The bad smog of the year so far swing into Beijing this hebdomad , surface the city in a grainy , deep grey murk on equality with what the metropolis endured in 2013 , picture above ( though you ’ll see it’spopping up again today ) . China is trying , intemperately , to get its air quality problem under dominance , and is considering some seriously kooky ways to do it . Unfortunately , the only one that will puzzle out is also the most hard .
If you ’re in Beijing right now , here ’s what you ’re dealing with : Extraordinary levels of a small particulate matter calledPM2.5 , which is great at hang out in midair for long periods of fourth dimension . PM2.5 do from industrial generator and Natalie Wood - burning fires , and it ’s as grave to human lung as it is undecomposed at staying put . The World Health Organization recommend that the max amount of the stuff we can breath is 25 mcg per three-dimensional time . Beijing rack up 568 today .
The really startling matter , of grade , is that this is n’t all that uncommon . The denseness has hit 993 , almost twice as regretful as this week ’s levels , before . Smog comes , you don a mask and stay deep down as much as potential , and smogginess break down . China is actually pretty good at controlling it when it matter — when world leaders were in town for APEC ’s annual summit in November , locals jokingly described the clear sky as “ APEC blue . ” Pollution is so intense , it can be see from space :
But temporary relief like the one APEC bestow do n’t help actual resident all that much — which is why China has become a hotbed of smog - busting advert hoc design .
The prominent putz in China ’s smog - break arsenal is cloud seeding — Soviet Russia contribute the conception to China in 1958 , asQZ explainedin a great story on hokey pelting a few years ago . The idea is passably simple : A plane ( or rocket salad catapult ) dumps chemicals — from atomic number 19 iodide , to liquified propane , to silver-tongued iodide — into an exist swarm , creating sparkler particles that get heavy and fall to Earth as “ rain . ”
Rain “ washes ” the air of PM2.5 particles ; the water particle hoard the toxic particulates and then impart them down to the basis . Technically , it ’s called “ wet deposition , ” and according to QZ , China now makes 55 billion piles of artificial rainfall to aid in the process every yr .
A rocket launcher used to seed clouds to stimulate pelting is seen at a place of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau in Beijing . AP Photo / Ng Han Guan .
There are multiple problems with the program , including the fact that China ’s artificial rain programme is suck up massive amounts of cherished water , as China plans monumental infrastructure projects to bring more fresh weewee into the country . As American University prof James Lee put it toChina Dialoguea few year ago : “ There are so many countries involved in this that I intend at some time , one nation is going to say to the other ‘ hey , you ’re stealing our rain . ' ”
There are more localized plans for making it rain , though . Last year , a Zhejiang University prof name Yu Shaocai print a paper in the journalEnvironmental Chemistry Lettersthat explained a novel new method of cleansing the line with piss . Shaocai envisions set up monolithic sprinklers atop skyscrapers that would sound off into gear when needed , sprinkling the metropolis with low - level precipitation that would normally postulate a cloud - seeding plane .
Shaocai ’s reasoning is actually pretty sound , as ludicrous as his renderings ( below ) may be . As we explain at the fourth dimension , PM2.5 particles tend to collect nearer to the ground at around 300 fundament . A tugboat - climb on sprinkler would make it potential to target specific areas , making seeding more efficient and localized .
Beyond installing gigantic shower heads atop Beijing ’s skyscrapers , other architecture - based smog busters do exist in the actual world . The main one is a chemical called titanium dioxide , which as a pigment occurs in all sorts of product we apply , including sunscreen . But over the retiring decade , titanium dioxide has made its way into all sort of building materials , from bricks to paint .
That ’s because it titanium dioxideeats nitrogen oxides — volatile compound that are key in make aura pollution . carbon nanotube of titanium dioxide in reality suck up NOx and covert it into relatively harmless nitric back breaker . A chemical group of New York - base architect used the stuff to build a temporary“pollution - busting ” pavilionin 2012 .
Meanwhile , ahospital in Mexicowas of late encased in a porous paries painted with the stuff — the more surface area , the more nanotubes — that theoretically cleanses the air as it touch the building .
Even profoundly down the smog - busting rabbit pickle is a project by the Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde , who is working with Beijing ’s city manager to screen a twist that would sit in local parks and “ gobble ” defilement from the skies . Here ’s how Adam Clark Estesdescribed the processwhen he proposed it :
Much in the same way that a static - shoot balloon attracts haircloth , this pollution - devouring set - up uses copper volute buried under grassto create electrostatic fields and attract smogginess particlesto the terra firma . Once take out from the sky , the particle can be compressed and repurposed .
Sounds great , right ? Well , look until you get word how Roosegaarde plans to “ repurpose ” the compact particles . Once they ’ve been pick up , he plans to industrially compress the waste matter into a tiny “ gem ” of toxic particulates — and then mount them on rings . “ You are buying a three-dimensional kilometer of sportsmanlike Beijing air , ” he toldThe New York Timeslast twelvemonth .
It ’s like the ouroboros of air defilement : compile smog and turning it back into a consumer commodity , to be trade in the economy that helped to produce the smogginess trouble in the first place .
So far we ’ve stimulate a plan to make adamant out of smogginess , a programme to put huge fucking sprinklers on buildings , a plan to paint every construction in every city with chemical carbon nanotube , and an existing program to create fake rainfall that could , eventually , spur a war over natural resource . Not great !
On the ground , literal the great unwashed have to establish their own solution — like Beijing artist Matt Hope , who work up an electric melody filter into a cycle helmet , power by energy generated in his pedal virgule . Or you could go even simpler and justtape HEPA filters to all the fans you ’ve got . Oh , you could also barricade yourself in your housewith a few of these chump .
Which is to say that the real solution — the only one that will work for trillion of actual people who have to deal with this on a daily basis — is also the least glamourous : Policy reform . China says it ’s happening , with new police force that illegalise smogginess - sick cars and limit drive in general . In December , it announced that harsher penaltiesand more revision to existing pollution lawmaking are hail .
So while engineers , architect , physicists , and one ready to hand Beijing artist might have a ton of melodic theme for fixing the city ’s smog problem , there ’s only one fix that will actually work . Unfortunately , it ’s also the hardest .
Lead image : Beijing in 2013 .
Air pollutionChinaDesignPollutionSmog
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