Many parts of the world are becoming nearly uninhabitable because of the polluting smog, comparable to smoking 17 cigarettes a day! Beijing, China has a smog issue which has become so severe that people are moving to other cities in hopes of out running it. The solution? Well that’s going to take a lot of work but to get people talking about the smog tower is a perfect starting point!

 

Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch designer and has been working to make a difference in the world through his designs. He’s been working on environmental projects that will help with light and smog pollution; his biggest project is the Smog Tower!

Roosegaarde was in Beijing and noticed that the local children were trapped inside to play because of the smog. This opened his eyes to a new concept of air purification and started designing a large-scale air purifier that cleans the air in parks and other small areas. The tower is 7 meters high, runs on wind energy and the tower has the ability to clean 30,000m3 of smog per hour. The Smog Tower produces 75% clean air from what it intakes, this may not put much of a dent in the pollution that China faces but it’ll create a bubble of clean air around parks and will get the conversation about smog started.

The Smog Tower uses copper coils to create an electrostatic field that small particles, such as PM 2.5 and PM 10, are attracted to. The tower is very similar to an air purifier at a hospital but in a much larger scale.

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This tower captures the carbon within the machine, which creates a waste. Roosegaarde didn’t like the idea of having a waste by-product in his invention and decided to compress the carbon product into a cube diamond of smog and placing the cube on a ring or a cufflink. For every ring that is bought, 1000m3 of clean air is produced! The rings or cufflinks are roughly $380 and will help fund the tour of the tower through China.

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Check out the video below for more information:

Smog Free Project by Daan Roosegaarde [OFFICIAL MOVIE] from Studio Roosegaarde on Vimeo.