The Giant Air Purifier Is Actually A Jewelry Making Machine

On a trip to Beijing three years ago, artist Daan Roosegaarde looked at a sample of the city's notorious air pollution and got inspired. The tiny black particles were mostly carbon; carbon, at high pressure, turns into diamonds. Why not suck up the city's smog, he thought, and turn it into jewelry?

Since then, Roosegaarde has been designing a prototype of the world's biggest air purifier (in the meantime, he also built a glow-in-the-dark smart highway, a virtual flood designed to make people care about climate change, and multiple other art projects). Now he's ready to build the purifier and begin cleaning urban air, transforming the resulting pollution into rings.

The "Smog Free Tower" uses the same technology that hospitals often use to clean air—attracting particles of pollution through static electricity—but on a larger scale. "[It] creates bubbles of clean air around the tower," says Roosegaarde. "Here people can experience clean air for free, and sense what a clean air future is. We designed the tower as a 'clean air temple' so it has a strong iconic but also performative value. It captures the ultra-fine smog, something standard existing systems cannot capture yet."

Read the rest of this article at Fastcoexist.