In the ongoing battle with climate change, trees are a natural first line of defence as they help to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are present in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t enough of them to cope with the quantity of greenhouse gases, and, at present, too few trees are being planted to make up the deficit. 

Happily, some interesting news from the US has reached us this week, as it has been revealed that two designers in Boston have been recruited to develop artificial trees capable of absorbing carbon dioxide, before either storing it or converting it into fuel. 

A spokesperson for the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions in Arizona claims that one square kilometre of artificial trees could theoretically remove four million tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually. 

There is a downside, however – the artificial trees don’t resemble real ones, as developers prioritise the efficiency of the carbon-removal process over realism. Affordability is also an issue, but once the technology has been perfected, its designers estimate that the cost of removing carbon dioxide will be as little as $100 a tonne.

Pioneering new technologies that challenge the norm and that are designed to lessen our impact on the environment is exactly what we deliver here at TrakRap.