Shungite doesn't only clean water - a Russian study put it in a ventilation valve and cleaned the air

The short version

Almost everything you read about shungite is about water. But a Russian engineering group built it into a building's air-intake valve - a stack of shungite, then zeolite, then a titanium-dioxide plate under UV lamps - and measured how clean the incoming air came out. The answer: 90 to 99.9% of the pollutants gone.

What they did

The filter was simple and physical:

"последовательные слои толщиной до 2 см адсорбентов: шунгит, цеолит, сетка диоксид титана (менее 1 мм), 2 ультрафиолетовые лампы"
"sequential layers up to 2 cm thick: shungite, zeolite, a titanium-dioxide mesh (under 1 mm), and 2 ultraviolet lamps."

The numbers

- Overall cleaning efficiency with the shungite layer in place: 90.2-99.9%, across every season tested
- A companion 2019 study by the same lead author measured carbon-monoxide removal specifically at 90.6-99.88%
- An interesting quirk: colder incoming air made the shungite adsorb more, not less - CO uptake rose by 0.24 kg per kg of shungite

Why it's worth knowing

The water story is well-travelled. The air story barely is - yet the same property that lets shungite grab contaminants out of water lets it grab them out of an air stream. Read the source if you want the full season-by-season tables.

Sources

- Litvinova N.A. et al. (2022), "Исследования влияния... очистки приточного воздуха...", Инженерный вестник Дона: cyberleninka.ru
- Litvinova N.A. (2019), "Очистка воздуха помещений... с фотокаталитическим фильтром", Экология урбанизированных территорий: cyberleninka.ru