Phytoplankton and CO2

[pandaparties]

So this might be a really silly question but I've been wondering... It's a pretty common saying how house plants can help reduce CO2 levels and pollutants in your house.
In reality though you'd need a crazy amount of plants for it to truly make an impact and plant density is hard to achieve. But phyto are supposed to be really efficient at consuming CO2 and obviously also easy to get crazy population density unlike with plants. I can't seem to find any actual academic papers but I was wondering if anyone has ever tested the impact of culturing on household CO2 levels and whether it could actually be a good way of "naturally" scrubbing while still reaping the benefits of home cultured phyto.

 

[najer]

So this might be a really silly question but I've been wondering... It's a pretty common saying how house plants can help reduce CO2 levels and pollutants in your house.
In reality though you'd need a crazy amount of plants for it to truly make an impact and plant density is hard to achieve. But phyto are supposed to be really efficient at consuming CO2 and obviously also easy to get crazy population density unlike with plants. I can't seem to find any actual academic papers but I was wondering if anyone has ever tested the impact of culturing on household CO2 levels and whether it could actually be a good way of "naturally" scrubbing while still reaping the benefits of home cultured phyto.

I work if needed at my lfs, when I saw the CO2 by the phyto cultures I asked and they bubble CO2 to speed things up.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley Verified Community Expert]

Won't be useful.

To offset the CO2 exhaled by one person (even ignoring the burning of natural gas in stoves, etc.), the plant (phyto or fern, doesn't matter) will need to add (grow) roughly as much dry mass as you consume in food each day.

That is a huge amount of needed growth!

 

[taricha]

In reality though you'd need a crazy amount of plants for it to truly make an impact and plant density is hard to achieve. But phyto are supposed to be really efficient at consuming CO2 and obviously also easy to get crazy population density unlike with plants. I can't seem to find any actual academic papers but I was wondering if anyone has ever tested the impact of culturing on household CO2 levels and whether it could actually be a good way of "naturally" scrubbing while still reaping the benefits of home cultured phyto.

As Randy said, mass balance is the way to think about it. A person on average breathes out 1 kg of CO2 (2.3 pounds) per day. Let's call a phyto cell 50% carbon (dry mass), so your 1 kg of CO2 = 270 grams Carbon, so you'd need to grow and harvest twice that 2*270 = 540 grams = 1.2 pounds of phyto cells (dry mass) per day. Every day - for every person in the house!
Oh, and dry mass means that the 80 or 90% water in phyto cells doesn't count, so you're growing 5 or 10 pounds of phyto cells to get 1 pound of dry mass.

So this won't happen in a bucket or bottles on a shelf, but maybe if you had a commercial scale algae reactor in your air conditioner room and bubbled the household air through it, you could lower the indoor CO2.
(It's entertaining to calculate how impossible this is.)