Can Beijing Turn Smog into Diamonds? An Artist Bets His Own Money On It

Liu Min, an expectant mother in Beijing, is worried about her baby's future. She gets anxious when she thinks of the youngest lung cancer patient in China, who's only eight years old. Air pollution is definitely on the minds of Beijing citizens—and now it’s driven an artist more than 4,000 miles away to take action.

Dutch designer and architect Daan Roosegaarde has created a 23-feet-tall, air-cleaning “Smog Free Tower” and he’s ready to ship it to Beijing if he gets a green light from the mayor’s office, with whom he says he’s had five rounds of talks. His tower works like a huge outdoor air purifier, and Roosegaarde says it can clean 30,000 cubic meters of air in an hour. That means in one-and-a-half days, it could clean the air contained in a typical football stadium. It works through ionization technology, similar to how hair sticks to a balloon’s surface. The tower consumes a small amount of power, equal to a home-use water boiler. He says he has successfully cleaned a park in Rotterdam and now he’s looking for partners in China to build and install his towers there.