Synthetic Urban Tree to Clean the City Air
When the folks at SHIFTboston decided that they wanted to develop a synthetic urban tree to address urban pollution concerns, they called on Parisians Mario Caceres and Christian Canonico. The design, as described by SHIFTboston, should could serve the air filtering and de-carbonization functions of a tree without the necessity to provide soil and water to keep the system alive. The end-goal of the design is to enable cities to offer the environmental benefits of trees in areas that are otherwise unsuited to support tree growth. Mario and Christian have shown a knack for innovation and creative thinking in previous SHIFTboston competitions and the pair certainly did not disappoint with their newest conceptual design.
Know as Treepods, these giant glowing structures can help filter CO2 from the air while remaining independent from the city’s power grid. The energy required for the air purification process in provided by solar panels that cover the top and any energy generated by children playing on seesaws around the tree’s base. The CO2 filtration process would take place in the branches of the Treepods through a “humidity swing” process which would release oxygen as a biproduct.
The structure would be composed almost entirely of recycled plastic bottles. Given that the structure would be transparent, you would naturally have to install thousands of LED lights so that it would glow through the night.
It would appear that a good deal of thought went into the generation of the Treepod design, but like most similarly outlandish conceptual designs, it will probably never be built.
SHIFTboston via Inhabitat