Unsafe range
* surprisingly, the toaster would raise levels if it was on high enough to brown toast
Really helped me make better decisions about when to open/shut windows and how to cook.
I got the laseregg after reading reviews of air quality monitors used in china. Apparently it holds up well to specialized lab sensors. It has a battery and can be moved around
[+] [-] code_duck|6 years ago|reply
The results on the toaster are not surprising. I’ve worried about toast smoke in coffee shops before because small amounts of gluten or allergens can make me sick.
It’s great that they are measuring concentrations of chemicals in the air related to cleaners. Something like someone spraying air freshener or mopping the floor with Pinesol makes me feel ill, and continued exposure will make me sneeze and my eyes turn red and so forth.
It’s amazing how casual people are about this. I sat down at the bar the other day and immediately the bartender started spraying Windex all over and wiping a wall. I had to rinse out my nose, and gained a headache. It definitely ruined the experience for me, but most people don’t think twice.
The possibility is raised that “The dominant source of VOCs in Los Angeles is now emissions from consumer products, including toiletries and cleaning fluids.“ Again, not a surprise. A statistic that quote to people is that about 5% of VOC emissions in the United States come from dryer vents, from mostly unnecessary chemicals in detergent and dryer sheets. Almost every single chemical product that is packaged for consumers and sold in plastic bottles at stores makes me very, very sick. Conditioners, shampoo, clothing detergent, pesticides, air freshener, candles soaps, fabric softener, floor cleaners, dish soap, glass cleaner. The annoying thing is that while the base formulation of these is bad enough, the part that is the worst for me is the completely unnecessary fragrances.
[+] [-] stinos|6 years ago|reply
Only if you think of it that way really, considering a) the majority of people don't have problems and b) long-term effects of those products are sometimes not known at all, let alone known by the general public. Don't forget things like allergy information for food etc are fairly recent developments even in the western world. And studies showing/hinting at links between cleaning produtcs and premature deaths etc are also fairly recent I think, so unfortunately the general population isn't really aware of the dangers.
[+] [-] clairity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcurtiss|6 years ago|reply
Noncancer effects are gauged in terms of multiples of the lowest observed effect level or the no observed effect level. If across a spectrum of exposures, we observed no effect at a certain level, that would be our NOEL. Of course, the observed effect could be a runny nose. 100x the NOEL could still be a runny nose (it could, in fact, be no adverse effect at all), but people see 100x the benchmark level and freak out.
In my mind, we really need to reshape this discussion around toxics. People are willing to suffer great costs to avoid hazards that do not, in fact, present material risks.
[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your-favo...
[+] [-] simple_phrases|6 years ago|reply
There are ~30k automobile deaths in the US per year. Your figure is off by several orders of magnitude.
[+] [-] surfmike|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jly|6 years ago|reply
I've also come to the conclusion that a vented range hood is really an essential for indoor cooking of any kind. It should definitely be the #1 priority for any home to improve air quality.
[+] [-] lukeschlather|6 years ago|reply
The worst day for me during the past few years' Seattle-area smoke events didn't register as a bad day on the official air quality reports because the particles were too big. But it was the only time where I actually had to stop and take a taxi 7 blocks because I just started coughing uncontrollably and couldn't carry my groceries home.
[+] [-] nitrogen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not_a_moth|6 years ago|reply
There are two cafes in SF I used to frequent who do their cooking in the same main space as guests, do not have much if any ventilation, and, if I was there hacking on my laptop around lunch time, I would always get headaches and need to leave. (one is a trendy workspace cafe, that I feel bad naming). It has not happened at other SF cafes despite a lot of working-in-cafes. I also used to have a roommate who didn't like the sound of our ventilation fan and wouldn't open the kitchen back door (to the outdoors) because of the cool air. Anytime she cooked with the oven I would get a headache and need to leave the apartment, while having no problem with the third roommate's cooking who preferred to ventilate.
[+] [-] graeme|6 years ago|reply
It's portable and has a battery. Quite eye opening to test it in various scenarios.
[+] [-] telotortium|6 years ago|reply
> CTRL+F "smoking"
> 0 results
The dominant source of air pollution for almost all of human history has been smoke of one sort or another (see: historical dramas that show indoor light/heating with candles and fireplaces, https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/), to the extent that I personally doubt banning secondhand smoke indoors would have made much difference to non-smokers' health before open wood fires and coal fires were phased out.
I suppose it's a notable achievement of our society that both industrial pollution and domestic smoke has been reduced so much that VOCs from other sources indoors are our greatest worry.
[+] [-] graeme|6 years ago|reply
But as far as I can tell, nicotine doesn't cause lung cancer. That's from the smoke itself - any smoke.
[+] [-] whttheuuu|6 years ago|reply
worrying about second hand smoke (unless you're literally trapped in a room like a bar, etc.) is almost laughable.
[+] [-] macNchz|6 years ago|reply
Additionally, it seems that many Americans also really hate opening their windows (and indeed the climate often doesn't really lend itself to opening the windows, in some places ever). I grew up in a drafty old house with no A/C, and even as a kid felt other people's–newer, not drafty, air conditioned–homes had an airless feeling.
It's been interesting to follow the recent studies on indoor CO2 and other air pollution...I don't feel quite so crazy for wanting to open the windows all the time when visiting family.
[+] [-] e40|6 years ago|reply
All this talk of CO2 recently has made me value that my house is drafty.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|6 years ago|reply
I believe growing up in a dusty environment contributed to my asthma...
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orliesaurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomohawk|6 years ago|reply
Instead of fabric softener, use white vinegar as a liquid fabric softener in your washer. It will make your clothes smell fresh - not vinegary.
That scent that comes off of clothes that are treated with scented detergents and softeners is air pollution.
[+] [-] soulofmischief|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jartelt|7 years ago|reply
I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.
[+] [-] modzu|7 years ago|reply
your sentiment reminds me of the surgeon mentality before germs were discovered. "ive been operating on people for years and saving their lives -- no way could i be giving them an illness just through my hands!", and yet that turned out to be true.
the low hanging fruit are gone but there is a lot left to explain in terms of health. for example millions of people die from many kinds of cancers every year for which we have no idea why.
[+] [-] mbostleman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vallode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NickBusey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Rudebwoy10|6 years ago|reply
But yeah, cooking, cleaning, air fresheners... all of them negatively affect my home air quality. Just need to ventilate at the right times. After the DHH video about this topic, I pulled the trigger and got the monitor, which fortunately also tracks CO2 and chemical (VOCs).
I'm glad to see 2 topics about air quality trending today. I had to finally register to get in on the one topic I actually know about.
[+] [-] ezconnect|7 years ago|reply