Plants are able to produce oxygen through a process known as photosynthesis and each leaf generates oxygen. To find out how much oxygen plants produce we first need to find out the answer to a few key questions.
How many leaves does the average house plant have?
Common indoor house plants have an average of 20 leaves.
How much oxygen does the average leaf of a houseplant produce?
The leaf of a common house plants produce oxygen at a rate of about 5ml per hour. While a plant is growing it will create more, and most common house plants produce less oxygen at night as they go through a process called respiration where they consume oxygen and release carbon dioxide into the air.
How much oxygen does a house plant produce?
The average house plant has 20 leaves, each leaf creating roughly 5ml of oxygen per hour. This means each one of your plants is producing 100ml of oxygen per hour which is 2.4L of oxygen produced per day, per plant.
How many plants would you need to sustain one human life?
The average human requires about 550L of pure oxygen per day to survive meaning it would take about 180-200 common house plants to produce enough oxygen for a human to survive on in a 24 hour period.
Which house plant creates the most oxygen?
Snake plants are one of the most powerful oxygen producing plants you can find as it is able to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen (O2) at night.
I wasn’t able to find the exact amount of oxygen generated for each snake plant leaf however a few other articles I read while doing research suggested 8 large snake plants would produce enough oxygen to sustain one human for 24 hours. This means each snake plant would need to generate roughly 68L of oxygen per day or 2.8L per hour which is how much the average indoor plant produces each day.
How do plants create oxygen?
Most plants uptake carbon dioxide and release oxygen during the day which is called photosynthesis and then uptake oxygen and release carbon dioxide at night which is called respiration.
However the snake plant is able to uptake carbon dioxide at night as well due to using a different type of photosynthesis named Crassulacean Acid Metabolism or CAM for short.
Due to the plants ability to produce oxygen at night, we can safely say it’s one of the best for boosting the oxygen levels in your home.
Which outdoor plant creates the most oxygen?
Assuming we are counting trees as “plants” then the plants that produce the most oxygen would generally be the largest trees. Something like a eucalyptus tree which can grow into a massive, tall tree that produces thousands upon thousands of beautiful green leaves that photosynthesize and produce oxygen.
Eucalyptus trees also grow quickly which means they produce an even larger amount of oxygen and due to their long lifespan of about 250 years they will have an enormous oxygen production total in their lifetime.
Maybe that’s what makes us Australians so great huh?
We are fully oxygenated!
