Ever wanted to have really fresh air in your place? This TED Talk by Kamal Meattle provides some insight into which plants you should have in your home and what element the clean in the air.
I’m going to try this out in my home.
air
Manila Uses Paint That Cleans the Air
This is groovy, a paint is being used on the walls of Manila that cleans the air.
In the Philippine capital Manila, which is one of the most polluted cities in the world, a paint which it is claimed can purify the air is being used.
A local company has come up with the paint and in partnership with the government it is trying to use it to clean up one of the city’s most smog-choked roads.
“Nom nom nom” Says the Cement
Our good friend algae is at it again and is cleaning smokestacks!
A mixture of hot gas rises out of a flue stack at the St. Marys Cement plant about 50 kilometres west of Waterloo. But not all the CO2-rich exhaust is vented to the open air.
Some is redirected through a 15-centimetre thick pipe connected to the side of the stack. The pipe carries the gas into a high-tech facility where a species of algae from the neighbouring Thames River uses photosynthesis to absorb the carbon dioxide and release oxygen in return.
“It’s a small model of what a big full-scale facility could be,” says Martin Vroegh, environment manager with St. Marys Cement Inc., headquartered in Toronto. The algae project, which went live last fall, is believed to be the first in the world to demonstrate the capture of CO2 from a cement plant.
The idea, Vroegh explained, is to turn CO2 into a commodity rather than treat it as a liability. The CO2-consuming algae will be continually harvested, dried using waste heat from the plant, and then burned as a fuel inside the plant’s cement kilns. Alternatively, the green goop can be processed into biofuels for the company’s truck fleet.
Thanks Mike!
Perhaps Your Pennies Can Clear the Air
Apparently copper can be used to scrub pollutants out of the air. Maybe one day a penny can help clean your house.
An easy way to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to find a chemical that combines easily with it, similar to the way that some metals oxidize. For example, compounds involving copper will usually combine with oxygen in the atmosphere voluntarily without catalysts, covering the surface of the copper material with a green patina, like the Statue of Liberty.
Unlike oxygen, carbon dioxide cannot combine so easily with other materials. It is possible to remove one electron from the molecule to facilitate its integration into other molecules, but that removal requires an electric potential of -1.97 volts, which is unreasonably high for the purpose of processing a single molecule.
One group of scientists found a certain dinuclear copper (I) complex that turns green when exposed to air under a slight electric potential (-0.03 volts). At first, they assumed it was from the exposure to oxygen, but upon closer inspection they learned that this particular form of copper was reacting with carbon dioxide.
How California Tracks the Air That They Breathe
California has a law that dictates the quality of air, but that needs to be tracked so it can be enforced. Here’s a video about how Berkeley Lab keeps track of the air.
Last March, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Marc Fischer boarded a small airplane loaded with air monitoring equipment and crisscrossed the skies above Sacramento and the Bay Area.
Instruments aboard the aircraft measured a cocktail of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, methane from livestock and landfills, nitrous oxide from agriculture, and industrially produced gases such as refrigerants.
The flight was part of the Airborne Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Davis to pinpoint the sources of greenhouse gases in Central California.
The airborne survey is intended to improve inventories of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn will help scientists verify the emission reductions mandated by AB-32, the ambitious legislation passed by California in 2006 to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.
“In order to comply with AB-32, we need to know where the gases are coming from and how much,†says Fischer, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.