China ’s absolutely dreadful smogginess epidemic – along with the millions of people that die from the exposure to it every individual year – is one of the reason the rising superpower has decided to take aleading roleon the earth stage on climate modification and environmental issuance . At the same time as it ’s pushing for renewable energy proliferation , it ’s also investing massively in orotund - scale “ unripe ” projects , include itsotherworldly forest city .

Dutch designer   Daan Roosegaarde , the designer of theSmog Free Towerproject – essentially jumbo air pollution filters – does n’t see anything wrong with recollect big , but he ’s realized that it may be the smallest things that make the biggest departure . In this case , he ’s looking at bikes .

Beijing , one of the most polluted cities on Earth , has millions of them . It ’s not entirely clear how many there are these twenty-four hour period , but it ’s at least 11 million . Even if someone does n’t own a bike , new bike - sharing schema and apps like Mobike are cropping up and providing at least100,000 deal bikesfor the integral metropolis – almost 10   times more than there are in London or New York City .

With this in thinker , Roosegaarde declare at the recent World Economic Forum in China that he was planning to combine his Smog Free Tower technology with as many of Beijing ’s wheel as possible . The idea is that they will be augmented with a front rack - bestride equipment that denudate away toxic and dangerous particulates in the gentle wind , leaving fresh breeze in the passenger ’s wake .

This type of filtration engineering is particularly honorable for bikes . Traffic is the major cause of Beijing ’s smog problem , and if bicyclist were to employ these filtration systems , they ’d be essentially clean the dirty air at its “ source ” .

At this peak , the equipment is only an idea – it is n’t even at the proof - of - construct degree yet , let alone aggregative production . Few details have been given on its aim parameters , but it ’s likely that merely cycling into smoggy air with it will filtrate out the pollution ; an additional energy source wo n’t be call for .

Few would argue that this is anything but a good idea , though . Bike - communion startup OFO for certain   thinks so : They ’ve teamed up with the idiosyncratic designer to get his project off the ground . Watch this place !

[ H / T : wire ]