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The Smog-Sucking Tower Has Arrived in China (vice.com)
Jamie Fullerton, reporting for Motherboard:Daan Roosegaarde reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a plastic bag filled with black powder, and waved it around. "This is Beijing smog," Roosegaarde said, before gesturing to the seven-metre tall, gently humming metal tower we are stood next to in the Chinese capital's art district, 798. "We collected it from the tower yesterday. Incredibly disgusting." Dutch designer Roosegaarde's smog souvenir may be disgusting, but it's the byproduct of an invention that he has touted as a potential alleviator of China's pollution problems. His "smog-free tower" sucks air, filters it with ion technology, with Roosegaarde having explained: "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 "is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower." With the dust collected, the tower then spews out cleaner air through vents, creating a "bubble" in the area surrounding it that contains, according to Roosegaarde, up to 70 percent fewer pollution particles than the pre-cleaned air.
I suggest in DC around the Capitol, they're a major source of air pollution.
If only we could stop the creation of smog in the first place.
That cleaned air is just going to get smogged up again a few miles away from the cleaning towers so while I applaud the effort, why bother?
So he took a factory electrostatic filter, but didn't include the scrubbers? So this is exciting how?
Much better just to install them on the factories themselves with the scrubbers....
If China uses dirty energy to produce the electricity that powers this tower, could this project end up producing more smog than it collects?
Created from coal burning plants. Self-cycling!
Electrostatic precipitators aren't new. While planting these all over China is nice, why not mount them on the smokestacks of the factories making the smoke in the first place?
I want to install one in the company bathroom.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Would having a large tower with a big bubble of charged ions at the top attract lightning? Because that could be cool
Why not put these closer to the sources of pollution? Like the smokestacks and exhaust ports from all those factories. Wouldn't that be more efficient?
We've had home/office air filters that work by exactly this ionization process for decades.
The "invention" is... they made it bigger?
This has been available at Sharper Image for at least 20 years.
So you've turned the pollution into a fine powder. Now what are you going to do with it?
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
Ionizing particle filters have been around for a century.
Spin it in a novel way, I don't care. Just so long as China starts cleaning up its mess.
I just hope that they don't find out that the same populations that sold them the cause of the pollution will turn around and sell them the solution.
So yeah, this thing is doing the opposite of what it claims. This thing produces smog.
Anyone else read the title and think we were back to the good old days of $699 licensing fees?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostatic_precipitator
So what do they do to mitigate the Ozone that's invariably produced by ionic air filtration?
This certainly isn't the first time charging air has been used as an air cleaner (anybody remember the "Ionic Breeze" ads from a decade back?)
I seem to recall Consumer Reports investigating ionic air filters and concluding they produced dangerous levels of Ozone, which is an irritant in its own right which can worsen Asthma, deaden the sense of smell, raise sensitivity to pollen, and cause permanent lung damage...
I guess I'll have to read TFA, but I suspect they're more interested in aesthetic air cleaning, not actual health improvement.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Knowing China, dump it in the ocean...
Makes sense.
Come up with a good answer, then.
What's it made of? CO, CO2? NOx? Just bury it? Dump it in the sea? Process it into carbon fiber?
Stretch your mind a little.
If they're paying to scrub the city's air, what do they get out of it?
Maybe we can ask them to pay to air condition the city during the summer too, and pump all the outside heat to their roof?
Why not just collect at the source? Much more effective.
One of the first things we learn in medical science is that if you are treating the symptoms, but not the cause, you have not treated the patient.
The same applies to pollution.
We need to fix the underlying source process. Band-aids will only put off the cold hard fact that you are not addressing the cause, which is the pollution caused by the use of coal and other fossil fuels.
Can you use ion scrubbers or water scrubbers on the existing plants as you replace them with other energy sources?
Sure.
But it won't deal with the cold hard explosion of coal plants.
Co-generation can cut the growth factor of those.
But they need to be replaced. Period.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The 2015 documentary "Under the Dome" was produced by a CCTV presenter whose unborn baby developed a tumor in the womb. She tries to find out why there is so much pollution in China, and why nothing is being done about it. The Communist Party's publicity department banned the film three days after release, which should tell you it's something you need to see. (Like how the Democratic National Committee told everyone not to read the leaked emails). When powerful people tell you to do something, you do the opposite. Under the Dome is available on Youtube, which is of course blocked in China. Worth a watch. No relation to the CBS TV series.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Use electricity that generates pollution to swap out one type of pollution with ozone. Brilliant!
Burn coal to produce electricity, creating air pollution.
Use electricity to power smog sucking tower.
Repeat indefinitely
Same principal as opening your refrigerator door to cool your house.
How about baby formula?
love is just extroverted narcissism
We've successfully turned this air pollutant into water pollutant! Now the water scrubbers can catch it and successfully turn it back into land pollutant! Later we'll burn it.
Its a standard anti pollution device on boilers and large kilns. Its something that uses a lot of electricity and the power companies will shut them off at night alot if they can get away with it.
Unless this 'technology' (which, by the way, is not anything new or innovative) is powered by raw sunlight, or Pixie dust, or Unicorn farts, or something else that doesn't require power generation, I seriously doubt that it removes more carbon and pollutants than it, overall, generates, and as such is utterly, completely useless.
An art piece for young fucks who don't remember The Sharper Image.
So you've turned the pollution into a fine powder. Now what are you going to do with it?
"Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants."
Not a good answer.
Ship it to the US as a key ingredient in blackface? Oh wait...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Don't put so much crap into the air in the first place.
Not to mention that you solve pollution issues at their most concentrated source (or as close as you can get to it). It's easier dealing with a small, contained issue than a huge, diffused one.
That is all.
Rockefeller style.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
So if this thing is making Ozone is it reversing the Ozone layer damage as well?
Ah, but it's clean coal ;)
And does that energy produce more net pollution?
The possible adverse effect is that it may slow down efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, of which smog have been a hugely annoying byproduct.
Filling it with nitrogen or some other inert gas should be OK though.
Duh is it not inert enough already?
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
You mean "cathode" and "anode"? Welcome to the dumbed-down news.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
This isn't being promoted as a serious response to air pollution. It was originally reported as being an art installation (it's in Beijing's Art district) though that may have been a ruse: it's more a piece of environmental activism. The very direct translation of air pollution to a bag of (probably carcinogenic) soot from such a tiny area illustrates the problem far better than quantitative measurements like the current reading from the US embassy in Beijing of "227".
those people aren't easily replaceable. Do something about the billionaires who own our politics and you might have a point. But good luck with that.
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Just how much energy this sucker uses and how much pollution is caused by one of China''s coal burning power stations in generating such energy?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Will ionically charging the air increase the amount of ozone? Would that be good or bad?
Sounds like this - https://www.sharperimage.com/s...
I've had a few of their air purifiers for a couple of decades now. Just replaced them with new ones this year. Wonder how much a big mother city model costs.
OK so, this is very very old technology. It's called electrostatic cleaning. I am not sure why this is news... is it the quantity or efficiency or something?
air pollution isn't necessarily toxic chemically. You could have a charcoal briquet, which is chemically fine and perfectly safe, but if you grind it up into nanoparticles and blast it into the air it will give people heart disease and cancer. Those dangerous microparticles that are the worst part of air pollution are fine if you get them out of the air. A bag of them or liquid slurry won't hurt anyone. I bet the stuff in China's air has some acids and metals in it that are not very friendly, but again get it out of the air and you have made it far safer.
Man, you really need that seminar!