What if more materials not only reduced their own environmental impact, but also actively tried to go farther? Hanging from a wall, a new design called BioScales looks like an abstract sculpture. But it’s also designed to capture CO2 and pollution from the air and later to be composted, returning carbon to the soil. The design was developed by the Los Angeles-based firm Sutherlin Santo. “Living downtown, dealing with the air quality here and dealing with the fallout from the wildfires, we found ourselves bringing equipment into our apartment to clean the air,” says partner Paul Sutherlin Santo. “We conceptually considered what could we do that didn’t amount to introducing new tech but used existing surface area.” It’s part of a larger project the studio is working on called Biocraft, which aims to replace petroleum-based plastic with biopolymers that have additional functions, like the carbon sequestration used by the scales.