It takes people of vision to change the world, one smog-filled city at a time: famed Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, founder of a social design lab based in Rotterdam called Studio Roosegaarde, traveled in 2013 to Beijing, where a smog-filled vista from his hotel window gave him a fantastic idea: he would create a way to suck up the smog, then turn it into diamonds as an added bonus.
It took three years to plan and build, a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund it, and a successful pilot in the city of Rotterdam – but Roosegaarde is now to proud proprietor of the largest “smog vacuum cleaner” – as he calls it in his website: a 7-meter Smog Free Tower, equipped with environment friendly patented ozone free ion tech.
The Smog Free Tower uses the patented technology to produce “smog-free bubbles of public space”, cleans 30,000m3 per hour without ozone, and “uses no more electricity that a water boiler, according to Roosegaarde. It also churns out some tangible souvenirs: Smog Free Cubes, Smog Free Rings, and Smog Free Cufflinks are created as tokens from the filtered air. These are available for purchase on demand, and “by sharing some “Smog Free Jewelry”, Roosegaarde explains in his website, “You donate 1000m3 of clean air to the city”.
After the successful pilot in Rotterdam, the Smog Free Project will arrive in China in September 2016, fully supported by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. If any of Roosegaarde’s past projects are any indication, and if his project garners the support of more environmental bodies, he will indeed succeed in bettering the air we breathe – all over the world.
