Brief Explanation

How do you lessen smog on EDSA, a busy highway that's five times more polluted than the world's safety standards and has virtually no space for trees?

The Brief

The Philippines' busiest highway is also its most polluted. The 2 million vehicles that traverse EDSA generates Nitrogen Oxide that's nearly 5 times that of the World Health Organization's safety standards. The pollution could be reduced if more trees were planted, but because there are barely enough spaces to plant them, the pollution can only worsen as the number of cars increase.

How the final design was conceived

Trees are the lungs of a city. Like lungs, trees also function as a sort of filtration system as it filters pollution in the area. A polluted place like EDSA would benefit a lot from the presence of trees. The problem is that there isn't enough space to plant them along the highway. Boysen, the Philippines' no. 1 paint manufacturer, together with its agency, decided that when you can't plant trees, all you have to do is paint them. A row of colorful, individually designed lung-shaped trees was painted on a 1,500-meter wall using KNOxOUT, Boysen's breakthrough pollution-busting paint. Every square-meter of a KNOxOUT painted surface can clean as much as one mature tree.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The tree lungs are the fifth of a series of giant air-cleaning artworks painted along EDSA. Among the artworks, they have proven to be the most popular and most talked about, earning rave reviews from the public and from local and international media, from networks such as BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera and National Geographic. The Manila Metropolitan Development Authority, the government body in charge of maintaining EDSA, even asked for more trees to be painted after seeing the initial batch. Best of all, nitrogen oxide levels were reduced by 20% as confirmed by the Manila Observatory pollution-monitoring group.