Cleaning the air from pollution

 

Chinas Air purification tower

 

Our planet is dirty – like really dirty. Not just the oceans, forests, and cities but also our air. We have been polluting our air more and more while getting unhealthier and unhealthier because of it, and our environment isn’t feeling much better. Now while most people, and most importantly companies have been ignoring the problem, some bright heads have come up with some really smart and clever solutions to clean our air to make it as fresh as it was hundreds of years ago before humanity started polluting everything they could. Here are 15 solutions to clean our air and a lookout into a bright future in which we are living CO₂ positive.

A very important step to cleaning our air is to obviously know where it is the dirtiest so we can decide where to employ these fancy new technologies, therefore a charity organisation in the UK called “Friends of the Earth” is supplying people with testing kits so they can measure the air quality around them and figure out if they live in healthy zones or are actually endangered of sicknesses caused by the air. But they aren’t the only ones measuring the air pollution, India for example is employing pollution sensors across the country to know exactly where the quality of the air is really bad. India isn’t the only country to measure their air, Czechia is integrating these sensors into their streetlights in Prague monitoring the air quality. Google themselves started to map out the air quality by fitting air pollution sensors to their Google-Streetview cars driving around West Oakland and adding this information to google maps so citizens can be warned of especially bad areas.

Obviously before we start trying to remove the toxins from the air, we should minimise our output of them, therefore Germany has made the effort to make public transport free so more people would be using them, therefore drastically cutting down on emissions nationwide. Sadly, however these plans haven’t been realised yet and public transport is out of budget for people who have to travel a lot.

Researchers from the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven made a device which could turn the pollutants from the air into hydrogen using solar power. Hydrogen can be a very clean way to power cars and can act as a replacement for big and heavy batteries. This project however hasn’t gone mainstream yet and the state of development is unclear to this day. But since this device was made in 2017, it seems that the project has been put on halt.

In the Chinese City of Nanjing yet another skyscraper has been constructed, but this one has a twist. It is called a “vertical forest” and that rightfully so. On the building more than 3000 different species of plants absorb up 25 tons of carbon dioxide and make the surrounding air a lot cleaner. Another project in that category comes from Germany, they have been erecting green walls filled with moss and lichen in their cities and can apparently absorb 240 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

the veritcal forest

When we travel back to India, we can learn about the so called “anti-smog gun” which is a device which can spray fine particles of water into the air. These tiny droplets then connect to the pollutants, bringing them back down to earth. While this isn’t a long-term solution, since it doesn’t remove the pollutants but just binds it to the ground, it is a good short-term solution to make breathing less unhealthy again.

One company which does filter out the particulates is AIR-INK. They attach devices to factory smokestacks which filter out the pollution and contains it. It then is brought to their facilities in which they turn the pollutants into ink for printers, markers and pens. A similar option is the so called “smog-free tower”. This is a tower envisioned by the Dutch artist Dan Roosegaarde which turns the particulates into gemstones which later can be used in expensive jewellery.

Another approach to cleaning out pollution from the air is a skyscraper build in China which sole purpose it is to clean the air. It can filter out particles in a huge area, making the air a lot less toxic to breath in. A similar concept are the pollution vacuum cleaners, which can be installed on roofs of skyscrapers and clean the air in the same fashion as the skyscraper, just in a lot smaller area. Both of these solutions are great, but it is not stated, what is being done with the filtered-out pollutants.

The next thing on this list is the fuel ban and the full switch to electric cars. This means, that the cars won’t produce any CO₂ while driving. What has to be considered though is, that the cars need to be charged and until we run 100% on renewable energy, we will not be able to use these electric cars as a clean method of transportation. In contrary, the production of the batteries is enormously dangerous for the environment and if they don’t charge on renewable energy only, they are just inefficient fossil-fuel burning cars.

And now for the promised outlook into the future of our hopefully clean earth: A skyscraper called “Mandragore” is a green concept residential skyscraper which is envisioned to be built on New-York’s Roosevelt Island. It is packed with carbon capture technology, energy saving measurements and passive heating and cooling. Just like the vertical forest, this tower is dreamed to be filled to the brim with plants and trees.

The skyscraper of the future?

While these are a lot of interesting solutions, we still can’t filter out as much pollution as we produce, therefore the most important thing is to live more conscious of our environment and put pressure on the government and companies to go as green as possible, our end goal should be to restore our earth to its former temperature and cleanness.