One wall, one world

MANILA, Philippines - EDSA handles a significant volume of traffic. Being the most important artery of the metropolis, an average of about 2.34 million vehicles pass through it every day.

The sheer volume of traffic that passes through EDSA adds to the already polluted air that Filipinos breathe.

Aside from carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide or Nox is one of the compounds that are polluting the air. Nox is formed when fuel burns at high temperatures, such as in motor vehicle engines.

Mobile sources are responsible for more than half of all nitrogen oxide in the country. Both on-road and non-road transportation sources are major nitrogen oxide polluters.

Nitrogen oxides can travel long distances, causing a variety of health and environmental problems in locations far from their emissions source. These problems include damaging the ozone and smog, which are created in the atmosphere from nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and sunlight. On smoggy days, one might experience difficulty in breathing or even have trouble seeing objects at a distance.

Trial data indicate that NOx levels in the vicinity of the Guadalupe MRT Station are at times over 200 micrograms per cubic meter — a figure that’s more than five times that of the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 40 micrograms per cubic meter.

To try and help combat this problem, Boysen developed the world’s first air cleaning paint Boysen KNOxOUT.

The paint is now available in the market and boasts of its ability to be an arm to combat nitrogen oxides in the air.  It has been proven to absorb eight cars’ worth of polluting emissions per square meter painted. KNOxOUT looks like an ordinary water based paint, but has a special ingredient – air cleaning titanium dioxide (TiO2), often referred to as a photocatalyst. When activated by light, it speeds up a chemical reaction that turns ordinary water vapor into free radicals that attack NOx and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the two components of smog; and transform them into harmless substances.

KNOxOUT is at the core of Manila’s “One Wall One World” campaign, which seeks to rid the air supply of noxious fumes and gases by painting the walls of buildings, houses, schools, and other establishments with this air-cleansing paint.

Operating under the “Green Walls” initiative, which repaints the walls of the busiest, most polluted streets in Metro Manila, the “One Wall One World” campaign is determined in the long-run to cover every wall in the city and make it a better place to breathe.

For now, the project aims to repaint the stretch of walls from Lawton Avenue in Barangay Cembo, J.P. Rizal to Kalayaan Gate One. This may seem like a daunting task, but with enough volunteers, anything is possible. Last December, a group of local artists even banded together and painted an extensive mural along the Marikina Riverbanks using the world’s first-ever anti-pollution paint—a small but definite step in a more detoxified direction.