CityTree: Pollution Absorbing Innovation with the Power of 275 Trees

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About the city. Air quality is already an established priority for the Mayor of London, where the city consistently breaches legal annual air pollution limits within the first few weeks of the year.

Goal

CityTree addresses the global problem of air pollution by combining a special, vertical installed moss culture with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology.

Implementation period. The first CityTree has been installed in 2018.

Fact

Four Parliamentary select committees concluded that air pollution in the UK caused 40,000 deaths and cost the economy £20 billion per year and that the government had to do more to solve the issue.

Solutions

Two large artificial “trees” have been installed outside Leytonstone tube station and on the High Road to help improve air quality in the area. Looking less like trees than what they are, a large moss-filled tower with seating, they compress the cleaning power of 275 trees into one park bench sized space.

While planting trees both cleans the air and absorbs CO2, the advantage of these moss towers is that they can deliver a concentrated burst of cleaning in a very small space. It would be difficult to plant 550 trees in this small patch of Leytonstone to deliver the same impact.

Unlike trees, they also work in the winter months.

Team

The project has been brought to London by The Crown Estate, with the support of Westminster City Council, and cleantech company Evergen Systems, the exclusive UK supplier of CityTree.