Europe’s biggest living wall company Mobilane has created a range of products to ‘green up’ Britain’s urban environments, helping both the private and public sectors to reduce their carbon footprint, promote biodiversity and improve air quality.
Green screens, Living Walls and Living Hoardings all use plants, and in particular ivy, to create a living, natural way to screen or divide space.
All help to reduce carbon dioxide levels and absorb harmful microscopic pollutants - called PM10s – from the air, while at the same time providing an immediate and visually striking way to enhance the built environment.
The Government's Environmental Audit Committee estimates that outdoor air pollution causes between 35,000 and 50,000 premature deaths each year in the UK. Furthermore, according to research produced by the Royal London Hospital, exposure to traffic pollution can be linked to the stunted growth of children's lungs. The medics’ research suggested that lung capacity can be reduced by as much as 17%.
Unfortunately for residents in the UK – and in Greater London in particular, where air pollution is especially poor – we frequently fail to meet European Union targets and World Health Organisation guidelines on PM10s.
Green screens are helping the country get a handle on this problem. On top of turning carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis, the ivy in Mobilane’s living walls purifies the air by soaking up nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. A 17-23 sq m Mobilane green screen, which can be erected in a matter of hours, will remove the same PM10s from the air as an average-sized city tree.
And it doesn’t end there. Green screens can play a part in reducing that perennial blight of many an urban space – graffiti. The spur to vandalism for many graffiti artists can be the sight of a blank wall. But if that wall is turned from a blank canvas into an attractive-looking layer of foliage, then the spur is removed. And with graffiti-removal costing millions of pounds each year, that is not an insignificant consideration.
This point is linked to the broader issue of green screens having a positive aesthetic impact on their surroundings. They are not just about providing environmental and social benefits, as considerable and as important as those benefits are; they are about improving the look of the UK’s buildings. Their wider use will help lift the appearance of homes and towns across the country.
