If you have children and have a home that you want to landscape, you may want consider more planting and less pavement and lawn. Recent publishing in Scientific Reports provide new evidence that certain planting between roads and playgrounds can decrease and protect children from pollution emitted from surrounding roads.

For the study, investigators planted 3 different tredges (trees managed to be head-high hedges) a three primary schools in Manchester. One school had an ivy screen, a second one had a wester red cedar, and third had a mixture of western red cedar, Swedish birch, juniper. A fourth school was set up as a control without any planting.

Compared to the control, they found that overall, tredges significantly reduced the children’s air pollution exposure, especially in the magnitude and frequency of acute air pollution spikes.

The plant with the biggest reduction in particulate matter and black carbon were the western red cedar that reduced black carbon by 49%, particulate matter PM2.5 by 46%, and particulate matter PM1 by 26% from the pass-by traffic.

“Our findings show that we can protect school playgrounds, with carefully chosen and managed tredges, which capture air pollution particulates on their leaves. This helps to prevent at least some of the health hazards imposed on young children at schools next to busy roads where the localized air quality is damagingly poor, and it can be done quickly and cost-effectively,” stated one of the researcher Barbara Maher.

The benefits of plants are completely under-appreciated and undervalued for their troves of benefits. The deforestation and cutting down trees like property needs to stop for the sake of our health and sustainability of our planet for future generations.

BA Maher et al. Protecting playgrounds: local-scale reduction of airborne particulate matter concentrations through particulate deposition on roadside ‘tredges’ (green infrastructure). Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18509-w