Greenbelt concept for pollution abatement

Mitigation of air pollution has emerged as one of the challenging tasks in environmental management. Air-cleaning technologies such as cyclones, high efficiency particulate filters, etc do provide the necessary level of particulate removal from the air discharges from industries. However, in the absence of 100% removal or malfunctioning of the ventilation systems, there is a possibility of particulates getting released into the environment. In addition to the industrial effluents, the air pollution is also caused due the burning of transportation fuels (petrol, diesel etc) in cities. The pollution includes many harmful organic compounds and particulates.

Green belt is a workable, cost effective concept which can easily be adopted to control air pollution in industrialized cities. Rows of plants are grown in such a way as to function as air pollutants sinks. The Green belt concept is useful around nuclear facilities where small amounts of particulate releases are trapped on the leaves of the trees which form greenbelt around the facilities. Leaves on the trees with their vast area, absorb or collect the pollutants on their surface, thus effectively reduce the concentration of the pollutants in the ambient air. Greenbelt designing in an appropriate scientific manner not only reduces air pollution, but also attenuates noise pollution.

The effectiveness of the greenbelt for pollution abatement depends on the type of tree, the tree height, width of the green belt and the distance of green belt from the source of release. Any excessive releases may endanger the life of the trees and hence limits for tolerance should be established depending upon the type of pollution. For example very high exposures of the trees to ionizing radiation (example: during Chernobyl reactor accident) are likely to be fatal for most of the trees. Keeping this mind, the new basic recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP-2007 (see www.radsafetyinfo.com) is providing some guidelines for the radiation protection of non-human species including plants and trees.