According to the last UN report about Global Warming, we reached the “Code red for humanity”. Thus, we all should show serious steps toward solving such an enormous global issue starting from yesterday and not even from the current moment. The delay in solving this major global threat would cause many drastic circumstances that we might not be able to undo if we kept this “stand-still” manner of reducing CO2 emissions. The damaging effects of greenhouse gases are now clearer and tangible for every human nowadays.

Unfortunately, the main cause of such drastic consequences of global warming is due to the emerging of the technological era that we are both blessed and cursed by using it.
The usage of high-tech devices and their applications is extremely essential for every one of us nowadays. However, the number of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases for producing these products is recording remarkable negative records to the point that oriented many scientists to think about how many years left for our existence on our lovely planet, The Earth.

Subsequently, the next generations will be in great danger as they will have to face many dramatic challenges that have been initiated by us, unfortunately.
Without a doubt, we believe that the rise of the technological era caused such a massive issue. However, we also have faith that the technology itself could play the “Hero role” to save our planet through positive and transparent initiatives.
Subsequently, we will shed the light on a special houseplant, the Prayer Plant, as it has a unique capability to remove the CO2 emission in an efficient manner in comparison with many similar indoor plants. Our initiative in this project is to convince everyone to plant such indoor plants at home, workplaces, etc.

The main goal of this project is to conserve the maximum lifetime of such plants without any human intervention. So, we will depend on INTEL’s DE10-Nano FPGA board to process many vital sensory readings and have all these records stored in the Microsoft Azure cloud for further processing.

Project Proposal

1. High-level project introduction and performance expectation

        All the great achievements are always started by small steps. Thus, we can overcome the global warming challenge by empowering small initiatives through the assistance of high-tech usage. We are so convinced that our main fight against the global warming challenge will start at the individual consumer’s level as they can play the most effective part in reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).

        The main idea of this proposed project is to increase the environmental impact awareness of greenhouse gases, especially those caused by our simple daily habits. For instant, charging our mobile and portable devices is emitting an enormous amount of CO2. Unfortunately, we cannot abandon the usage of our high-tech lifestyle as we are so convinced that it become a basic right that all of us should have. There are over 7.7 billion mobile phones in use nowadays and this number is expected to keep raising a year after a year. What is really interesting is that each mobile device is creating around 79 Kg of CO2 emissions in its lifetime, which is equivalent to the CO2 emissions from burning about 34 Liters of petrol! Such fact is only related to the CO2 emissions from mobile phones only. Subsequently, we need to have a different look at the average amount of CO2 emission that each individual person is causing by using different smart devices on a daily basis.  

        In this project, we proposed the usage of a special houseplant, called the “Prayer plant” as different studies and experiments proved its ability to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases very efficiently in comparison with similar indoor plants. In order to achieve the maximum absorption of the CO2 gases by the Prayer Plant, we need to record much different vital information about it such as its irrigation cycle which will be a function of many sensory data that need to be monitored in where the prayer plant will be placed such as the room’s temperature and humidity, the amount of the ambient light, and the moisture level of plant pot’s soil. Subsequently, we will use a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board to perform all the data processing stages and the direct interaction with the sensors and actuators in the system, while we will use the Microsoft Azure IoT could server to store all these data for further processing stages. These processing stages include the studies of each system and the studies of the many systems once this proposed project got expanded and used by millions of positive individuals that want to contribute to play a positive role in saving our planet.  

2. Block Diagram

3. Expected sustainability results, projected resource savings

        We selected the Prayer Plant for this project since each one of these plants could significantly decrease the amount of CO2 in a single room by 14.40% over a 24-hour period. Also, it proved that each prayer plant could get rid of the CO2 emission from a single mobile device up to 3.14%. This means that we approximately need around 30 prayer-plants to eliminate all the CO2 emissions of charging a single mobile phone per day. The power of this idea will achieve its maximum goals with the collaboration of millions of individuals from all over the planet. Also, the involvement of IoT will help us to have a great out-of-scope vision and tracking capability once this proposed system got implemented by a large group of positive individuals. On the other hand, we are expecting that the dependence on FPGA as the processing hardware will give us the capability to save a massive amount of power consumption while processing all these operations. The expected dynamic power consumption in our proposed system will not exceed 1 Watt.  

4. Design Introduction

5. Functional description and implementation

6. Performance metrics, performance to expectation

7. Sustainability results, resource savings achieved

8. Conclusion