A breath of fresh air

Oakland Tribune, Feb 25, 2006 by Elizabeth Jardina, STAFF WRITER

THE WORLD IS FULL of scary statistics. Here's another one: Indoor air can be two to five times as polluted as outdoor air. And the group responsible for this dire little nugget of information? The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

At this point, you might pull your chair back from your kitchen table and look around your kitchen.

You might notice the conspicuous lack of smokestacks, dearth of highway traffic and the complete absence of smoky coal fires in your kitchen.

You might shrug and figure that, once again, somebody is trying to scare you.

But if you live in a typical home typically sealed to keep heat in, full of typical cleaning products, typical carpets, typical furniture, typical paints and other chemicals you're typically living in the midst of not-so-clean air.

If you're feeling the need to open a window right now, that's OK. That's actually one of the EPA's recommended solutions to indoor air pollution. Or you could indulge your green thumb with a crop of houseplants. Or look into less toxic products.

All to take a breath of fresh air.

The air in there So where do those scary statistics come from?

"Indoor air quality can be 10 times worse than outdoor air quality, essentially because of ventilation," says Northern California EPA spokesman Mark Merchant. "The chemicals that come from everyday living, flame retardants, that stuff my wife puts in the cat box to make it smell better."

Dianne Anderson, the green building coordinator for San Mateo County's RecycleWorks program, recently led a brown-bag lunch session onindoor air quality. The list of things that can make air unfresh took up pretty much the entire hour.

"There are volatile organic compounds that come from paint, or you can get formaldehyde from glues, there's PVC, that's vinyl flooring, she says. "All of these have emissions that are floating around in the air.

"If people tend to use a lot of cleaning products or pesticides, any time they're sprayed, it releases chemicals in the air."

Why does all this matter? Poor-quality indoor air might give you a headache, asthma, dizziness, fatigue, or eye, throat or nose irritation.

Some of the biggest sources of indoor air pollution are:

- Cigarette smoke (don't, and definitely don't in the house).

- Unvented or leaky oil, gas and wood stoves and furnaces.

- Carpeting, pressed wood products like plywood and flooring that are treated with formaldehyde (as bad as it sounds).

- Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are released from paints, stains and hobby glue. (This isn't the good kind of organic; "organic" here just means it's a carbon-containing compound.)

- Pesticides and cleaning products, especially those in spray form, which can hang around in the air for longer than you think.

Planting solutions

If you think keeping the air in your house fresh is a sticky problem, there's a scientist in Mississippi who has dealt with even more alarming circumstances.

B.C. Wolverton, author of the book "How to Grow Fresh Air" (Penguin, $18), worked for NASA for 30 years on the problem of developing a closed ecological system that astronauts might be able to use in space.

"How does one create a healthy environment in a closed, energy- efficient home?" Wolverton says. "Compared to the moon, it's relatively simple.

"At NASA, we didn't have the option of raising a window on the moon."

He says houseplants -- ordinary houseplants -- have the ability to absorb lots of the nasty chemicals we're trying to avoid breathing in.

"You can use houseplants to help refresh the air," he says.

This may come as something of a surprise to those who have been diagnosed with allergies, say, and told by their doctors that houseplants are a source of mold.

"The plants are falsely accused," Wolverton declares.

He says that if you don't overwater your plants -- leaving large amounts of moisture that fosters mold in the soil and the saucers underneath them -- it shouldn't be a problem.

Plus, plants seem to have extra protection that nobody fully understands.

"We found that plants, when they transpire -- give off moisture from the leaves -- they emit something that suppresses the mold, bacteria, viruses -- whatever may be in the air," he says. "It may be negative ions. So in addition to removing volatile chemicals from the air, if you have enough plants, they will help suppress nasty molds in the air."

He says he suspects this natural defense from molds may have developed because the tropical plants we typically use as houseplants evolved in low-light conditions under the canopy of the tropical rain forest.

"Warm, dark, perfect for molds," Wolverton says. "Nature had to give them some way to protect their leaves."

One of his favorite houseplants is the lady palm (Rhapis excelsa).

"It's one of the easiest to maintain, and it has less of a problem with insects, old mealybugs and so forth, that will attack plants," he says. "It's sort of a tough leaf so your animals and children won't chew on it. Of course, the whole palm family, based on our studies, are among the better ones for removing those volatile organic chemicals."