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Daan Roosegaarde.
Daan Roosegaarde. Photograph: Willem de Kam
Daan Roosegaarde. Photograph: Willem de Kam

'Cities have become machines that kill people': the Dutch inventor fighting smog

This article is more than 6 years old

Daan Roosegaarde, the artist and inventor behind smog-filtering towers and bikes, is on a mission to clean the air in the world’s most polluted cities

When Daan Roosegaarde wanted to pump Oxford Street air into a London museum to demonstrate the life-limiting effects of pollution, health and safety officers refused to give him permission.

“You would see a sign saying that if you were in this room for one hour, it would take away 15 minutes of your life,” the Dutch inventor and artist explains from his studio in Rotterdam. “The health and safety regulator letters we got then, you don’t want to know! Indoors, there are rules, laws and inspectors, but outdoors nobody cares.”

Roosegaarde is behind an award-winning smog-filtering tower, and an anti-smog bicycle that works by sucking in smog and releasing purified air in a cloud around the cyclist. These inventions are part of his studio’s Smog-Free Project to reduce pollution in cities.

Roosegaarde is not alone in his desire to tackle smog. Environmental lawyers ClientEarth are taking the British government to court for a third time for illegal air pollution rates, Delhi has seen a public health emergency declared because of smog levels, and the Lancet estimates air pollution caused 6.4 million premature deaths in 2015.

Motivated by a general fascination with the world and “irritation” at the status quo on air pollution, the 38-year-old Roosegaarde has an obsessive passion for inventing things to improve the natural environment. This passion has earned him the title of young global leader at the World Economic Forum, a visiting professorship at Tongji University in Shanghai and a library full of awards.

“When pollution becomes physical, maybe I can use that to design with,” he muses. “Like Van Gogh has paint, maybe I have my small particles.”

Daan Roosegaarde’s anti-smog bicycles. Photograph: Studio Roosegaarde

He found his environmental calling on a trip to Beijing, one of China’s most polluted cities. “I was looking out from my room in Beijing four years ago,” he says. “On a good day, I could see the world around me, and three days later I couldn’t see the other side of the street. We live six years shorter, children have lung cancer … cities have become machines that kill people.”

He invested €1.2m, two years and the combined energies of a 12-strong team to come up with a solution. His memory of playing as a bored child at parties with the static energy generated by balloons inspired the idea of using positive ionisation to build “the largest smog vacuum cleaner in the world” for the dangerous tiny PM2.5 and PM10 particles that make up smog.

To generate cash, his studio compressed the soot they were collecting into black diamond-like rings and invited the public to purchase them through a Kickstarter campaign that raised €113,153. With Bob Ursem, a nanoparticles expert at the Delft University of Technology, and Dutch company ENS Technology, he developed a seven-metre air purifying tower, which was opened in 2015 by the mayor of Rotterdam.

Roosegaarde was invited to Beijing to build a tower there in September 2016. His studio has now sold the country rights for it to the Chinese environmental technology company Film Method Works, which he says is now manufacturing hundreds of the towers for China.

There has been some debate about the tower’s effectiveness, however: the China Forum of Environmental Journalists published an assessment of the Beijing trial run, concluding that the tower is limited in scope and its effect on PM2.5 levels was “unstable”.

But Studio Roosegaarde has commissioned a study – yet to be published – by Dr Bert Blocken of Eindhoven University of Technology, which has reportedly found that the tower captures and removes up to 70% of the PM10, and up to 50% of the PM2.5 particle. Blocken told the Guardian: “The tower has an effect, but it is very local as it is also just a local instrument.”

Protoypes of Roosegaarde’s anti-smog bicycles are due out later this year, and he says he is working on agreements with governments in India, Colombia, Mexico and Poland to launch his smog-filtering towers and bikes in 2018.

His other projects include an energy-harvesting kite, windvogel, that can generate up to 100kW in strong wind, and the glowing lines pilot initiative to light up highways. This uses road markings that absorb the sun’s energy and glow for up to eight hours. Roosegaarde says he has also been invited to advise on a new smart highway programme in the UK.

Although half of his work is self-commissioned, industry and government partnerships are essential – but not without hazards.

“Entrepreneurs realise that advertising with logos isn’t working any more and are looking for social engagement,” says Roosegaarde. “We had one of the biggest oil companies in the world coming to us and offering €2m for the Smog-Free Project. We said: ‘Look at your portfolio: that’s greenwashing.’”

He sees his role as a conscientious activator: “Government should have a long-term vision for clean air and clean energy, NGOs should tickle the status quo as much as possible. I can design a clean air park. Will it solve a whole city? No. But step by step, I can design and engineer. I’m not going to wait for government – you see in the US the regime changes and we go back. It’s too fragile.”

Similarly, consuming less isn’t the answer. “A lot of the sustainability movement has been about less waste, less showering, and I don’t feel comfortable with that. It’s about setting a new value and accepting the consequences, which is maybe more electric cars, or not buying that one thing, or designing smarter things. You can fly less, or build smarter aeroplanes: we should do more, not less.”

So what next for this man who likens himself to a kind of cleaner – a “schoonmaker” in Dutch? Space waste, of course. “Right now there are 23,000 objects of about 10cm floating in space,” he says. “It’s the smog of the universe, created by us. And if we continue, [it] will get worse until we cannot launch satellites any more.”

The office in his studio is equipped with a “yes, but” chair, which gives people a mild electric shock if they say these words when sitting on it. So it’s probably wise not to argue with Roosegaarde’s mission to scrub up cities, the skies and even the universe.

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