Clean air maker (Photo : Studio Roosegaarde)
A Dutch artist and environmentalist has built the world's largest air purifier in heavily polluted Beijing to provide a life-saving cocoon of safe air for children and citizens to breathe.
Now operational and on display at 751-D Park, the seven meter tall "Smog Free Tower" creates a "bubble of clean air enabling citizens to experience clean air for free," said its creator, Daan Roosegaarde, 37.
This artist/innovator is the founder of Studio Roosegaarde best known for creating landscapes of the future and exploring relations between people, technology and space.
The tower, which is part of Roosegaarde's Smog Free Project, captures and collects some 75 percent of airborne smog particles with diameters of PM2.5 and PM10 and releases the purified air to create a 360-degree bubble.
It's basically a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks in polluted air and cleans this air using ion technology, which electrically charges and attracts air molecules into its purifying system. Inside the tower, pollution particles are sifted out of the air while vents recycle the filtered air outwards.
Roosegaarde said he was inspired to design and launch his Smog Free Project in China when visiting the country in 2013.
"I believe we should act now and do more, not less on order to make modern cities liveable again," he said. "Smog Free Project is the beginning of a journey to create solutions together towards smarter and brighter cities."
Roosegaarde's tower can also collect smog particles and compress them into Smog Free Jewelery, which he hopes will attract more attention.
Some 4,000 people in China die every day from the effects of air pollution, or 1.6 million every year. This compares to the 55,000 deaths in the United States in 2010 to air pollution.
A UC Berkeley study found that 99.9 percent of eastern China, where most of China's heavy industries and cities are located, has a higher than annual average of smog particles in the air.
The air tower will later tour four of China's most populated cities.
