The bus is designed to clean the air as it drives through the city.

Manchester is one of the UK’s busiest cities, and with that comes a whole lot of pollution. In fact, according to a 2017 study, 923 deaths in Greater Manchester that year were linked to long-term exposure to polluted air. Scary.

Now, following a successful trial in Southampton, Bluestar is bringing its ‘Bluestar Breathe’ bus to Manchester. Fitted with an air filter on its roof, the bus will suck pollutant particles into its special filter, to help tackle pollution and poor air quality in the city.

The trial worked so well in Southampton, they’re currently set to expand their fleet there with five new buses, while rolling out the concept further in Manchester, Brighton, Newcastle, Oxford, Plymouth and Crawley.

Tests last year revealed that a single bus could remove as much as 65g of pollutants from the air in a 100-day period, cleaning 3.2m cubic meters of the cities air – an incredible effort to help tackle the current pollution levels.

David Brown, Go-Ahead chief executive, said: “We want to play our part in tackling the crisis in urban air quality and show that buses can be integral to cleaning up our cities.

“Our air-filtering system has exceeded all expectations in how it can benefit the environment, and it builds on our track-record as operator of the UK’s greenest bus fleet.

“We believe the Air Filtering Bus provides a ‘quick win’ for councils as they explore initiatives such as Clean Air Zones to tackle toxic pollution.”