A Swedish company is working on a project to convert skyscrapers into vertical greenhouses in areas where land is scarce.

“A tomato seed is planted on the ground floor on a rotating spiral and when it arrives at the top, 30 days later, you pick the fruit,” Plantagon vice president Hans Hassle told the AFP news agency.

Within just a few decades, some 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. This will necessitate the need to “grow fruits and vegetables in an urban environment due to the lack of land,” he added.

A vertical greenhouse would mean “we could have fresh organic produce every day and sell it directly to consumers in the city,” Hassle explained.

“We would save 70 percent on the cost of fresh produce because right now 70 percent of the price is transport and storage costs,” he said, adding that the project would mean produce would become more readily available to those with tight budgets.

Although no vertical greenhouses exist today, “several cities in Scandinavia and in China have expressed an interest,” Hassle added.

Each installation would cost around $30 million dollars, far more than a conventional greenhouse. However, the investment would rapidly turn a profit, Hassle said.

“With ground space of 107,640 square feet, a vertical greenhouse represents the equivalent of 1,076,390 square feet of cultivated land” due to the rotating spiral that allows continuous planting.

“An inventor came up with the idea 20 years ago but none of the people he presented it to believed in it. He presented it to me 10 years ago and it seemed like a good idea, so I talked to Sweco, a Swedish engineering firm, and they agreed to build these vertical greenhouses,” Hassle said.

Such vertical greenhouses might resemble a large glass sphere with a pillar in the center, around which the seedlings on a platform continuously rotate.

“It looks fantastic like that, but the technology is simple,” said Hassle.

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