London has had problems with controlling pollution and surpassed the pollution limit for the whole of 2018 before January was over. This does not stop the capital from trying to win the war against pollution and there is a pollution absorbing bench which is expected to help London in counteracting the effects of pollution.
Green City Solutions is a German-based tech startup company and it has recently planted a pollution absorbing bench called CityTree outside the pubs and organic supermarkets of Glasshouse Street in London. The CityTree is a hybrid between a city bench, a pollution-sucking filter and an environment-tracking smart device.
It uses a combination of plants and mosses that naturally remove dust, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone gases from the surrounding air. It is connected to the internet and provides data on pollution levels, soil humidity, water quality, and air temperature. It is vandalism-resistant and has solar panels on the top to fulfil electricity demands.
The pollution absorbing bench may not be huge in size but it claims to have the same benefit as 275 real trees by filtering the air of up to 240 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. The solo bench cannot magically clean the London environment but it is a step in the positive direction.
“There is no simple solution, so alongside our work to reduce carbon emissions from our buildings and reduce the number of vehicles on our roads, we want to test and learn from new technology,” James Cooksey, Director of Central London at The Crown Estate, said in a statement.
London is not the first city to get a CityTree, Theses benches have been installed in over 20 cities in the world including Berlin, Paris, Oslo, Amsterdam, Drammen, Hong Kong, Brussels, and Newcastle. “Our ultimate goal is to incorporate technology from the CityTree into existing buildings,” Zhengliang Wu, co-founder of Green City Solutions, told CNN last year. “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.”
It is good to see that conscious efforts are being undertaken by the cities around the world to put an end to pollution.