Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisisweirdok | Hacker News Reader

You'd need hundreds of houseplants to mitigate the co2 created by one person completely, I am not sure if a few would be better than nothing.

View on HN

There are more variables at play than just co2, humans are not perfectly elastic spherical CO2 emitters ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/greengood.aspx

Do you know a chart of how fast a plant turns over carbon dioxide? I'm trying to search, but the results are mostly global warming related.

It varies by plant type, health, and other factors. So it's hard to be specific.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-many-plants-would-i...

>back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest you’d need around 400 houseplant-sized plants.

Or you can grow spirulina or other microalgae which is much more efficient at converting CO2, and at absorbing the available sunlight. I believe you need about 5 m2 of southern facing window in a bioreactor that is 6 inches deep to convert the 1 kg of CO2 that a person creates. Can't find the citation sadly.

I'm casually experimenting with this too, to improve AQ in my home office. Do you recall the surface area in the 6-inch-deep bioreactor (or total volume)? The only hard numbers I've found are from the Russian BIOS-1,2,3 experiments, which suggest 18L/person of Chlorella will 75-100% compensate for a person's CO2.

I have 18L of Spirulina, which appears to be having some effect, though not anywhere near a complete offset. Though, my setup is quite sub-optimal, and I've seen articles that suggest Chlorella is a couple times more efficient at biofixation than Spirulina. Continuing to tinker :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com