By Paco de Campos.

Lima, Jan 28 (EFE).- The polluted city of Lima will soon have mechanical "super trees," each one of them capable of purifying enough air so that 20,000 people can breathe easy all day long.

One of these Urban Air Cleaners has the same capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen as 1,200 real trees and to filter 200,000 cubic meters (7.05 million cubic feet) per day, the heads of the project told Efe.

The initiative was started by Tierra Nuestra, a Peruvian firm dedicated to conservation through technological development.

"We've gathered a group of Peruvian engineers, economists and financiers and we're starting to work on how we could resolve the matter. So, we're presenting the air purification project and we're starting to develop it," one of the creators, engineer Jorge Gutierrez, told Efe in an interview.

Two years later, the prototype of the UAC-20 purification device has been set up outside the Production Ministry in Lima, where it has been visited - Gutierrez said - by scholars and government officials.

"Not only from Peru, but also from the United States, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, South Korea, and even people from Paris and Madrid," the engineer added.

The way the device works is simple. It reproduces "specific processes that are performed naturally in nature, thermodynamic, pressure, cooling processes," that is, the machine takes in polluted air and emits clean air, Gutierrez said.

The entire process costs just $3 per day.

The "super tree" creator said that similar projects have been developed in other countries, but all of them have proven not to be viable because of their high cost.

"The machines developed in Mexico or Chile ... (consume) between 48 and 68 kilowatts per hour and need continuous maintenance, while we only use 2.5 kilowatts and about 60 liters of water every five hours," he said.

Regarding the cost of installation, the objective is to get firms interested in socially responsible work to sign up as sponsors and for the air purifiers not to be a cost to Peruvian municipalities.

Although the project has been developed especially for the polluted capital city, surrounded by sand hills and where it hardly ever rains, the goal is to export the purifiers.

"The idea is to take them to most of the countries that have this problem and to be able to work on a world scale to improve people's health," Gutierrez said.

The UAC-20 has been selected as a candidate for the Rolex Award for Enterprise 2008, an international prize given for innovative projects.

Gutierrez says the "super tree" will allow municipalities to mitigate the problems that come with pollution, but he added that its main function will be to make the public aware of the pollution problem.

"The only real and definitive solution is for people to become aware and for us to stop using fossil fuels," he said.

"We must become aware that health is a tremendously necessary thing for life ... and each member of society must protect himself from pollution and therefore it's necessary to put all our ingenuity into solving" the problem, he said. EFE

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