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Associate Professor Fraser Torpy: Most people think they're escaping from air pollution when they go indoors. 
 
Dr Peter Irga: There's just so many different variables that we can look at when it comes to plants and removing air pollutants. That's so interesting for me.  
 
Torpy: And at the end of the day, we don't do any work. Plants do it all for us. 
 
People come here with a practical mindset and to do the work we do. You've got to be practical. This isn't theoretical work. This is real pollution. Real plants, real effects. We have this new emerging problem. Gasoline petrol vapours are highly carcinogenic.  
 
Irga: It was rather shocking for me to to read those first reports. We discovered indoor air pollution is 2 to 5 times worse than outdoor. 
 
Torpy: And over the long term, we are talking 20, 30 years we get these cancer effects appearing. People with attached garages in their homes, you basically have the exhaust pipe in your lounge room.  
 
Johan Hodgson, Ambius Pacific: Petrol vapour is such a concern. Not just locally, but globally. How do you remove these horrific chemicals indoors? Can plants have an impact?  
 
Torpy: I could see the plant in the chamber with this horrible carcinogen, and I never expected that biology could work that way. 
 
Irga: Your hands are shaking when the data is rolling in and you're seeing the benefits. It's shocking. From our research, it's less about the plant. It's actually about the bacteria that grow on the roots. But you still need the plant there. So that's that symbiotic relationship.  
 
Torpy: What we didn't expect was that the plants were going to preferentially remove the most toxic VOCs first. 
 
We don't know why they did that, of course, but they did. 
 
Irga: It was amazing to know that plants could remove air pollutants and what I wanted to do is take that to a larger scale. Let's look at how a building could have ventilation that passed air through plants, so we can increase the rate in which air pollutants could be removed. I'm concerned that that might be too limited. We need to cover every surface in something green. 
 
Torpy: UTS is the world home of plants and air quality research. I tried to facilitate environment where students from the university or students from elsewhere come in and and they take over where I've left off and they move things forward. What's the problem with this view? Poor air quality, ridiculous energy requirements. Poor health. How are we going to fix that? 
 
Trying to really redesign spaces. That's going to be a really big ticket going forward as we try and make these indoor environments healthier.