It is commonly noted that people currently spend on the order of 80 to 90 percent of their time indoors. This has several impacts. First it means we are predominantly breathing indoor air and, as a result, indoor air quality (IAQ) has been the focus of numerous studies, standards, and programs that seek to create healthy indoor environments. Common approaches to achieving better IAQ results, particularly in green building design, include careful selection of materials used and increasing ventilation rates. Second, time spent indoors typically means that we are living life deprived of interaction with nature. To overcome both of these indoor environmental concerns, it has been common to incorporate plants into indoor environments. However, potted plants alone can have only limited impacts. An emerging option that is more effective and more appealing for many designs is to use a vertical wall of hydroponic plants. Designed properly, these plant walls not only provide a connection to nature, they can provide real and significant improvements to indoor air quality as well.

Living Plant Walls Overview

There is increasing interest in the integration of natural systems such as living plant walls and green roofs into the built environment. Of the two, living walls is the less mature industry. There has been considerable consolidation in the green roof industry over the past few years with the design community settling on a few well-tested methods of design, typical of sector maturation.

A recent analysis by Aditya Ranada of Lux Research on the use of green living walls in the built environment predicts that the rate of new installations of green roofs in Europe will substantially decrease over the next five years due to saturation of the market. Contrary to this, the living wall sector is still very much in the early phases of development. The same study by Lux Research, predicted a 16-fold increase in the accumulated area of plant walls between 2012 and 2017. Ranada predicts no decrease in the rate of installations in European living walls as seen with green roofs in the foreseeable future.

Living hydroponic plant walls provide a connection to nature, a design focal point, and can be used for biofiltration of indoor air. Photo courtesy of Nedlaw Living Walls, Inc.