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Dutch Town Lays Air-Purifying Concrete
eldavojohn writes "In an effort to combat air pollution, a Dutch town has paved some of its streets with air-purifying concrete. It contains a titanium dioxide-based additive that utilizes sunlight to turn car exhaust into harmless nitrates. It was shown to do this in a lab and now the scientists are interested in just how much this will affect the air quality around the road. They will sample the air quality by a normal road and by this newly paved one."
Because the purifying concrete offsets the pollution incurred from mining the titanium to create the concrete? Am I wrong in thinking I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly? Someone weigh in on this please. Thanks :P
My humor is probably your flamebait
Nitrates? Aren't those bad in their own right? I'm thinking along the lines of fertilizer run-off and the affect it has on algae in oceans. Could this solution create worse problems?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This sounds like a great idea if it works, but surely producing concrete is a far from 'green' process. I wonder how long the concrete has to be in place to neutralise the polluting effect of manufacturing it in the first place.
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I'm also a bit curious about the "harmless nitrates" that will be washed into the ground every time it rains.
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I would imagine that active elements would decay, and that in a number of years, the concrete wouldn't do anything.
But by then, the road would need to be repaved anyways, so that's not really a problem. As long as it remains chemically active for a longer timespan than the life of the road, we're good.
1) From TFA: "'With one rain shower everything is washed clean,' the institution said in a statement." Ah, but exactly WHAT is washed to WHERE, eh? Are we just trading off air pollution for water pollution?
2) How durable is this new substance? How much pollution can the road suck up before it wears out? Will it need to be resurfaced and/or replaced every year? Two years?
As a biologist I take exception to the phrase "harmless nitrates"!
It may not have anything to do with greenhouse gasses, but more nitrates in rivers and ground-water is the last thing humanity needs.
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the additive binds the nitrogen oxide particles emitted by car exhausts and turns them into harmless nitrates. "With one rain shower everything is washed clean," the institution said
Hmm... the New York Times says nitrates are "a dangerous and increasingly widespread pollutant... reaching dangerous levels in groundwater".
It seems environmentalists hold wildly diverging opinions on this.
If the NYT is correct, it's fortunate that this "air purifying concrete" is not likely to be very effective. You see, only a small percentage of the NOx molecules are going to come in contact with the road surface (which makes them eligible for conversion to nitrates). The titanium dioxide in the concrete is not able to reach out and grab NOx molecules floating one meter or even one millimeter above the road. I predict the air quality measurements will show very little difference, and the media will never report on this idea again.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Nitrates don't need to be harmless, nor there needs to be zero side effects. All that's needed is that the combined damage produced by any side effects must be less than the damage produced by the excess carbon dioxide in lieu of said concrete.
Funny how any time there is a proposed innovation to solve a problem, there are always nitpickers who point out side effects without considering their proportion compared to the original problem being solved. A solution either offers a net benefit, or it doesn't.