Airlabs benches bring clean air to the streets

Airlabs has developed a park bench, which can bring clean air to where the people are.

Airlabs, based in London, builds the Clean Air Bench, which filters pollutants out of the air around it.

“We clean nitrogen dioxide, which is, as you know, one of the biggest problems in European cities, especially where we have many, many diesel vehicles,” said Sophie Power, CEO and co-founder of Airlabs.

“At certain points during people’s day, they experience rapid spikes in the levels of these pollutants, especially by roads, across the transport system and in outdoor areas, anywhere outdoor central that’s polluted. So we want to reduce these spikes because they’re most harmful to the health and we can do that by installing our units across a city,” she said.

Tests run by London’s King’s College in July 2016 found an Airlabs test unit removed more than 87 percent of nitrogen oxides. Airlabs claims that improvements made since then have raised that number to over 95 percent.

Even at that level of efficiency, there is simply too  much air pollution in a city to filter it all.

However, it is possible to clean the air in small areas where people congregate.

Usually these are also high-pollution locations: bus stops or taxi stands.

This way the most harmful environments become the most healthy.

“The question really is, ‘How much clean air can you deliver?” asks Matthew Johnson, chief science officer and co-founder of Airlabs and professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen.

“The air pollution over a city like London could be kilometers thick. You can’t clean all of that air, but if you focus on the places where people are, it’s a much smaller volume of treated air that you need and we think there we can achieve success, ” he said.

Airlabs build these benches, each fitted with five filter units, but the system is not limited to benches.

The filter units can be installed into any structure around the city—the base of lamp post or traffic light, for instance. The filters can also be installed in industrial settings, to clean particularly polluted parts of factories, for instance.

Polluted environments can be extremely deadly.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said one in four deaths in 2012—12.6 million people—were from an unhealthy living or working environment.