Daan Roosegaarde has been touring China with his Smog Free Project, showcasing the Smog Free Tower and encouraging people to find innovative solutions to address air pollution. He’s not out of ideas yet though; he’ll add to his tour with new smog-sucking bicycles. These bikes could work much like his Smog Free Tower does, absorbing dirty air, cleaning it, and pouring it back out as fresh air.

Biking in a city polluted by smog isn’t healthy, so people are less inclined to ditch their cars and opt for a bicycle. Roosegaarde envisions an answer to that problem in a bike that can inhale dirty air, clean it, and pump it out around a cyclist.

In a statement, Roosegaarde said, “Beijing used to be an iconic bicycle city. We want to bring back the bicycle as a cultural icon of China and as the next step towards smog free cities.”

The studio says the concept aligns with growing interest in bike sharing programs in China – like Mobike, which has over a million shareable bicycles in the Beijing area. There’s still a long way to go to slash pollution and traffic in the country’s capital, but the smog-sucking bicycle could offer a creative approach to the problem.

The Smog Free Bicycle found its beginnings in a Studio Roosegaarde-hosted workshop at contemporary art museum M Woods in Beijing, featuring Professor Yang of Tsinghua University and artist Matt Hope, who worked on an idea for an air-filtering bike around four years ago.

According to Studio Roosegaarde, the new smog-sucking bicycle is “currently in the first stage and is intended to become a medium for smog free cities, generating clean air by pedaling, and creating impact on the larger urban scale.”

Article from inhabitat.com

by Lacy Cooke