1.6-Million people die each year of air pollution in China. The country’s smog levels pose a major threat to public health to the extent that now, even children are suffering from lung cancer. These conditions have driven Dutch designer and architect Daan Roosegaarde to invent a radical solution.

Smog free tower

Roosegaarde, has created a 23-feet-tall, “Smog Free Tower” for cleaning the air and he’s ready to ship it to China if he gets a green light from the Beijing mayor’s office.

Operating much like a massive outdoor air purifier, the tower can clean 30 000 m³ of air in an hour. That means in one-and-a-half days, it could clean the air contained in a typical rugby stadium. The use of ionization technology means the tower only consumes a small amount of power to produce big results.

Roosegaarde claims to have already successfully cleaned a park in Rotterdam and now he’s looking for construction and installation partners in China.

“I would really like to do it in Beijing first. It is the city [that] inspired me to do this,” Roosegaarde says, adding that he was convinced after more than two years of trips to the Chinese capital. However he faces a significant challenge in that the mayor’s office keeps postponing the project due to the city’s air pollution being politically sensitive.

He says he has been approached by air conditioner makers too but decided to work with public interests first, through local government and possibly Tsinghua University, who has also shown interest, according to Roosegaarde.

Diamond inspiration

Roosegaarde first came up with the idea of a Smog Free Tower in 2013. The tower is the first project he started with his own money, gathering extra funds by listing the project on crowd-sourcing website Kickstarter with a goal of raising 50,000 Euros (USD54,350). It ended up raising 113,153 Euros in two months.

One of the rewards he offers donors is a ring set with a cube formed from collected smog particles, which are 42 percent carbon. “And if you place carbon under high pressure, you get a diamond,” he explains.

Future goals

Roosegaarde’s aim is to install the towers in about 20 public parks in Beijing, expanding the offer to other developing nations like Mexico and India, which face similar air-pollution problems.

The Beijing mayor’s office was unavailable for comment on this story.

 

Source: Bloomberg