10 Extraordinary Efforts to Stop Pollution

Every day, millions of people recycle materials, and many shoppers consider the environmental effects, known or possible, of their purchases. Governments pass laws to forbid or control the use of scarce resources and prevent or lessen pollution. They also fund a variety of programs, many of which involve the work of private companies, to sustain, protect, and purify natural resources and conserve energy while seeking new, alternative energy sources and taking measures to prevent or address problems and potential risks associated with climate change. These actions sometimes take unusual and unexpected forms, such as those on this list of ten extraordinary efforts to stop pollution, some of which work well, others of which need more work.

Related: 10 Companies That Changed the World

10 Interceptor Trashfence

The Interceptor Trashfence that The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization, installed across the Las Vacas River near Guatemala City proved effective, preventing thousands of tons of the city’s plastic waste from flowing into the Caribbean Sea. Ocean Cleanup images show heaps of the collected refuse that, otherwise, would have choked the river. Although the gigantic screen, which resembles a gargantuan “cyclone fence,” is anchored to the banks, the force of the surging plastic debris was strong enough to buckle part of it.

The non-profit group’s director, Boyan Slat, estimates that the river transports 20,000 tons of trash downstream each year. He explained that The Interceptor was installed during a pilot period so that the organization could “continue to evaluate variables such as fence height, mesh size, and foundation security.” Although the benefits of the barrier seem obvious, not everyone is pleased with it. Hondurans complain that a lot of the plastic waste ends up on their side of the river.^[1]

9 Artificial Coastlines

If you look at a world map, you’ll notice five circular arrows—two in the northern hemisphere rotating clockwise and three in the southern hemisphere going counterclockwise. These represent the ocean currents that have created a global pollution crisis; in essence, “ocean plastic accumulates in five ocean garbage patches” and will continue to do so as long as additional plastic flows into the ocean and existing waste remains uncollected. As plastic continues to accumulate, cleanup will become more difficult, even as the waste threatens sea animals who mistake the plastic for food and causes further detriment to “ecosystems, health, and economies for decades or even centuries.”

Part of the solution may lie in the creation of artificial “U-shaped” coastlines to concentrate the plastic. One such coastline, already in use, has netted hundreds of tons of seaborne plastic. A video showing the emptying of an avalanche of collected debris onto the deck of a cargo ship reveals the plastic articles that it has harvested: trashcans, laundry baskets, crates, tubs, drums, and more, which, if left in the sea, would take years to decompose. It is hoped that the use of computer modeling will predict where hotspots are so the cleanup systems can be placed in these garbage patches.

Unfortunately, artificial coastlines worked better on paper than in actual use. As Australia’s ABC News’s environmental reporter Nick Kilvert explains, the prototypical System 001, a 1,968-foot (600-meter) long free-floating pipe with a net 9.8 feet (3 meters) deep suspended under it, deployed in 2018, didn’t collect the debris; instead, the apparatus “was pushed along with the plastic it was supposed to be collecting,” and physical oceanographer Kim Martini feared that the artificial coastline might “trap sea life” in the process.

An attempt to fix the problem failed a year later when System 0001B was tested. In 2021, System 002 did better, and in 2023, System 002B, equipped with a plastic compactor and three times the size of the 002 prototype, was tested. Results were positive enough to warrant an “upscale to a full fleet of cleanup systems.” Hopes are high for System 003, which is currently working on ocean cleanup.^[2]

8 Gigantic Air Purifier

In Xi’an City, in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, amid a massive, glass-enclosed array of filters, a 328-foor (100-meter) tall tower stands, surrounded by skyscrapers, as it purifies polluted air within its range of effectiveness. The walls of filters on the world’s largest air purifier capture large specks of inhalable particulate matter. Behind the filters, inner layers collect the tiny particles that slip through the outer filters.

As a result, 353 million cubic feet (10 million cubic meters) of air are cleaned every day, reducing small PM 2.5 particles by between 10% and 19% within a 3.9-square-mile (10-square-kilometer) area and attaining “a purifying efficiency of 80%. The tower is part of China’s greater, ongoing battle against air pollution, as is the country’s decrease of the consumption of coal by 30% within a year.^[3]

7 Urban Reefs

As their name suggests, urban reefs are not actual reefs. They’re 3D-printed sculptures or urban furniture made of living materials like mycelium, river dredge, sea shells, and clay aimed at increasing metropolitan biodiversity. Water absorbent they feature a range of microclimates, providing habitats that enable a wide variety of plants, insects, and animals to live and thrive in cities.

As the company Urban Reef, which creates these reefs using a combination of landscape architecture and computational design,” explains, the resulting microclimates “stimulate biodiversity in the urban landscape,” allowing human societies to coexist with nature in a mutually beneficial relationship.^[4]

6 Khavda Renewable Energy Park

Sagar Adani, the director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL), has big plans. With help, in the form of funding, from his uncle, Gautam Adani, whose personal fortune amounts to $100 billion, Adani is at work building the Khavda Renewable Energy Park. This “sprawling solar and wind power plant,” which, upon its completion, will cover over 200 square miles (518 square kilometers) in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where it is being built on uninhabited land devoid of vegetation and wildlife, “just 12 miles from one of the world’s most dangerous borders separating India and Pakistan.”

