12/07/2018
Air quality in the capital is of particular concern for both national and local government, and is a growing issue on construction sites. As developers we are expected to take this seriously and address the issue at every stage of the build. However it seems science is working hard to deliver some truly innovative methods for tackling the problem.
Heineken-owned beer brand Tiger and its agency Marcel Sydney teamed up with Anirudh Sharma who has invented a method of extracting pollution from the air and transforming it into Ink. Together they installed an outdoor poster on Shaftesbury Avenue which was ‘painted’ using Air Pollution! Just think, maybe one day newspapers etc. will be printed with the pollution harvested from the air we breathe!
The University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC) have set the bar high for ingenuity. They have managed to create a billboard that turned humid air into drinkable water. One billboard located in Lima, Peru produced around 26 gallons of water from nothing more than humidity, basic filtration and gravity.
The same University has gone on to develop an Air Purifying billboard – which sucks pollution from the sky and returns purified air to the surrounding areas. Not just trace amounts of air, like those claimed by conventional room-based HEPA air purifiers, either, but 100,000 cubic meters of urban air per day. That’s over 3.5 million cubic feet, which UTEC says is equivalent to the work of 1,200 mature trees. That’s a lot of air. Furthermore, UTEC claims the billboard is “totally effective in removing [the] dust, metal and stone particles” that contaminate air spaces around construction zones, and which can lead to life-threatening health problems, from respiratory issues to cancer.
This is ground-breaking work, and a version of this technology has already been seen in London. Italian company Urban Vision have developed a product which they have called ‘The Breath’ which was showcased in Leicester Square and Shepard’s Bush in 2014 and is designed to actively combat pollution with billboards coated in nano-molecules, which remove pollutants from the air through photocatalysis; the safe and non-toxic coating uses UV light from the sun to break down harmful nitrogen oxides and other pollutants into molecules of water and nitrogen. The product is low maintenance and self-cleans with the help of rain.
It seems a natural progression to use this technology on the Hoarding surrounding active building sites, which is exactly what has been done by Sir Robert McAlpine on the Battersea Power Station Phase 3a project. Let’s hope that with increased awareness, demand for this product increases so that it becomes commonplace not only on building sites, but civic buildings, schools and hospitals. That really would be a breath of fresh air!
Breaking news and analysis from TIME.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science and entertainment news.
