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“People assume that in the 21st century buildings should be made of titanium, because we have a narrow definition of progress. Maybe a 21st-century building is made out of dirt used in an intelligent and beautiful way.”

Structural visualization and research projects here

Images from construction of Mapungubwe Visitor’s Center in South Africa:

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More on the Living Building Challenge at http://www.cascadiagbc.org/lbc

image from www.naturaire.com

In research designed to create a breathable environment for NASA orbiting space stations,  scientist Dr. Bill Wolverton discovered that houseplants are the best filters of common pollutants – chemicals released by furniture, carpets, synthetic and treated building materials, photocopiers, etc., leading to a host of dis-ease, respiratory and allergic problems.

Newer homes and buildings, designed for energy efficiency, are often tightly sealed to avoid energy loss from heating and air conditioning systems, trapping VOC’s and creating poor IAQ

“Palms and ferns are among the best filters,” says Bill C. Wolverton, “Spider plants are also excellent because they target benzene, the chemical released from house paint.”

Plants, as the lungs of the earth

Plants produce the oxygen that makes life possible, add precious moisture, and filter toxins. Houseplants can perform these essential functions in the home or work place with the same efficiency as a rainforest in our biosphere.

The advantage that houseplants have in particular is that they evolved in tropical or sub-tropical forests, where they received light filtered through  branches of taller trees. Their leaf composition allows them to photosynthesize more efficiently under relatively low light conditions, which in turn allows them to process gasses in the air efficiently.

Unlike man-made filters that absorb toxins like a sponge—and ultimately end up in the landfill—plants break toxins apart, says Wolverton. Plants suck air into the ground, where microbes degrade toxins into fundamental sources of energy and life.

[See: How to Grow Clean Air - 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office, by B. C. Wolverton]

Recent Studies

In a new study from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, biologist Margaret C. Burchett and colleagues tested the impact of two plants, the Spathiphyllum “peace lily” and the “Janet Craig” Dracaena on air quality in 60 different offices. After 18 weeks of measurements, the findings were striking: As few as six small potted plants reduced overall toxin levels by 75 percent.

“The most remarkable finding is that the plants seemed to ramp up their filtration abilities when the air was more toxic,” says Burchett. She found houseplants were better filters during weeks when pollution levels were high, and performance waned when the air was more pure. Overall, offices with plants had cleaner air than those left without the additional splash of green.

According to a Washington State University study, houseplants also reduce stress and help people relax. Plants have been shown to increase employee productivity, reduce sick leave rates by as much as 60 percent, and heighten a patient’s ability to tolerate pain and physical discomfort. Installations of indoor plants have been shown to help control temperature and humidity as well.

Wolverton recommends adding a few plants to each room, but to see a drastic improvement, Wolverton argues houseplants have to be used as a technology platform.

image from www.manhattanplant.com

From rooftop ecology gardens to greenhouse window boxes that circulate filtered air, Wolverton says houseplants have the most impact when they are literally planted into the house. Wolverton has also designed an EcoPlanter, which claims to more than double a plant’s filtration capacity through the use of activated carbon, and has been marketed in Japan for nearly a decade. Phytofilter, a startup based in Saratoga Springs, New York, recently licensed the exclusive rights to Wolverton’s research and technology, and hopes to integrate large planters into the ventilation systems of buildings and apartment complexes by 2010.

Living Walls and Biofiltration

The landscape+urbanism blog and naturaire.com say:

living wall biofiltration involves a hybrid of two technologies: “… biofiltration, the use of biological systems of beneficial microbes to break organic pollutants down into their benign constituents, and phyto-remediation, the use of green plants to facilitate the remediation or reclamation of contaminated soils or water.”

Unlike mechanical filters which clog or saturate, plants are self-rejuvenating: “Because the pollutants in the air are broken down to their benign constituents, there is nothing to accumulate in the system.”

Plants are beneficial in other ways, by a variety of means. These include, a high surface area ratio, they are regenerative, can actively break down microbes versus merely filtering – both in vegetation and roots, accumulate airborne pollutants and dust, and provide a CO2 sink via photosynthesis.
While NASA found that some of the plants were better than others for absorbing these common pollutants, all of the plants had properties that were useful in improving overall indoor air quality. NASA also noted that some plants are better than others in treating certain chemicals. For example, English ivy, gerbera daisies, pot mums, peace lily, bamboo palm, and Mother-in-law’s Tongue were found to be the best plants for treating air contaminated with Benzene. The peace lily, gerbera daisy, and bamboo palm were very effective in treating Trichloroethylene. Additionally, NASA found that the bamboo palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue, dracaena warneckei, peace lily, dracaena marginata, golden pathos, and green spider plant worked well for filtering Formaldehyde. After conducting the study, NASA and ALCA came up with a list of the most effective plants for treating indoor air pollution.

Recommended plants

The NASA studies generated the recommendation that you use 15 to 18 good-sized houseplants in 6 to 8-inch diameter containers to improve air quality in an average 1,800 square foot house. The more vigorously they grow, the better job they’ll do for you.

