CO2 - Algae - Oxygen
Want to know how to create oxygen from the smog and pollution emitted from cars on highways? Utilising Algae? Seeing as Algae is not something you would usually find on a highway, this is very innovative.
A French and Dutch design firm, Collective Cloud , has devised the answer - and algae farm above a small stretch of highway in Geneva, Switzerland.
Algae, like plants, generates energy from photosynthesis using sunlight and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen along the way as a by-product. As cars are huge emitters of CO2, and highways are flooded with pollution, an algae farm sitting right about the noisy, environmentally damaging cars is a perfect location!
The system is comprised of multiple transparent tubes clinging onto the viaduct which is used for the production of algae. And hooks up to secondary equipment such as filters, pumps and solar panels.
“The functioning and the placement of this bioreactor signal practices of the future: food production in an urban environment, the conservation of green space and the reinterpretation of existing infrastructures,” the Cloud Collective writes on their website.
The algae farm was built to explain how easy it would be to do this on a larger scale. It was built as part of a garden festival in Geneva, which "“focuses on the co-habitation of the urban and the natural within the context of the urban expansion of Geneva.”
Cloud Collective states, "we focus on the character of the site and try to prove that even these locations of highways and car dealers – despite their anonymous and generic character – can play an important role in the production of food and biomass."