Smog selfies. Until last November’s ‘Great Smog of Delhi’, these weren’t a reality. But as people choked in the capital — a result of the city’s Air Quality Index hitting a staggering 999 (anything above 500 is hazardous) — they turned to social media to vent their frustrations, tweeting pictures with the hashtag #MyRightToBreathe. Now, with the country’s air pollution rivalling China’s — a study by US-based State of Global Air says it is the deadliest in the world — we can expect such selfies to become the norm rather than the exception.
In this haze, however, what’s heartening are the initiatives to find solutions. One of the most exciting is Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde’s brainchild, the Smog Free Project. With Bob Ursem, a nanoparticles expert at the Delft University of Technology as an early advisor, Roosegaarde and his team of engineers created the Smog Free Tower. The seven-metre-high structure was installed in Beijing last September, where it sucks in polluted air and filters it using patented ion technology.
Put a ring on it
When I connect with Roosegaarde, over phone from Rotterdam, the 37-year-old tells me how the idea sparked in 2013, on a visit to Beijing. “I was looking out at the smoggy air from my hotel room when the realisation struck me how our desire for progress has created side-effects that we never imagined. Pollution is one of them,” he says, elaborating, “While you need Government initiatives like Swachh Bharat, they take a long time. I wanted to operate in the now, to show how the future could look. The best way was to literally suck up the polluted air, clean it, and release it, so that you have parks that are 55-75 per cent cleaner than the rest of the city.” The tower reportedly purifies 30,000 cubic metres of air an hour.
While it might be a local solution for parks, for Roosegaarde, this project is also an activator — to get people to think about how they can improve the world. “Some see this as a symbol of hope; they call it the clean air temple. At the same time, everyone realises that one tower is not the solution. We are conducting a lot of workshops, and we are working with local universities, governments and green technology companies to see what we can do now, so that in 10-15 years these towers will be unnecessary,” he says.
Meanwhile, he has a few more hurdles to overcome. Having set up shop in China, budget is still a factor. One of the more innovative ways he’s raising funds is by creating jewellery from the smog particles the tower captures. “We compress it by hand to make cubes (later encased in resin). You can buy rings, cufflinks (necklaces and earrings will be added to the line soon), or just the cubes. I designed them as squares to represent the building blocks of the future,” he smiles. Buying a ring equals donating 1,000 cubic metres of clean air, so it’s an investment worth making.
Clean slate
With plans to take the tower on a tour of China in the next few months, he says he would like to bring it to India, too, but adds “officially I cannot confirm it yet”. Roosegaarde was in the country last December, where he met with several like-minded people. “We are getting a lot of requests for collaborations, from India, Kazakhstan, Poland, etc. We don’t want a polluting oil company to buy the tower as a mascot, so we are also saying ‘no’ many times to create a good ‘yes’. We want collaborators who are interested in the campaign,” he states.
Calling this chapter one of the Smog Free Solutions series, Roosegaarde reveals that he is working on a smog free bicycle, too. “We make landscapes of the future. So it is always about clean thinking and new technology,” says the innovator, who is launching a project to generate electricity with kites this September. Also in the works are a design project for a 32-km dam in Netherlands (where he will add a layer of light and interactivity), and brainstorming on how to tackle space waste.
Jewellery at 250 euros. Details: studioroosegaarde.net