Soil and roots were also found to play an important role in removing air-borne pollutants. Micro-organisms in the soil become more adept at using trace amounts of these materials as a food source, as they were exposed to them for longer periods of time. Their effectiveness is increased if lower leaves that cover the soil surface are removed, so there is as much soil contact with the air as possible.

1. Philodendron scandens `oxycardium’, Heartleaf philodendron
2. Philodendron domesticum, Elephant ear philodendron
3. Dracaena fragrans `Massangeana’, Cornstalk dracaena
4. Hedera helix, English Ivy
5. Chlorophytum comosum, Spider plant
6. Dracaena deremensis `Janet Craig’, Janet Craig dracaena
7. Dracaena deremensis `Warneckii’, Warneck dracaena
8. Ficus benjamina, Weeping Fig
9. Epipiremnum aureum, Golden pothos
10. Spathiphyllum `Mauna Loa’, Peace lily
11. Philodendron selloum, Selloum philodendron
12. Aglaonema modestum, Chinese evergreen
13. Chamaedorea sefritzii, bamboo or reed palm
14. Sansevieria trifasciata, Snake plant
15. Dracaena marginata , Red-edged dracaena
16. Gerbera jamesonii,  Gerbera Daisy
17. Chrysantheium morifolium, Pot Mum
18. Ficus elastica, Rubber Plant

image from www.good.is - click image to enlarge

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[audio:TM20090118edit.mp3]

Once upon a time there was an economic disaster that laid low the United States of America and spread hardships from sea to shining sea and even out across the oceans blue. Then came a war of unprecedented proportions. But we beat back the Great Depression and won the Second World War. It’s more than a little relevant at this point to ask, “How’d we do that?”

Far from the federal government’s admonition to spend vaguely toward prosperity, delivered in the early days of sliding toward our current meltdown with delivery of our juicy little “economic stimulus payments,” which we’re the first of this year’s bail outs and which cost the United States around $150 billion dollars, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt built us out of the Depression and won the War by saying, “Don’t spend – save. Invest in the future of this country and let’s build it up as if we believed in its future.”

The “it” that got built started out with dams, bridges, post offices, soil reclamation and reforestation projects. The government was paying people, but they actually did something. Then, with Nazi Germany on the warpath and Imperial Japan too, the “it” turned into tanks, guns, bombs and airplanes. But build as if our survival depended on it we did.

Today we wake up to discover we’ve been building suburban sprawl, the most inefficient form of habitat we could ever have imagined, a form so bad it renders car-based cities the largest contributor to climate change and species extinction extant. There’s where the bizarrely expensive houses miles from anything else, with the even more bizarre mortgage terms, began and spread. There’s where the mess was first and worst, compounded by the raising cost of gasoline, asphalt, car depreciation and everything else automotive. Take a map of the Bay Area or anywhere else and you will see the per-person demand for energy and contribution to climate change goes up as population density and “mixed-uses” goes down. Surprise! We are facing another World War, the War of the current built environment against the World itself.

So what to build this time around? Instead of dams, guns and bombs our economic and ecological, national and planet survival depends on building the ecologically tuned, higher density, mixed-use city with its subsystems of transit and bicycle transportation and solar and wind energy. Bail out is not the right term for infusing federal money into building a better world and I doubt Roosevelt used the term, though extreme conservatives of his time probably though of it as a bail out of the worker. Today’s bail out is proposed for the people who at best could go on to loan money into action by financing… something – but what? The last big thing on their track record was exactly what imploded causing the current disaster: car-dependent sprawl, plus a certain measure of their own contagious greed.

Liberals say bail out the small guy (and don’t mention the same old sprawling mess) by trying to shore up mortgages to energy hog buildings and commutes. The general notion that the federal government should actually do something here is completely appropriate, but what?

In early 1942 Roosevelt told the automobile manufacturers it was going to be illegal to make any more cars until this war gets won. They didn’t believe it at first, but they got paid, too. And that’s what they did: joined everyone building us out of the Depression and War. For a year and a half in the middle of the war – amazing to our ears today – not a car was produced. And we won. We need a clear strategy like the New Deal building up to win the Second World War. I wouldn’t advise banning cars today, but I would advise building the city that simply doesn’t need them. In other words, how to get out of our economic mess? Build out, don’t Bail out. Ecologically tuned cities are the answer.

Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders, Inc., of Oakland, and author of Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, New Society Publishers.

Ecocities
Why is it a great vision for urban development?

We need cities to thrive with lower energy demand, which people are now beginning to appreciate with increasing oil and gasoline prices. The ecocity model addresses energy and economic issues starting where they begin, at the land use foundation.

Ecocities, together with their appropriate subsystems – rail, bicycle and foot transportation, solar and wind energy and organic farming – constitute what to build for a prosperous future.

Please join us and help make it happen!

1560 Alice Street #21
Oakland, California 94612
Ecocity Builders
Website: ecocitybuilders.org

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