Mexico’s Vertical Gardens for a Cleaner Air

Mexico City’s busiest highway is being converted into more than 600,000 square feet of vertical gardens. This initiative will convert more than 1,000 concrete pillars of the elevated highway into vertical gardens to improve the air quality and produce more oxygen. These gardens will suck up more than 27,000 tons of harmful gases, capture more than 11,000 pounds of dust and utilize rainwater to keep more than 500,000 plants alive. The plants will use all the elevated highway surfaces to capture rainwater. This water will be cleaned and reused in a combination with grey water to irrigate the vertical gardens. The plants are not being grown on soil. The project is using recycled plastic bottles to develop a specific felt which has the same density as soil and the plants are being grown on them. Highways are being turned into vertical gardens in Germany, Japan, US and France as well. Vertical forest residential towers at Milan, Italy has ambitious plans to plant 3 million new trees by 2030 which officials say will absorb around 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year (4/5th of total Carbon Dioxide content of Milan).