Those who grew up in 1970s America may remember a series of anti-pollution commercials featuring children's drawings. One of the grade-schoolers' wishes was for the invention of a large machine that would suck up smog like a vacuum cleaner. Even as a child, I remember thinking "Man that would never work!"
Luckily California-based Nectar, an engineering and design firm, did not share my pessimistic view and has been working on a similar device:
The CO2 Scraper is a large-scale construction for holding between two to four hundred large-size trees that will absorb potentially dangerous pollutants and convert global warming-related CO2 (carbon dioxide) into breathable oxygen.
Designed to be placed near factories or other major sources of pollution, the CO2 Scraper is a relatively simple, primarily concrete construction in which trees would be supplied with water and nutrients via a windmill-powered pump system. [Designed to be energy self-sufficient] via windmills (the only outside power required would be electricity for an elevator to be used by maintenance personnel), the Scraper will be "carbon positive," that is, it will absorb carbon dioxide and increase the amount of life-giving oxygen in the atmosphere.
Aside from absorbing nutrients and converting carbon dioxide into breathable air, the structure would also provide a significant amount of shade, while also cooling the air during the hot summer months because of the temperature-lowering properties of hundreds of trees.
Sounds like it would work, no? And it's also got me wondering if the kid who drew the smog vacuum grew up and got a job at Nectar.
thanks bob!
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Planting trees around the site would not be enough to do the job. In order to plant over 1000 trees, you will need acres of land that are not cheap. Spreading the tree on the flat land require lots more logistics and maintenance vehicles to go around, therefore more CO2 emission. With this CO2 Scraper, thousands of trees can be planted in small foot prints. Smoke stacks are also designed to keep the exhaust up in higher altitude. Having trees on ground is almost useless to catch those CO2 in high altitude.
At this point of human history, people are spending money and effort to just create CO2. If this CO2 Scraper can really sequester CO2 like it is designed to, this could be a really a history in making.
A better idea, I think, would be to blanket the roofs of every city, and many homes, with grass, lichens and trees, making essentially "green roofs." This would keep the buildings cooler, would help reduce pollution, and uses pre-existing structures as a base. Combine this with active solar panels (i.e, computer controlled, swiveling mounts that follow the sun), and it would be possible to reduce overall pollution AND energy consumption in major cities like Los Angeles or New York erewhile producing agricultural products such as fruits and vegetables in a sustainable, inexpensive way.
If you feel the need to engineer something out of this, why not just pipe emissions into a dense forest or something instead of creating a giant ineffective windscreen?
I'm pretty sure 5 minutes worth of thought would provide about a billion better solutions than this one. I hope I'm only missing the joke!
For example: Due to the amount of concrete used in the bases of off-shore windfarm windmills, every windmill has to run for over 28YEARS to pay back the CO2 deficit created in its building and manufacture. And electric cars... where does the power come from to power them?... predominantly fossil fuel burning powerstations! (not to mention that it uses 16x more energy to refill a rechargable battery than it will actually give back out!) Just something for them to think about!!
If you are going to propose 'eco-friendly' and even more importantly 'eco-enhancing' products, be sure that you have actually done your research!