Potted plants have demonstrated abilities to remove airborne volatile organic compounds (VOC) in small, sealed chambers over timescales of many hours or days. Claims have subsequently been made suggesting that potted plants may reduce indoor VOC concentrations. These potted plant chamber studies reported outcomes using various metrics, often not directly applicable to contextualizing plants’ impacts on indoor VOC loads. To assess potential impacts, 12 published studies of chamber experiments were reviewed, and 196 experimental results were translated into clean air delivery rates (CADR, m³/h), which is an air cleaner metric that can be normalized by volume to parameterize first-order loss indoors. The distribution of single-plant CADR spanned orders of magnitude, with a median of 0.023 m³/h, necessitating the placement of 10–1000 plants/m² of a building’s floor space for the combined VOC-removing ability by potted plants to achieve the same removal rate that outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already provides in typical buildings (~1 h⁻¹). Future experiments should shift the focus from potted plants’ (in)abilities to passively clean indoor air, and instead investigate VOC uptake mechanisms, alternative biofiltration technologies, biophilic productivity and well-being benefits, or negative impacts of other plant-sourced emissions, which must be assessed by rigorous field work accounting for important indoor processes.

盆栽植物已证明能够在数小时或数天的时间尺度内去除小型密封室中空气中的挥发性有机化合物 (VOC)。随后有人声称盆栽植物可以降低室内 VOC 浓度。这些盆栽植物室研究报告了使用各种指标的结果，通常不能直接适用于将植物对室内 VOC 负荷的影响背景化。为了评估潜在影响，审查了 12 项已发表的腔室实验研究，并将 196 项实验结果转化为清洁空气输送率（CADR，m ³ /h），这是一种空气净化器指标，可以按体积归一化以首先参数化 -室内订单损失。单株CADR分布跨越数量级，中位数为0.023 m ³/h，需要在建筑物的地面空间放置 10–1000 株植物/m ²以实现盆栽植物去除 VOC 的综合能力，以达到与典型建筑物中室外到室内空气交换已经提供的相同去除率（~ 1 小时^-1）。未来的实验应该将重点从盆栽植物的（无）能力转移到被动清洁室内空气，而是研究 VOC 吸收机制、替代生物过滤技术、亲生物生产力和福祉效益，或其他植物源排放的负面影响，这必须通过严格的现场工作对重要的室内过程进行评估。