Road embankments as a green barrier improving urban air quality

For many, roadside embankments are just a piece of land… but for scientists at the Centre for Climate Research of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, they are much more!

In a recent article published in the prestigious international journal Building and Environment, a team of scientists demonstrated that plants on embankments along expressways can:

  • accumulate significant amounts of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) and trace elements (As, Pb, Fe, Cu, Cd, Zn),
  • effectively purify the air along the road, becoming a natural barrier against toxic pollutants.

💡 Key findings:

  • Plants accumulate pollutants throughout the year—even in fall and winter.
  • They can reduce PM10 concentrations in the air by up to 71%.
  • The ecological risk resulting from the presence of trace elements is reduced by 42%.

Statistical analyses have shown strong links between dust in the air and dust deposited on plants – proving that plants are truly effective at capturing pollutants.

The main author of the publication is our PhD student, Adam Nawrocki, M.Sc. The co-authors are: Arkadiusz Przybysz, Ph.D., Prof. SGGW, Robert Popek, Ph.D., Prof. SGGW, and Hanna Moniuszko, Ph.D.

The article was written in collaboration with:
Dr. Elżbieta Wójcik-Gront, Prof. SGGW (Department of Biometrics, Institute of Agriculture, SGGW)
Dr. Piotr Sikorski, Prof. SGGW (Department of Environmental Design and Remote Sensing, Institute of Environmental Engineering, SGGW).
The research was funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (grant no. 2020/39/D/NZ9/00969).

We encourage you to delve deeper into this topic and read our article:
Nawrocki, A., Przybysz, A., Moniuszko, H., Wójcik-Gront, E., Sikorski, P., & Popek, R. (2025). Understanding spatial patterns of traffic pollutant reduction by vegetated earth berms. Building and Environment, 225, 113878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113878

👏 We would like to congratulate all the authors of the publication and thank them for their contribution to the development of research on green urban infrastructure!

🌱 Because roadside vegetation is an effective protection against air pollution!