This is super interesting! Sounds from the article like the main point is to remove CO2 from the air to improve air for humans. That's already really exciting. In essence it's a CO2 scrubber right? So how does this compare to devices built with the goal to remove CO2 with the goal to reduce climate change?
Edit: To answer my own question, this probably does little. They have a home use version that supposedly removes as much Co2 as twenty indoor plants. The paper linked below had three most efficient plant remove about 17% of Co2 in a cubic meter of air with optimal light conditions. So twenty of those wouldn't have much impact in a reasonably sized dwelling. That's assuming it's equivalent to the most efficient plant and great lighting. I cannot imagine the much larger installation at the airport making much of a difference either given the massive amount of air.
So this tank removes around 0.25kg of co2 per day.
By comparison, an average human exhales 1kg co2 per day. So you need four of those tanks to offset a single passenger passing by.
This does virtually nothing for the air freshness, and is possibly not even carbon negative if you were to count emissions from the device cleanup and algae storage.
Wouldn’t it offset one passengers CO2 for a whole day and not just a single passenger passing by? I’m sure that’s what you mean but the wording is a bit confusing.
It sounds like it would offset one person staying in the airport for a quarter of a day, yes. Though, with how many people pass through an airport, it means that this would do, instead of almost nothing, four times almost nothing.
If only there was a large parcel of land nearby to an airport terminal where a renewable power source could be installed. Hmm, where could we find a large piece of relatively flat land with little to no trees to shade the sunlight? Hell, you could even cover the remote parking areas bringing extra value by providing covered parking and still leave the majority of that flat, cleared, open space unadulterated.
I’m guessing they don’t want to put stuff in the areas around runways, because that’s where planes go when something bad happens. I wouldn’t want to be escaping a plane directly into a chopped-up field of HV solar panels.
"per day" is a rate and can be applied to any unit of time. 1kg per day is equivalent to 1/86400kg per second (1/(246060)). Math works out the same either way.
Someone must have missed the news stories of airlines preferring to cancel flights leaving travelers stranded in airports for extended periods of time.
Seems like 24 hours in an airport is becoming routine /s
And the PIT airport is under construction with passenger areas being replaced with removal of the mini-train. I hope they didn't pay for this green washing demonstration.
They do not have to be noisy. Gardermoen is not noisy, Arlanda is not noisy, Copenhagen is not noisy. They just need to be designed deliberately to be quiet. Adding green plants won't make it much quieter unless you plant huge hedges indoors.
Agree, I nevertheless bought one of their (AlgenAir) home devices, despite the fact that at present levels of efficiency I would need 100 of them to make a material difference in CO2 levels in a normal room. My thinking is that even given the incredible degree of efficiency of photosynthesis itself, there must be opportunities for other bioengineering-type improvements and 100x is not an unreasonable target over a 10-20 year timeframe. My dollars are an economic signal in support of investment in a machine to turn electricity into captured CO2.
That said, having had the device for a few months, it brings plenty of present value. It's pretty, a literal living lava lamp, and it makes a lovely water bubbly sound. Watching the algae population grow in concentration and change the color of the water is very satisfying.
For actual sunlight, where only 45% of the light is in the photosynthetically active wavelength range, the theoretical maximum efficiency of solar energy conversion is approximately 11%. In actuality, however, plants do not absorb all incoming sunlight (due to reflection, respiration requirements of photosynthesis and the need for optimal solar radiation levels) and do not convert all harvested energy into biomass, which results in a maximum overall photosynthetic efficiency of 3 to 6% of total solar radiation.
Trains are only viable regionally in the US, unless you want to spend 72 hours traveling for greater cost than a plane ticket that would have taken you 4ish hours to go from NY to LA. Even if we did build high speed rail the whole way, the number of stops along the way would only cut that to 24ish hours. Most people would choose the plane.
I haven’t been to the US, but it can’t be all that special. Plenty of countries have high speed trains instead of most domestic air travel, even similarly sized ones like China.
Especially if you count the time to get to the airport and through security, high speed trains are highly competitive or even better than planes in total travel time.
Bikes are even better! Yet bikes (with all the environmental cost of the metal mining, forging, production, shipping, plus replacement tires, brakes, and all the cost of air pressurized for the tires), are far worse than walking.
So we should all walk, yes?
But, I mean, the cost of shoes on the environment. They wear out quite fast, I walk 10 to 15km a day, and my shoes wear out every 3 to 4 months, so it makes more sense to go barefoot.
Yet again, the cost of all that food... food production is bad for the environment! Probably, I should not walk, or really go anywhere, and just sit still.
Right? Right?!
Here is the answer.
Don't suggest fewer plane trips. It will never happen, unless you purposefully hurt, and cause tyranny against others to enable your dream.
Instead, make a better plane. Make a better blimp.
Make people want your dream, instead of fighting your dream.
Make them love your solution, not your restrictions.
Once recommended exercise thresholds are met, a durable bicycle is better than walking. Faired LEVs and light ebikes are better than bicycles. And full capacity mid speed (<200km/h) trains are better still. High speed rail is somewhere between walking and bicycles.
Maximise flourishing within a resource and energy budget. And if you invent a better plane or a lower impact energy source, add it to the menu. Do not blow the budget by an order of magnitude (or three) and then demand that technology fix the problem after the fact.
Don't have to go that far. Choosing to not have children or choosing to have fewer children would be a good start.
From what I understand, taking better care of the children we have so they have a better chance to reach healthy adulthood is the best way to suppress child birth rates. I say we because parents don't own their children. The children belong to all of us, the community.
That thought is considered sacrilegious for some reason. If we would just start shrinking back to healthy population levels, a lot of problems would disappear. But nooo, an impossible reduction of everyones climate footprint by 10% is offset within 10 years of population growth instead.
