CityTree: the air pollution startup with the purifying power of 275 trees
While governments grapple with legislation to stop people polluting, one German startup has come up with a way to clean the air in real time.
The four co-founders of Green City Solutions - an architect, a horticulturalist, a mechanical engineer and Wu, the IT specialist - met at Dresden University and founded the startup in 2014. Together, they created the CityTree as part of the answer towards a complex problem: how to clean the air in the world’s increasingly overpopulated urban areas.
City dwellers suffer from asthma, heart disease and lung cancer because of the poor quality of the air where they live. The World Health Organisation says four in every five city residents face toxic levels of particulate air pollution: a combination of poisonous nitrogen dioxide and other carcinogenic particles. It’s not getting any better: the WHO says air pollution was eight per cent worse in 2013 than it was in 2008.
