Every Clean Air Initiative lamppost is simultaneously an air-cleaning unit, a real-time pollution monitoring station, and a smart city data asset. Here is the full technology specification.
Unlike rooftop monitoring stations, Clean Air Initiative sensors are positioned at 1–2 metres above pavement — the height where people actually breathe. Every post is a real-time environmental monitoring station.
All sensor data from every Clean Air Initiative post feeds a real-time public dashboard — accessible to anyone. Before and after comparisons, live street-level maps, and open data downloads.
The software and data infrastructure underpinning the Clean Air Initiative is designed to handle millions of posts, real-time data streams, and a public-facing dashboard with global access.
A common, fair question about outdoor air cleaning is whether it does anything measurable against the open air of a street. The strongest answer comes from a peer-reviewed pilot study in Hong Kong — the closest published precedent for the corridor approach Clean Air is built on.
Researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University deployed seven roadside air-purifier units along an urban street canyon, with a network of twelve monitoring stations measuring the effect against the surrounding background air (Li et al., 2024, Science of the Total Environment). It is exactly the question we are asking on Brixton Road: do several modest units, spaced closely along a street, produce a measurable effect that a single isolated unit cannot?
Their measured hourly-average reductions, against simultaneous ambient background:
The study also found that tighter unit spacing produced stronger local reduction, and estimated a filter lifetime of around 130 days of continuous running — both directly informing our corridor design and maintenance planning. We treat these figures as encouraging precedent, not as a promise: this was a Hong Kong street canyon with its own climate, density and traffic mix, and our own Brixton pilot is designed to produce London-specific evidence of its own.