A new study in the journal of Environmental Science & Technology highlights a worrisome reality about dust in our homes. It can contain a mixture of potentially toxic chemicals that leak out of everything from fabrics to paint to flooring materials. This poses possible health issues like asthma and allergies.
Here are three ways to keep indoor as clean as possible:
- Open windows often. Circulation of air helps decrease the concentration of volatile compounds. As the study suggests, they are more highly concentrated indoors than outside, even in outdoor places where the air isn’t entirely clean.
- Buy air-cleansing houseplants. In a study presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, a common houseplant like a spider plant or Caribbean tree cactus were shown to be effective at filtering harmful substances from indoor air. Plants absorb bad compounds from the air onto their leaves and move them to their root zones, where microbes break them down.
- Use a vacuum with a HEPA filter. HEPA is an acronym for high-efficiency particulate air, which means that these filters pick up fine-grained dust and toxins that can escape standard vacuums and contaminate your air.