Solution to sick-building syndrome found in plants.

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 constructed of metal framing and sheet metal which is matted on three sides with vegetation common to the Sudbury area including club moss, bog laurel, native grasses, cedar and tamarack.

Any VOCs emanating from within the building become food for the microbes attached to the biofilter. A rain sprayer system on the unit periodically washes those tough-to-destroy toxins down into some lower level aquatic swamp and dry land sections where more microbes finish it off.

The unit, which can be hooked up to a building ventilation system, plugs into the wall to run some internal fans, lights and sprayers. It uses no more power than it takes to run two kitchen appliances.

The second prototype was recently installed at Niagara Under Glass, a six-acre commercial greenhouse and botanical gardens in Vineyard, Ont.

A third is likely on the horizon, but there are plans in the works to begin marketing the biofilter and eventually create a company for mass production.

The sales pitch for this technology, says Dr. Alan Darlington, a University of Guelph plant scientist and co-investigator in the project, is in the energy savings, particularly in northern climes.

In most modern office complexes, contaminants are inside causing any number of health problems. To ventilate these spaces, outside air is pumped in to displace those contaminants. But in winter, that air has to be heated first.

"What we're suggesting is that instead of going outside for that air, run (office air) through the biofilter...and simply recycle it," says Darlington. "We're finding the more extreme the climate, the more favourable the technology."

But having a mass of plant life sitting in an office environment might be make the workplace unbearable for allergy sufferers, right? Not so, says Darlington.

"In terms of fungal and bacterial spores, the air coming out the back of the unit is close to the same quality as the rest of the building, so were not adding any spores at all," Darlington says. "The biofilter should actually work at pulling pollen and spores out."

Unlike charcoal filters, there is no saturated hazardous waste to get rid of. Dead biofilter plants can be used for garden mulch.

According to NORCAT's arrangement with Guelph, the research belongs to the university. CREStech receives the rights to commercialize it and will assign those rights either to an existing company or a newly formed one that, must be situated in Northern Ontario.

"We don't take the intellectual properties," says Boucher. We're frying to grow the economy of Northern Ontario. When we get to a point where we can't manufacture 20 (units) a year, we will spin it off to a company."

"Our effort is to commercialize research, not do research. Every project must have a commercial spinoff at the end. That's our mandate."

They hope to be manufacturing units for consumer usage within 30 months. Currently a unit costs between $30,000 to $40,000 to produce. Considering the first prototype cost more than $300,000 to build, Darlington says the end product "will be significantly less."

Both classify the commercial market potential in North America for this technology as enormous and their order book is starting to show.

Thus far, Darlington says about 15 undisclosed companies and individuals have expressed interest in the product. "Some of these buyers are talking multi-orders of six or eight units.

Besides the commercial and institutional sector, they believe it has applications in underground mines, for sealed buildings in the high Arctic and may possibly even have extraterrestrial or space-science applications. The technology has caught the attention of NASA, and Darlington fully expects some version of the biofilter will be on the International Space Station within the next few years.