Will Artificial Trees be the Future Trees?

Over the past century, economic growth and technological advances of countries have been rapidly
progressing and giving people an easier, faster, and wealthier way of living. These developments, however, impart
a great role on the climatic-problems this world is currently facing— resulting to lower level of “healthy living”
and “holistic sustainability” for the living organisms.

Air pollution has always been one of the major causes of such problems, and most places in the world are
not giving the adequate attention to the problem as they continue on producing machineries that emit large amounts
of air pollutants such as chlorofluorocarbons. What makes it even worse is that, natural resources—especially
forests—which help in fighting air pollution and other climatic-problems are being torn away for any reason people
could think of. Moreover, places with the greatest amount of air pollutants, such as the big cities, lack plants and
trees because of land scarcity.

Land scarcity combined with extreme climate conditions could prevent natural trees from growing.
Although some developed cities have already implemented what we called, “Green-isles”, they are not enough to
fight the over-flowing air pollutants that put our lives at risk. It is no doubt that inventing something as effective as
the natural tree, is needed.

This problem paved way for the idea of creating Artificial Trees. These trees which could garner, let’s say
hydro-carbons or any other pollutants, then convert it to useful and less harmful gasses through several conversion
processes, will be of great help to the environment. One of the probable processes to be used is called “Catalytic
converters”. According to Chemistry Libretext (n.d), Catalytic converters are used in exhaust systems to provide a
site for the oxidation and reduction of toxic by-products (like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and
hydrocarbons) of fuel into less hazardous substances such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrogen gas. These
converters could be the basis of these artificial trees, but instead of by-products of fuel are to be converted, by-
products of smoke could be used instead.

Will this be feasible for a wide-scale implementation? If given the proper and deep research with the right
amount of budget and attention by the society and the government, I hold onto the belief that this will be feasible
for a wide-scale implementation. If polluted water is capable of being refreshed, I believe that polluted air is not
different. Nothing is impossible with a mind that seeks.