Studio Roosegaarde’s Smog Free Tower acts like a giant air filter helping to create cleaner urban skies. Meausring 7 meters in height, it features environmentally-friendly and patented ozone free ozone free technology. Acting like a giant vacuum cleaner, it is able to suck up 30,000 cubic metres of air per hour and then cleanse the air of harmful particles such as PH2.5 and PH10.  The air pumped back out is reportedly 75% cleaner than before. According to Dan Roosegaarde, “It works by creating fields of static electricity, attracting or magnetising these tiny dirt particles so you can suck them up.”

Roosegaarde has already built a seven-metre-high version of this tower in Rotterdam (Vierhavensstraat 5). It has now been further revealed that authorities in Beijing have purchased the technology and are looking to roll it out across multiple Chinese cities as a solution to the country’s increasingly problematic air quality problems. “The tower we’ve designed at the moment can easily clean the air from a medium-sized park in one day,” he says. “And we can produce bigger ones in the future. Right now it’s just a localised solution, but it can create cleaner public areas and playgrounds, and hopefully it will inspire other designers to come up with technologies which can clean cities on an even larger scale.”

While the air quality in Rotterdam and Western Europe generally is relatively good, this is of course not the case everywhere. The World Health Organisation estimates that air pollution is the cause of nearly 2 million deaths worldwide every year. Gases such as nitrogen dioxide and sulphar have been strongly linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease while ozone, which is formed when sunlight interacts with other gas pollutants, is an environmental toxin. For Dan Roosegaarde, these statistics, along with his experience of seeing six year-old children in Beijing suffering from lung cancer was a call to action and the motivation behind the Smog Free Tower. You can learn more and join the #smogfree revolution here.