The urban tree that cleans as much polluted air as an entire forest
Air pollution is a silent, yet deadly reality, resulting in 7 million premature deaths every year. However, there seems to be a solution: the CityTree, a high-technology green wall that eradicates harmful particulates from the air, having as much air-purifying power as 275 normal trees, as Inhabitat reports.
The urban tree is under 4-meters tall, around 3-meters-wide and 2.19 meters deep and it is, essentially, a huge moss culture. Zhengliang Wu, co-founder of Green City Solutions said: “Moss cultures have a much larger leaf surface area than any other plant. That means we can capture more pollutants.” There are two available versions – one with a bench, one without. Each version has a display for information or advertising.
Each tree can remove dust, nitrogen dioxide and ozone gases from the air thanks to the large moss area. The installations are autonomous, because electricity is provided by solar panels and the soil is watered with rainwater. The urban tree also has WiFi sensors that measure soil humidity, temperature and water quality. “We also have pollution sensors inside the installation, which help monitor the local air quality and tell us how efficient the tree is,” Wu said. Each tree costs about $25,000 – a big, but worthy investment, considering that each tree can absorb around 250 grams of particulate matter (approximately 250 metric tons of CO2).
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Green City Solutions already managed to install 20 CityTrees in major cities like Oslo, Paris, Brussels and Hong Kong. The company hopes to install more CityTrees around the world, despite the bureaucratic challenges they are currently facing. “We were installing them (the CityTrees) in Modena, Italy, and everything was planned and arranged, but now the city is hesitant about the places we can install because of security reasons,” Wu explained. The company will persist nonetheless and already has plans to introduce the invention to India, where air pollution has reached dangerous levels.
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