Solution to sick-building syndrome found in plants.

• Author: ROSS, JAN

New biofilter has the capacity to break down noxious fumes while recycling air

Your head is pounding. Your eyes are burning. And you generally feel nauseous and downright miserable. The funny thing is, you only feel this way at the office.

Maybe you're allergic to work? Or maybe you're another victim of sick-building syndrome?

The technicians at Sudbury's Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT) have teamed up with University of Guelph researchers in developing an air filtration system that uses plants to scrub indoor air clean of toxic airborne nasties.

With eyes on the lucrative commercial and institutional building market, they have produced the Biofilter, a free-standing, self-contained ecosystem that captures and breaks down noxious fumes and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) while recycling indoor air in the process.

Though still in the prototype stage, the research group intends to commercialize the product within the next two years.

The module is big enough to filter the air inside the entire 32,000-square-foot NORCAT building in Sudbury, but small enough to fit inside an office lobby, an executive boardroom, cafeteria, shopping mall or any place people congregate.

When the first prototype was installed in NORCAT's foyer two years ago, the number of respiratory infections and other ailments among staff at the Cambrian College institute dropped off dramatically. Further testing was done with monitoring devices in determining how quickly paint fumes were eliminated from the building.

"We've figured we were able to clean up (the air in) this whole building in about eight hours," says Dale Boucher, NORCAT's manager of prototype development and advanced technologies.

Since the energy crisis of the 1970s, the construction industry has super-insulated homes and offices against energy leaks using man-made materials like particle board, synthetic fibres and plastic which can emit harmful compounds. Most air filters work well in capturing dust and dander, but do little to eliminate noxious VOCs.

The incidence of vick-building syndrome prompted Guelph scientists to look to household plants, and later native Canadian species, for a solution to polluted indoor air problems. With funding support from the Centre for Research in Earth and Space Technology (CREStech), the provincial ministries of environment, agriculture and rural affairs, along with expertise from NORCAT, they built two prototypes.

The first model, on view at NORCAT, is...