There’s a feeling that accompanies the sense of impending doom when we consider all the troubles plaguing our environment: powerlessness. The scope of the disaster is so huge, so beyond what we as individuals are able to do about it, that we’re robbed of any sense of agency we may have in confronting climate change, greenhouse gasses and pollution. We’re tempted to just give up and wait for some genius to solve the problem for us.
That’s not a responsible course of action, but it still feels good when one of those geniuses steps up with an idea. Ceracasa Ceramica of Spain may have given us one such idea: BionicTile. The tiles are coated with a special glaze that, when combined with sunlight and humidity, convert nitrogen oxide pollutants from things such as car exhaust and industrial processes into harmless nitrates. The company claims that just 200 buildings clad with these tiles could clean about 2.6 million cubic meters of air each year, providing a cleaner atmosphere for more than 400,000 people annually. These tiles can be combined with Lifewall, another Ceracasa tile product. Lifewall supports plant growth, basically turning a building facade into a giant Chia Pet.
The BionicTile promotional video opens with about two minutes of doom porn set to distorted cello music. We see factories pumping ugly-looking clouds into the sky, an SUV buffeted by hurricane winds and X-rays of pollutant-mangled lungs. But then, as though we’ve stepped into a commercial for anti-depressants, some peaceful, Boards of Canada-esque electronic music plays as the company introduces BionicTile. The pitch is that a lot of deadly schmutz could be sponged from our air if many city buildings were clad with this tile. It would be as though the city was an enormous forest. Trees appear where there were once buildings. The video suggests we can have our unsustainable cake and eat it too, although it puts us more in a mind of the “Life After People” documentary.
Bill Rodgers is a Contributing Editor at CFile.
Above image: A screenshot from Ceracasa’s BionicTile promotional video.
Ceracasa’s BionicTile video presentation, explaining how the specially-coated tiles sponge polluting nitrogen oxides from the air. Video courtesy of Martin Cox.
Screenshots from the BionicTile promotional video.
A building clad in BionicTile and a building clad in Lifewall tile, which can be combined with BionicTile. Photographs courtesy of Ceracasa.
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