After years of battling with pollution, China is banking on a seven-meter tall tower made of aluminum and powered by electricity to clean up its toxic air.
Daan Roosegaarde, an artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has introduced in Beijing a seven-meter tall tower that he claims can suck pollutants from filthy air through a process called positive ionization. The tower, which acts like a giant vacuum cleaner, cleans the air by sending out positive ions which will attach themselves to dust particles. A negatively charged surface inside the tower will then attract the positive ions along with the small dust particles. The device, which runs on just 1,400 watts, requires no more energy than a water boiler, according to Roosegaarde. It is capable of cleaning 30,000 cubic meters of air an hour, he said by phone yesterday. Roosegaarde is also working on installing the technology on bicycles, so people can have portable clean air. He declined to comment on the cost of the tower.
What’s more, Roosegaarde and his team also figured out how to make jewelry out of air pollutants by condensing dust collected through the tower under high pressure, forming tiny black stones, which are later sealed into resin cubes and can be mounted onto rings and cufflinks as accessory. It takes 1,000 cubic meters of air to make each stone, according to Roosegaarde, who is selling them for 250 euros apiece. Dust collected from the tower is enough to make 300 rings if it runs for about ten hours a day, he said.
But the public won’t know if the tower is effective in cleaning Beijing’s polluted air because the results are not going to be released, according to Liu Guozheng, secretary general of the China Forum of Environmental Journalists, an association under China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, when contacted by phone yesterday.
China, which has set aside 17 trillion yuan for environmental protection between 2016 and 2020, faces the world’s worst air pollution problems. In Beijing, annual measurement of PM2.5, a tiny particle associated with increased risks of blood clot as well as tissue and systemic inflammation, is about nine times more than the recommended levels, according to the World Health Organization.
“Two to three years ago I was in Beijing,” Roosegaarde said. “On Tuesday I could see the cars and people, but on Wednesday I could see nothing. So I was inspired by the smog.”
Roosegaarde said he hoped to eventually place hundreds of smog-cleaning towers across China. He is meeting with local manufacturers to produce the device in the country. Financing of the project will come from ring sales, the Chinese government and hopefully future sponsors, he said.
“The Chinese government is investing a lot in this [fighting air pollution],” he said. “We want to make something that works now.”
China isn’t the first country to have the tower. Last year, there was an exhibition of the same design in Rotterdam, following a campaign on fundraising platform Kickstarter that raised 113,153 euros for the project.
In outdoor tests, the tower has cleaned the air by about 60%, measured by the number of pollution particles removed, according to Bob Ursem, a researcher at the Delft University of Technology who has worked with Roosegaarde on the project.