I’ve just supported a great innovation on Kickstarter. The Largest Air Purifier Ever Built that Sucks Up Smog and Turns it Into Gemstones!
A very clever designer Daan Roosegaarde has unveiled the Smog Free Tower, a 23-foot air purifier that captures smog from the outside air and turns these smog particles into gemstones. The tower purifies 30,000 cubic meters of air each hour, and each gemstone is the product of roughly 1,000 cubic meters of air. Roosegaarde is currently raising funds via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to cover the travel costs of transporting the air purifier to major cities like Beijing, Mumbai and Paris, with smog gemstone cufflinks and rings as backer prizes. So I’ll be getting a small cube to remind me about how I’m helping the planet by purifying the air in inner city environments.
The process taking place inside its walls powered by 1,400 watts of sustainable energy, which is comparable to a water boiler, and the studio says it hopes to one day integrate solar PVs into the design to power the process—which works not so differently than some ionic air purifiers. Roosegaarde explains; that the way it works is by charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface -the counter electrode- will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust that would normally harm us, is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower. This technology manages to capture ultra-fine smog particles which regular filter systems fail to do.
I think this was an important project to get involved with because it demonstrates another example of how creative thinkers are transforming scarcity into abundance. This architectural feat appeals to me as its a blindingly obvious solution to a growing problem; your born with a fine set of lungs – it makesense to keep them clean. Unfortunately us humans through our industrial endeavours have polluted certain areas of the planet through the need of our ever expanding consumption of stuff; and this innovation marks a turning point to give something back to our congested communities. Environmentally it ticks many boxes and will set the scene for other concepts to support its success through crowdfunding, DIY innovators and other material based sciences. This is a project which has immense scalability; Can you imagine giant versions of these towers sucking in huge amounts of polluted air with the residue being used in the building industry or other sectors as a sustainable material.
This is truly exceptional and an example of an idea I get excited about and want to discuss. This really lights my inner fire. I hope this encourages you to comment & contribute about what could be next.
To your success.
Steve