Natural air cleaning

St. Gabriel's Parish living wall 3m x 8m

Nedlaw Living Walls make living walls with a purpose – to clean out indoor air pollutants and allergens. It’s a different focus than standard living walls/vertical gardens. Given the correct installation of the living walls, they can actually replace traditional air filters in your home.

The leaves of the plants change the carbon dioxide into oxygen, but it’s the roots of the plants that take out most of the chemicals according to multiple studies. The living walls from Naturaire facilitate the process of the air cleaning by using a fan and drawing air from the home through the roots of the plants and back out into the room. That process helps clean out the home of the over 300 voc’s (volatile organic compounds) that can potentially be found there.

The living wall system can degrade and breakdown the VOC’s quickly and naturally, even in large volumes of air and acts as a completely natural biofilter. Since they no only can capture, but also breakdown the VOC’s, they end up being able to remove many harmful pollutants that other air filters can’t. According to their website, the air quality of a space relying almost entirely on an active living wall is at least as good as a similar indoor space using a high-tech ventilation system that replaces the building air up to six times per hour.

You can make the living wall system an active biofilter in one of two ways: hooking it up to the HVAC or using a fan in the back of the living wall. The HVAC is the most effective way because it can filter the air of the whole house. The air is drawn through the living wall and cleaned, then into the HVAC system and then disseminated through the house. The second method works as well, but is more localized as it just draws and circulates the air from a particular room.

Remington Group Living Wall freestanding 2 sided wall 35 meters square

How well does the system work?
During studies at the University of Guelph, common indoor air pollutants were released into the air to determine the living wall’s effect on the VOC’s. A single pass through the Living Wall removed up to 80% of the formaldehyde, 50% of the toluene and 10% of TCE (trichloroethylene). The filter is only 5 cm thick, but the ability to have such a strong effect on the chemicals is amazing.

“Concentrations of toluene and formaldehyde in the aquatic system did not increase during the four-week experiment, suggesting that these materials were readily metabolized. TCE levels in the aquatic system initially did increase slightly, but then plateaued, suggesting a possible capability to degrade this compound. Even before the challenge, we knew that two to three percent of the bacteria present had the ability to break down VOCs.” -From their website

“Through photosynthesis, green plants are able to convert CO₂ — which is considered an indoor pollutant — into oxygen. The true impact of this on indoor air quality is minor. To be a true CO₂ scrubber would require over 10m² of wall per occupant instead of the typical 0.2m²required to provide clean air.”

How big do you want the living wall?

The suggested dimensions are 1 square meter or yard of active living wall or biofilter (a living wall with an air circulation system attached) for every 100 square feet of floor space.

Remington Vertical Garden

WESST Corporation (Women’s Economic Self-Sufficiency Team) 420 sq ft

Living walls home owner

Sassafraz Restaurant, Toronto living wall 22 sq meters