The cost of the project? A staggering $20 billion. The park will aid the Indian government’s grand, ambitious plan to increase the nation’s use of renewable energy resources by 50% and reach a level of zero emissions by 2070, even as India’s future needs for energy boom.^[5]

5 Sporopollenin

Most grains of pollen share a characteristic with the majority of spores: They are coated with sporopollenin, exine’s main component, nicknamed “the diamond of the plant world” because of its hardness. The bipolymer substance is so durable that it has been discovered on 500-million-year-old sedimentary rocks. It’s also plentiful since, as Living Carbon, a public benefit corporation, observes, “it is naturally produced in the reproductive tissues of terrestrial plants, and as the outer cell walls of certain algae species, it naturally resists decomposition.

By spurring microalgae to express or produce more sporopollenin in their cell walls, a larger portion of the biomass can be used for durable carbon removal, at the same time avoiding the need for energy-intensive post-processing and minimizing storage space. As a result of their research, Living Carbon’s team of biologists, ecologists, foresters, botanists, and researchers have “produced a photosynthesis-enhanced tree [able to] store more carbon on less land.”

They are now at work on developing a metal hyper-accumulation trait that will “increase the durability of stored carbon by slowing the rate of decomposition.” Biotechnology, combined with examples of millions of years of evolutionary adaptations to the environment, has enabled this large-scale carbon removal solution.^[6]

4 Bioengineered Trees

Other companies are also bioengineering trees as solutions to controlling the planet’s pollution. As Gabriel Popkin explains for Science, a California biotech company is seeking to create fast-growing trees that can rapidly soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide. In lab trials, this enterprise has resulted in “genetically enhanced poplars grew more than 1.5 times faster than unmodified ones.”

Trees are great at removing carbon from the atmosphere because they absorb it from the air and stabilize it in the forms of wood and roots, but photosynthesis and photorespiration slow the rate at which trees can absorb the gas. By using a bacterium to insert genes from pumpkin and green algae into poplar trees, another company lowered trees’ photorespiration rates and recycled “carbon from phosphoglycolate into sugars essential to growth.”

While scientists were pleased by these breakthroughs, they regard them, in the words of plant biologist Sophie Young, as only “a great first step,” adding the big caveat that the trees were grown in a greenhouse rather than in their natural environment.^[7]

3 Mammoth Air Vacuum

A Swiss company, Climeworks, is using Orca, a gigantic vacuum, to suck carbon dioxide from the air, trapping it inside the collector’s filters, from which the gas is then transferred to storage tanks before being stored under Iceland’s “porous volcanic rock,” where it solidifies in two years. This contrasts with the natural process that Orca mimics, which takes thousands of years.

Two problems affect whether this technology will be adopted quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe: politics and the speed at which Orca is duplicated sufficiently to extract, store, and transform the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide. Orca itself can process only 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, “a tiny fraction of the annual 10 billion tons” that must be removed from the atmosphere.^[8]

2 Electrochemical Oxidation

Another extraordinary effort to stop pollution focuses on so-called forever chemicals, or what chemists refer to as poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances [PFAS]. These chemicals, the Cleveland Clinic points out, are “endocrine-disrupting chemicals [ECDs],” to which David Shewmon, MD, says we’re being exposed constantly. The Cleveland Clinic adds that repeated or high exposure to EDCs, which causes them to build up in the body, can cause problematic thyroid function, slowed development in children, increased cancer risk, reduced immune function, and reproductive challenges due to reduced semen quality or sperm count.

A new method of treating water that is heavily contaminated with PFAS shows promise, according to the University of California-Riverside (UCR). The process exposes the water to ultraviolet light, sulfite, and electrochemical oxidation, which breaks the strong fluorine-to-carbon bonds in the PFAS compounds and other concentrated organic compounds. UCR associate professor Jinyong Liu notes this decontamination method “achieved near-complete destruction of PFAS in various water samples contaminated by the foams.”

Firefighters and military personnel are exposed to fire-suppression foams containing hundreds of unhealthful forever chemicals, the stubbornly strong fluorine-to-carbon bonds of which allow them to persist indefinitely in the environment. They, among others, stand to benefit from this new method.^[9]

1 Orphaned Well Cleanup

In theory, American companies that pollute are supposed to foot the cleanup bill; in practice, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) often bore the cost since many offenders declared bankruptcy or “disappeared” beforehand. When the EPA’s cleanup funds were exhausted, American citizens were left vulnerable to the toxic effects of the remaining contaminated sites. The 2021 renewal of the Superfund program means that polluters will be on the hook again for cleanup costs.

The remaining sites will now be cataloged and closed as pipelines are removed and abandoned chemical wells are capped with cement. Such wells resulted from “boom-and-bust cycles” in oil and gas, during which in boom years when oil prices are high, small companies jump into drilling, but when the market goes belly up, they go bankrupt. This leaves the contaminated sites for either the government to clean up or to be left contaminated, risking public health.^[10]