Billboards of the world, you can aspire to be more than signs pointing to cheap motels and sleazy roadside attractions. An engineering team in Peru has created a billboard that they say can purify 100,000 cubic meters of air everyday—taking in pollution and spewing out sweet, fresh air for the city. The air-purifying billboard in Lima comes from the same folks at University of Engineering and Technology of Peru who created a billboard that captures drinkable water from thin air last year.
Imagine air-purifying billboards going up any time you had a sufficiently large construction zone — a step that became part and parcel of the preparation process. Remember the billboard that turned air into drinkable water? The one located in Lima, Peru that produced around 26 gallons of water from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and gravity? Its creators, the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC), are back with an encore idea that sounds just as clever. This one involves a slightly different sort of billboard — also located in Lima — that sucks pollution from the sky and returns purified air to the surrounding areas. Not just trace amounts of air, like those claimed by conventional room-based HEPA air purifiers, either, but 100,000 cubic meters of urban air per day. That’s over 3.5 million cubic feet, which UTEC says is equivalent to the work of 1,200 mature trees. That’s a lot of air.
This is really cool!