The green Van Gogh cleaning up the cityscape
Un peu d’air pur.
Artiste et inventeur engagé, Daan Roosegaarde crée des objets pour rendre l’air des villes plus respirable : une tour qui aspire les particules fines, un vélo purificateur d’air... De Rotterdam à Pékin, ce Néerlandais veut réveiller les consciences, et tenter, à sa mesure, de combattre la pollution atmosphérique.
When Daan Roosegaarde wanted to pump Oxford Street air into a London museum to demonstrate the lifelimiting 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. “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.”
2. Roosegaarde is behind an award-winning smog-filtering tower, and an anti-smog bi- cycle 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.
ARTIST AND INVENTOR
3. 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. 4. Motivated by a general fascination with the world and “irritation” at the status quo on air pollution, the 38-year-old has an obses-
sive passion for inventing things to improve the natural environment. “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.”
5. 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.”
6. 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.
7. 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, he developed a sevenmetre air purifying tower, which was opened in 2015 by the mayor of Rotterdam.
SMOG-FILTERING TOWER
8. Roosegaarde was invited to Beijing to build a tower there in September 2016. 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.
9. But Studio Roosegaarde has commissioned a study 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. “The tower has an effect, but it is very local as it is also just a local instrument,” Blocken told The Guardian.
10. Roosegaarde 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.” 11. 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.”
SPACE WASTE
12. 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.”
13. 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.