Treepods air-scrubbers could clean up Boston

Heading away from the use of polluting fossil fuels towards sustainable clean energy, we are discovering more and more novel ways to use or harness the wind.

Even though solar panels have become almost commonplace, we’re still seeing the technology being pushed into new ground. More projects are surfacing that harvest energy from the oceans. Meanwhile, we’re also coming up with inventive ways to monitor pollution. Now an initiative from Mario Caceres and Cristian Canonico of the Influx Studio in Paris, working with SHIFTboston, is looking to roll out a man-made forest of air-cleaning Treepods throughout Boston … which are powered by solar and kinetic energy.

SHIFTboston is an incentive aimed at focusing new, exciting, innovative and environmentally responsible ideas to transform Boston into a more dynamic city. Hoping to help the city of Boston reduce its carbon dioxide, Caceres and Canonico from Influx Studio in Paris have come up with what they describe as a CO₂-scrubbing living machine called Treepods, that is said to “embody and artificially enhance the capacity of trees to clean the air.”

The carbon dioxide removal process used by Treepods is based on technology developed by Dr Klaus Lackner, director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. It enables the energy-efficient capture of carbon dioxide from air. He was inspired by his daughter’s prize-winning 8th grade project which successfully extracted carbon dioxide from the air using a fish tank pump and a battery, and proceeded to create a machine which cleansed the air like a living tree.

Influx Studio says that an eco-friendly, alkaline resin within the Treepods structure will react with the air around it and strip it of carbon dioxide. The cleansed air will then be free to go on its way. When this CO₂-drenched resin reacts with water it will then release the carbon dioxide for storage.