Cloud Collective, a French and Dutch design company has come up with an elegant and green solution to clear up the environment around highways: suspended algae farms. So far, they have implemented such a system over a small stretch of highway in Geneva, Switzerland.Since algae works by absorbing CO2 and eliminating Oxygen into the air, placing an algae farm near a highway seems like the perfect place. But the system doesn’t only clean out the air. A series of pumps and filters regulate the system, and over time, the algae matures into what can be turned into any number of usable products. Most notably, the algae can be used as combustible biomass or in creams, lotions and other cosmetics. “Responding to the abundance of CO2 and sunlight, we propose a closed system of transparent tubes, clinging onto the viaduct which is used for the production of algae. These algae can be used to filter air, as combustible biomass or even as raw material for different cosmetic and alimentary products.

A steel structure, supporting all the secondary equipment such as pumps, filters and solar panels, functions as a marker for the quickly passing traffic and provides explanations on a more detailed level for pedestrians and cyclists”, Cloud Collective writes on their website.Of course, this is just an early installment, a proof of concept to show that it works and that it can be applied at a larger scale. holmes air purifier coupon codesI would personally like to see a lifetime assessment of such a system, to see if it can actually be profitable – in other words, if the value of the resulting products and the environmental services are greater than the costs of building such a system. air duct cleaning suffolk nyBut the idea is pretty awesome – simple and efficient. can air purifier remove formaldehyde

Hopefully, we’ll be seeing such installments in more places in the world.Like ZME Science on facebook:Setting a car’s ventilation system to “recirculate” is the best way to reduce exposure to harmful traffic pollution. That’s the advice researchers have for parents as millions of children return to school, many of them driven in cars on the highway. Environmental health researchers recently conducted the first systematic measurements of in-vehicle exposure that included a full range of car types and operating conditions, and for all types of particulate pollution. “Short of driving less, putting your ventilation to ‘recirculate’ is the best way to reduce exposure to all types of vehicle-related particulate pollution,” says Scott Fruin, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “Otherwise, an hour-long commute to work or school can double your daily exposure to traffic-related particulate air pollutants.”

The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology, quantifies the extent of exposure reduction according to car age, speed, and pollutant type. In addition to the benefits of recirculation settings, exposures are lower in newer cars, at slower speeds, and on arterial roads, where pollutant concentrations are lower than on freeways. Concentrations of particle pollutants on freeways are often five to 10 times higher than elsewhere. To put the results in perspective, measurements were turned into predictive models, then the models were applied to the  national fleet of car models and ages and Los Angeles driving conditions. For a typical car (seven years old, the national average), recirculation settings reduce in-vehicle particle pollution for very small particles from 80 percent (of on-road levels) to 20 percent, and from 70 percent to 30 percent for larger particles, compared to air ventilation settings which bring in outside air. (Windows were always closed in this study.

Keeping windows open while driving quickly raises inside pollutant concentrations to the same levels as on-road levels.) “Until this comprehensive study, measurements have been based on only a few cars and usually only one pollutant,” says Neelakshi Hudda, PhD research associate in the environmental health department. “We showed that recirculation settings produce large exposure reductions across all car types and for all particulate pollutants.” The researchers also found that leaving the windows closed over 30-minute or longer drives with several passengers raised carbon dioxide levels in tight new cars to those of stuffy meeting rooms. “Some people are sensitive to high CO2 concentrations. To prevent this, outside air should be pulled in every 10 or 15 minutes for a minute or two, especially if there are two or more people in the vehicle,” Hudda says. Traffic-related particulate pollutants studied included ultrafine particles (the very smallest that can enter the bloodstream) to the larger particulate matter (PM) sizes such as PM2.5 (invisible particles smaller than 2.5 microns) that are linked to heart disease and premature mortality.

Pollutants also included black carbon and particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, both high in diesel emissions, considered by the State of California to produce cancer. Source: University of Southern CaliforniaThere’s a massive vacuum cleaner in the middle of a Rotterdam park and it’s sucking all the smog out of the air. A decent portion of it, anyway. And it isn’t a vacuum, exactly. It looks nothing like a Dyson or a Hoover. It’s probably more accurate to describe it as the world’s largest air purifier. The Smog Free Tower, as it’s called, is a collaboration between Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, Delft Technology University researcher Bob Ursem, and European Nano Solutions, a green tech company in the Netherlands. The metal tower, nearly 23 feet tall, can purify up to 1 million cubic feet of air every hour. To put that in perspective, the Smog Free Tower would need just 10 hours to purify enough air to fill Madison Square Garden. “When this baby is up and running for the day you can clean a small neighborhood,” says Roosegaarde.

It does this by ionizing airborne smog particles. Particles smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter (about the width of a cotton fiber) are tiny enough to inhale and can be harmful to the heart and lungs. Ursem, who has been researching ionization since the early 2000s, says a radial ventilation system at the top of the tower (powered by wind energy) draws in dirty air, which enters a chamber where particles smaller than 15 micrometers are given a positive charge. Like iron shavings drawn to a magnet, the the positively charged particles attach themselves to a grounded counter electrode in the chamber. The clean air is then expelled through vents in the lower part of the tower, surrounding the structure in a bubble of clean air. Ursem notes that this process doesn’t produce ozone, like many other ionic air purifiers, because the particles are charged with positive voltage rather than a negative. “The proposed technology, while not new, would need to be well demonstrated on a large scale in a highly polluted urban area,” says Eileen McCauley, a manager in the California Air Resources Board’s research division. 

She adds that there are concerns around efficacy and logistics like how often something like this would need to be cleaned. But Ursem himself has used the same technique in hospital purification systems, parking garages, and along roadsides. Still the tower is by far the biggest and prettiest application of his technology. Indeed, it’s meant to be a design object as much as a technological innovation. Roosegaarde is known for wacky, socially conscious design projects—he’s the same guy who did the glowing Smart Highway in the Netherlands. He says making the tower beautiful brings widespread attention to a problem typically hidden behind bureaucracy. “I’m tired of design being about chairs, tables, lamps, new cars, and new watches,” he says. “It’s boring, we have enough of this stuff. Let’s focus on the real issues in life.” Roosegaarde has been working with Ursem and ENS, the company that fabricated the tower, for two years to bring it into existence, and now that it’s up and running, he says people are intrigued.

He just returned from Mumbai where he spoke to city officials about installing a similar tower in a park, and officials in Mexico City, Paris, and Beijing (the smoggy city that inspired the project) also are interested. “We’ve gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to these right now,” he says. “I think that it should be in a public space.” Roosegaarde has plans to take the tower on a “smog-free tour” in the coming year so he can demonstrate the tower’s abilities in cities around the world. It’s a little bit of showmanship that he hopes will garner even more attention for the machine, which he calls a “shrine-like temple of clean air.” Roosegaarde admits that his tower isn’t a final solution for cleaning a city’s air. “The real solution everybody knows,” he says, adding that it’s more systematic than clearing a hole of clean air in the sky. He views the Smog Free tower as an initial step in a bottom-up approach to cleaner air, with citizens acting as the driving force.