Cars are getting greener. What about roads?

There's been a huge improvement in the fuel efficiency and pollution controls of automobiles over the past few decades. What if roads could help further by swallowing up cars' pollutants?

By Antony Ingram,?Guest blogger / July 21, 2013

Heavy traffic on the Westside of Los Angeles. In environmental terms, cars have vastly improved over the last three decades. Now, the sidewalks in one Dutch neighborhood are doing their part.

Reed Saxon/AP/File

Enlarge

It was the terrible smog of cities like Los Angeles in the 1970s that prompted a huge change in the efficiency and pollution controls of?automobiles. Today, cars are many orders of magnitude cleaner than their counterparts from previous decades.

Skip to next paragraph GreenCarReports

The website focuses on the auto industry?s future, the evolution of cars beyond fossil fuels, and the green movement's relevance to car shoppers today. For more stories on green cars, click here.

Recent posts

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; // google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Subscribe Today to the Monitor

Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of
The Christian Science Monitor
Weekly Digital Edition

But what if our roads could help further? No, not by reducing congestion (though that would be nice), but by swallowing up the pollutants pumped out by?cars.

The sidewalks in one Dutch neighborhood are doing just that.

The?Los Angeles Times?reports that scientists at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have discovered a way of using air-purifying pavements to cut pollution by half.

A layer of titanium oxide is used to cover paving slabs. This layer combines with chemicals in the air, turning them into less harmful substances.

One of the pollutants reduced most by the coating is NOx, or oxides of nitrogen. NOx reacts with other pollutants in the air to form smog, and is a major component of?automotive?exhaust. Using a nearby uncoated pavement as a control test, the scientists saw a 45 percent NOx reduction in "ideal weather", and a 19 percent reduction over the course of a day.

Potentially, other chemically-engineered surfaces could be used to remove other pollutants from the air, particularly around major routes.

The issue, for the time being at least, is cost--titanium isn't the cheapest of materials, and covering every road in the land with pollution-reducing chemicals could be prohibitively expensive.

Producing those chemicals in the first place is the other elephant in the room--such a process would need to be scrutinized to ensure it wasn't an environmental liability itself. Still, if such coatings took the form of a simple spray for a nation's highways and byways, at least it wouldn't require the removal and replacement of entire roads...

The researchers' findings are published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best auto bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger,?click here.?To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link in the blog description box above.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Lsn-MMyBATY/Cars-are-getting-greener.-What-about-roads

xavier joan crawford joan crawford john goodman kendall marshall whitney houston news sylvia plath