carbon dioxide in your room

You exhale 100x more concentrated CO₂ than you inhale.

In 2020, the major constituents of dry air (by volume) were nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). The remaining 1% consists of argon (0.9%), carbon dioxide (0.04%), and other gases (0.06%). You inhale this mixture of air all the time. As you can see, the relative CO₂ level is extremely low compared to the other air components. Using the unit of parts per million (PPM), we can say that the CO₂ concentration equals 400 PPM.

Exhaled air is a mixture of around 3,500 compounds, including nitrogen (78%), oxygen (16%), argon (0.9%), carbon dioxide (4%). The rest of the components are present in microscopic amounts. So, do humans breathe out carbon dioxide? Yes, we use 5% of the oxygen we breathe in to increase the CO₂ concentration by nearly 4 percent points, i.e., 40,000 PPM.

That’s a hundredfold increase!