Diamonds Generated by New Smog-cleaning Process

euronews reported yesterday that Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde has come to an agreement with Beijing’s leaders to test a “huge electronic vacuum cleaner” that can clean polluted air by sucking up smog.

Here’s what Roosegaarde envisions:

The park would have a vacuum tower in the centre, fitted with ionic filters that charge and remove smog particles, blowing fresh air out of the tower’s side vents. Copper coils buried underground would generate an electromagnetic field that attracts the smog particles.

Interestingly, the process creates diamonds. Roosegaarde explained:

We started to look at the smog particles and realised that most of it exists out of carbon. And what happens when you put carbon under a lot of pressure for two or three weeks, you get… diamonds. We are taking a thousand cubic metres of smog air and compressing this in a sort of smog ring, and there will be different versions, so if we compress it really, really a lot, you get like a real diamond-diamond. The largest series will be that we compress it a little bit less so it gets crystallised, so you still see it’s smog, but it’s beautiful and by sharing or selling a diamond ring like that, a smog ring, you donate a thousand cubic meters of clean air to the city of Beijing.

Click here to read the full euronews report.