Currently it seems that the air recycler turbine takes the same durability hit regardless of whether it's cleaning up 6 or 16,000 pollution. I suggest that either the damage be scaled by the pollution amount it scrubs, or at the very least some sort of cover/machine is added to detect the pollution levels so we can trigger it on with a redstone signal.

It's far too expensive to run as-is - it eats turbines way too quickly and isn't worth the ingot cost for the turbines.

There is a pollution detector for just that.

Ahh, didn't know that existed.