Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde turns his attentions from designing smart highways and dance floors to a pollution collecting system in Beijing.

His idea is an "electronic vacuum cleaner" for Beijing's polluted skies. The Smog system throws an unexpected solution at the problem - it uses copper coils buried under grass to create electrostatic fields and attract smog particles to the ground. Once it is pulled to the ground, the particles can be compressed and repurposed.



Obviously, Beijing will try anything, and they're going with this idea now. Roosegaarde's Shanghai based design firm, Studio Roosegaarde forged an agreement with Beijing's mayor to test the concept in one of the city's parks.

In theory, it should be capable of clearing a 22,500 suqare foot area of clear sky. "Here, the absence of the smog is the design and I like that," Roosegaarde told Wired. "For me design is not about chairs and lamps or tables, what you know Dutch design to be. I like thinking of designs that enable and improve life."

Hopefully the project pans out well and can be rolled out on a larger scale.

Check out another one of Roosegaarde's work dubbed "Crystal" in the video below. It uses LED pebbles that light up when you interact with them with Roosegaarde describing them as "the new LEGO from Mars".

[Dezeen]