As part of the Smog Free Project, Dutch architect and artist Daan Roosegaarde and students from UDEM University Mexico developed the Smog Eating Billboard, which cleans up polluting particles through an intelligent coating process.

The Smog Free Project is a long term project for clean air. It started with the Smog Free Tower, ‘the world’s first smog vacuum cleaner’. The tower uses ionised technology to produce smog free air in public spaces, using little energy, all of which is green (read more about the tower here). From collected smog, Roosegaarde created the Smog Free Ring, a piece of jewellery made from compressed smog particles. Additionally, the designer created a bicycle equipped with a plug-in air cleaning device.

The latest addition to the project is the Smog Eating Billboard, which was developed by Roosegaarde and students from UDEM University in Mexico. The project takes advantage of existing city panoramic structures to clean the air.

In the city of Monterrey in Mexico are more than 9,000 billboards. The air, however, is heavily polluted. The smog eating billboard cleans the same amount of air as 30 trees every six hours and can function for five years. It consists of a surface treated with a. surface that attracts particles of contamination and purifies them in a process called photocatalysis. The billboard measures 12.70 by 7.20 metres (42 by 24 feet).

Considering the amount of panoramic structures in the city, if all billboards were replaced by smog eating ones, they would clean the amount of air equal to 292,800 trees in 6 hours.

Find more air-cleaning projects here.

Photos: Studio Roosegaarde