Entrepreneurs Invent City Bench that Absorbs More Air Pollution Than a Small Forest
A team of hard-working entrepreneurs and scientists have developed a paradigm-shifting solution to air pollution that combines living organisms and sophisticated computer technology to provide a self-sustainable biological air filter.
March 24, 2018
air
With great technological advances—like the industrial revolution and the subsequent oil boom—came a great impact on the environment. As more industries began to fluorish, increasing the quality of life for billions of people around the world, the quality of air began to suffer.
As governments across the world began advocating for solutions that called for banning all the things, the folks in the free market who aren’t able to implement their ideas with force, began thinking up actual solutions to our world problems. Greencity Solutions are some of those folks.
The tech firm saw the problem with air polution within larger cities and they sat down and began thinking. After years of trial and error, the team at Greencity Solutions had created the CityTree.
The CityTree is an incredible masterpiece that combines art, science, and biodiversity to provide a real-world solution to the problem of low air quality.
In regards to its capabilities in cleaning the air, CityTree is more powerful than a small forest, providing the air cleansing capability of an incredible 275 trees. The technology behind CityTree takes just 1% of the space that would be needed to achieve the same results planting real trees.
What’s more, it’s alive. The CityTree combines modern technology and living organisms to form a hybrid airfilter the likes of which the world has never seen.
“The technology is being billed as the world’s first intelligent biological air filter. It works by creating an environment for specially cultivated mosses to thrive in urban conditions. The ability of certain moss cultures to filter out and absorb air pollutants such as particulates and nitrogen dioxide makes them ideal air purifiers – but in towns and cities where air pollution presents the greatest challenge, mosses are barely able to survive due to their need for constant water and shade,” the Crown Estate explains.
“The vertical living wall of mosses with protective shade giving plants, a fully automated supply of water and nutrients, and cutting edge Internet of Things (IoT) technology has solved this problem. At the same time, air quality, filtering performance and the plants’ requirements can be remotely monitored and analysed.”
The CityTree is entirely self-sufficient as solar panels generate the electricity needed to maintain them and if it doesn’t get enough natural water, both nutrients and water can be supplied fully automatically.
Greencity Solutions has even taken into account the criminals who will try to vandalize them and designed their plant pots with protection to withstand deliberate damage. It’s nothing short of incredible.
“It will be fascinating to see what impact The CityTree has on pollution in the local area. This is just one example of the new technology we want to test across Westminster. Air quality is the number one concern for our residents and with over a million people moving into and travelling to our neighbourhoods each day it is crucial that we make more strides to clean up our air and tackle poor air quality for residents and visitors alike,” Cllr David Harvey, Cabinet Member for the Environment, Sport and Community at Westminster City Council said in a statement this week.
“It is going to take a wide range of measures to tackle pollution in central London. The ten pledges set out in our Air Quality Agenda outlines policies to make a real difference – whether it’s reducing the number of dirty journeys, introducing new cleaner technology or encouraging better habits – we want Westminster to be an example for cities across the world,” he said.
While there is still a long way to go to fix the world’s air pollution problem, the minds working at CityTree are paving the way for a cleaner future and they have no plans of stopping here. Eventually, entire buildings could be covered in this technology.
“Our ultimate goal is to incorporate technology from the CityTree into existing buildings,” Zhengliang Wu, co-founder of Green City Solutions, told CNN. “We dream of creating a climate infrastructure so we can regulate what kind of air and also what kind of temperature we have in a city.”
Remarkable, indeed.
Replies