In Monterrey, Mexico, a new billboard has popped up in the city. But unlike the countless other billboards advertising around the city, this billboard is actually having a positive impact on its immediate surroundings. That’s because the billboard is covered in an air-purifying resin that can eat up the city’s smog.
The billboard advertisements are coated with a special resin that, when hit by sunlight, prompts a photocatalytic process to turn smog into clean air. The air-purifying resin is called Pollu-Mesh, and it is Roosegaarde’s latest effort to tackle pollution in cities, following on from a series of smog-eating towers installed in Rotterdam and Beijing.
According to the Roosegaarde, a roadside advertisement measuring 12.7 by 7.2 meters can provide the same amount of oxygen that 30 trees can provide over a six-hour period. If each one of Monterrey’s 9,760 billboards were coated with Pollu-Mesh, they would do the work of 292,800 trees in six hours—with one billboard functioning for up to five years. In a city with limited space for trees, Pollu-Mesh could provide a solution for cleaning up the city’s smog.
