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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.
If China uses dirty energy to produce the electricity that powers this tower, could this project end up producing more smog than it collects?
That's overkill. All you need to do is hermetically seal the Capitol building after all the Congresspeople are in there, and lock and bar the doors so no one breaks the seal.
why not mount them on the smokestacks of the factories making the smoke in the first place?
Because then Chinese made iPhones and Androids would cost a more money, so you and everyone else would buy the ones from India or Vietnam or Africa or some other third world hellhole instead. You are the reason not to mount them on the smokestacks.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I want to install one in the company bathroom.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You're going to die one day, so why bother with things like eating, sleeping and breathing?
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.
So yeah, this thing is doing the opposite of what it claims. This thing produces smog.
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.
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?
But what affluent person wants to live next to that? No, better put them in the optimum locations to boost real estate values, and give the growing middle-class something to aspire to (There's a clean-air tower in your neighborhood, hmm? Well our tower is practically in our back yard!). Peasants get the factory-side views, with complimentary side of black lung, as always.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I could see business campuses installing these on their grounds for their own personal benefit. And unlike a lot of technologies that benefit the installers locally while hurting everyone else just a little, this is a net positive to everyone. If you make them cheap and efficient, they'll start showing up by hospitals, in malls, on hotels and apartment buildings, etc, and pretty soon the air everywhere looks cleaner.
Sure, game theory would say that there's less and less benefit for future adopters as the overall air gets cleaner, but if they become a status symbol people will still install them.
I'm having trouble believing that it's nearly as effective as they say though, so it probably doesn't matter.
If only we could stop the creation of smog in the first place.
The towers are just a silly stunt. Nobody really thinks that outdoor filters are a realistic solution. Filtering makes sense for enclosed areas, like homes and offices, but not outdoors. Beijing has been cracking down on burning trash and has banned coal for cooking/heating, and China has started imposing smog controls on cars. But diesel engines are common in China, and there are many many two-stroke gasoline engines on scooters and motorcycles. Those are not easy problems to fix. A good first step would be to promote electric scooters, with more convenient charging stations. That would not work in a hilly city like Chongqing, but should help in flat cities like Beijing or Shanghai.
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! --
Nice revisionist history. China had Most Favored Nation status well before Clinton was even president.
http://articles.latimes.com/19...
And Bush Jr. followed in Daddy's footsteps by making China's MFN status permanent:
https://georgewbush-whitehouse...
How about baby formula?
love is just extroverted narcissism
No, you gotta Nuke it from orbit, that's the only way to be sure...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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.
At least one point is mentioned in the article: They hope that by having "bubbles" of relatively fresh air in parks, etc. for contrast, they can boost public support for more substantial smog-reducing policies.
They're not trying to clean the cities air, that would take a far larger undertaking, but to create at least limited public places where the air is clean(er). You're argument is akin to "Why use air conditioning - it only makes it hotter outside?"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Rockefeller style.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
It doesn't work that way. Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations, unless they are specifically geared for that. So most of the energy is used to heat up the coils rather than to climb the hill.
Don't forget the new coal fired power plants to run the towers.
Electrostatic stack scrubbers are exactly the same thing, but fitted to the smokestacks.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I clicked on the comments to write exactly what the above poster wrote. Somebody please mod the above poster up, they have nailed it, but I have no points today.
Batteries are pretty good these days and you can put a lot of them on a bike. I had some students in 2000 who took the frame of a 125cc motorbike, stuck lead-acid batteries everywhere, fitted a motor and that thing could go. With the batteries of today you could get a lot more range with something that doesn't have to be very big - a Vespa sized thing is going to get you up hills.