According to NASA's Clean Air Study, these air-purifying plants—all of them very common and easy to find—are great at getting rid of the dangerous, cancer-causing toxins that you're breathing in right inside your home.
11 Air-Purifying Plants for a Healthy Home
Updated on Aug. 20, 2024
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Rubber Plant
This evergreen tree, native to India, is easily identified by its large, waxy leaves. They’re toxic to animals, but they remove toxicity from your indoor air—especially the formaldehyde emitted by common cleaning and grooming products. They do this by absorbing these toxic gases into their leaves and roots through a process called phytoremediation.
Brighten your landscape with these vivid, colorful plants.
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Aloe Vera Plant
This succulent is good for your health in a bunch of ways. It’s best known for the skin-soothing effects of the gelatinous aloe that can be harvested from its leaves. But aloe vera is also great at eliminating airborne benzene, a chemical found in household cleaners and paint. Is this plant making people go blind?!
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Peace Lily
This plant has a sweet name and makes a lovely gift. But it’s also a powerhouse air purifier that’s perfect for the bathroom. It excels at removing mold spores from the air, and also filters out chemicals like alcohol and acetone—common in hairsprays and nail polish removers. Hummingbirds adore this plant (and so do we).
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Bamboo Palm
This trendy plant gives your decor tropical appeal while filtering formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, benzene, and other harmful elements from the air—and it humidifies indoor air, too. The plant is native to Madagascar and needs bright light in order to thrive.
Confused about how to fertilize dense plants in the garden?
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Spider Plant
The spider plant is not only super easy to care for—and keep alive—but it’s also an effective air purifier, banishing formaldehyde, benzene, and xylene—found in cleaners, paints, and pesticides—from your environment. Keep one in a pot and clip off its little plantlets to use as air plants (no pun intended). These inexpensive plants will make your garden pop.
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Snake Plant
Also known as Mother-in-Law’s Tongue, this plant has leaves that resemble tall, green flames. It’s great at filtering out formaldehyde from the air and getting rid of allergens. It’s also a succulent, so it’s relatively easy to care for, even if you don’t have a particularly green thumb.
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Boston Fern
This lush fern makes a perfect hanging plant, and it draws out traces of formaldehyde from the air. This one is a bit more high maintenance than other air-purifying plants; it requires ample humidity and indirect light, which can be tricky. Here’s how to successfully plant succulents outdoors.
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Weeping Fig
Also known as the Ficus tree, the Weeping Fig makes short work of formaldehyde, xylene and toluene polluting your home’s air. It’s fairly low maintenance, and loves indirect light and lots of water. This one is also poisonous to animals, though. Check out some low-maintenance plants for that shade garden you’ve been wanting to plant.
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English Ivy
This one is often seen crawling up the walls of a home’s exterior, but English Ivy also makes a lovely houseplant. Like all great air purifiers, it removes carcinogenic substances from the air, and looks beautiful doing so. It requires a decent amount of light to thrive. These 12 plant combos are easy and beautiful.
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Chinese Evergreen
Like most tropical greenery, this patterned plant, native to Asia, is a bit high maintenance—but well worth the effort. Not only is it beautiful, but it eliminates plenty of toxins—including formaldehyde, trichloroethylene and benzene, from indoor air.
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Dragon Tree
This common indoor plant is beloved for its ability to remove xylene and trichloroethylene from the air. This plant is native to the jungle and thrives in a humid environment, but doesn’t need a ton of light.