One of the reasons that “overpopulation” as a concept faces criticism is that not all humans are created equal so far as resource consumption goes. Less people in the global north would do far more good for the climate than less people in the global south, because the former have a several times higher per capita consumption. Some of the people concerned about “overpopulation” seem to think the problem is the latter group though, and in that context the outcome of “depopulation” would be pleasing to fascists.
It's a mix of 'moral' feeling that you cannot tell people not to have kids, and of actual concern that our economic system is unfortunately founded on constant growth. It's much harder to grow the economy with fewer people.
Sort of. While increasing global CO2 levels makes it worse, indoor CO2 levels is mostly a function of buildings being made more and more efficient/air-tight. I live in a new LEED-platinum condo building, and in the fall or spring if I don't may my A/C unit on, my bedroom CO2 levels will go from ~500ppm to 1,300 or higher. You can see the drastic drop in CO2 levels when I wake up and open the door to get air flow.
I have my doubts about this. In my experience, a house full of cannabis plants photosynthesizing full tilt under 15,000 watts of lights would still show elevated CO2 when two people went to it and tended it. Maybe the algae get around that, but I need to see some numbers.
>A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year. Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees' worth.
This is going off topic but what an interesting idea... Can plants work day and night if you give them light 24x7? I assume they don't need to rest or get tired?
If you really want to have a less CO2-heavy stuffy indoor air, what you can use is an air-to-air heat exchanger. The idea is to get fresh air from outside, but transfer heat from the outgoing Co2-rich air to the incoming fresh air so you don't waste the heating (reverse in case of air conditioning, I suppose).
If the problem is Co2 in the outdoor air, I'm afraid that's a much bigger problem that you're not gonna solve with a tank.
CO2 or Oxygen levels are normally never a problem, not even on mount Everest (where the air pressure is the problem). It's for sure not a solution but an interesting research field to remove toxic chemicals...for long duration spaceflight/bases ;)
The crucial part of this study is the following quote:
"These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes VOCs at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building’s floor space."
In general, the amount of plants needed is just too high to be practical. At least among those plants tested in this study. This also applies to plants commonly sold as "air cleaners" (the common ones were all tested in this study). They do little to nothing for non-sealed rooms. Specific algea may be better suited.
That's why i wrote "moonbase" where your fresh veggies could also clean the air.
But yes algea are maybe better if you have the power to circulate them, pressured air to blow it truth and a filter to take the dead ones out, bacteria etc in check, earlier or later your water will start to foul otherwise.
Based on the photo, it seems more of a showpiece than an actually practical way of filtering large quantities of air. Those bubble columns are at most a few liters of air per minute -- not much more than your usual aquarium pump -- when large air purifiers are in the hundreds or even thousands of cubic feet per minute. I just can't imagine passing that much air through the columns without sending greenish water all over unsuspecting passengers. Unless this treated air has a synergistic effect on the surrounding air, like negative ions or ozone, this won't make the air significantly cleaner.
Buying a CO2 meter for the office - especially a closed-door small room one - is something almost all indoor workers should invest in. As you noted, it gets over 1000ppm quite easily.
My office is an interior one without a window to the outdoors, so I have to flap the door open here or there along with the exterior door about 100 feet away. HVAC doesn't do much to help.
If I am in the office with the door closed for 2 hours (I share it with one other person), 1000ppm happens regularly.
This thread is about indoor air pollution. Trees aren't going to help with that. The best way to reduce it is to open a window.
For outdoor air pollution, planting trees can actually increase it[1]. Even in ideal conditions, planting trees is not nearly enough to stop climate change. The best way to fix the CO2 problem is stop producing it, not to try to clean it up.
> The best way to fix the CO2 problem is stop producing it, not to try to clean it up.
I'd have to disagree. Stopping the production is important, but that doesn't solve the problem, it just doesn't make it worse. A true fix would always include removing some CO2 from the atmosphere, however that may be done.
Multiple approaches are needed, but it's far cheaper and easier to avoid CO2 production than to sequester carbon (even if plants are used to capture it).
If it doesn't solve the problem (which it doesn't! Many glaciers are already gone, there's nothing we can do about it), it's not even a bad way, it is just no way to _solve_ the problem.
It's the best way _to not make it worse_. Carbon Capture doesn't save us from making it worse. It can however undo parts of the damage.
The solution isn't to just freeze the status quo, that's what I'm saying.
I read the whole article and I can't find the part that backs up your statement. Not saying it might not be there, but telling people to figure it out on their own isn't super helpful.
In fact most of the article seems to agree that planting trees is a net good for removing CO2 and that the biggest problem is finding enough room to plant all the trees that are needed.
In some ways I don't mind it since it seems expected and I also like the idea of using the remains as compost feed. But I was a little worried about the expense of renewing it plus the waste from doing so. It looks like the algae and nutrients come in plastic bottles.
Any power consumption figures for a room of X people? I have to bombard my aquarium with powerful lights and co2 injection to get some pearling (oxygen bubbles). I would also imagine the lights to be blue+red peak grow lights to optimize photosynthesis and the glass tubes to be thinner to minimize attenuation of light in liquid.
Edit: To answer my own question, this probably does little. They have a home use version that supposedly removes as much Co2 as twenty indoor plants. The paper linked below had three most efficient plant remove about 17% of Co2 in a cubic meter of air with optimal light conditions. So twenty of those wouldn't have much impact in a reasonably sized dwelling. That's assuming it's equivalent to the most efficient plant and great lighting. I cannot imagine the much larger installation at the airport making much of a difference either given the massive amount of air.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315968651_Effective...