Air pollution presents a worldwide health crisis but an innovative solution may have been found
The World Health Organization reports that 4.2 million people die every year as a result of exposure to outdoor air pollution, with 9 out of 10 people on the planet breathing polluted air. Even large-scale adoption of green energy won’t be enough to immediately reduce the risk of lung disease, stroke, and heart disease that results from exposure to polluted air. As a result, efforts are being made to clean up the air in some of the world’s most polluted areas.
The World’s Largest Air Purifier
In early 2018, an experimental air purifying tower, the world’s largest to date, was unveiled in Xian, China. The 328-foot tower produces clean air with little power required to run it, using solar power to heat polluted air that is sucked into glass rooms that function as greenhouses. The hot air moves up the tower, passing through a series of filters before finally being emitted as clean air. Since its debut, the tower has produced 353 million cubic feet of clean air per day, drastically improving air quality in the area.
Cao Juniji, the lead researcher on the project team, has explained that this tower is just the beginning and that he hopes to build additional towers throughout China in the future. According to patents filed by the team, future towers could be as high as 1,640 feet, covering more than 11 square miles and generating enough clean air for a small city.
India’s “City Cleaner”
Of the millions of deaths from air pollution each year more than half of them occur in two countries: China and India. So, it should come as no surprise that India has recently made similar efforts in constructing an air purifying tower of its own. Kurin Systems, an innovative air purification company inspired by the tower in Xian, has planned to install a 40-foot purification tower that can purify an incredible 1,130 cubic meters of air each day.
Dubbed the “City Cleaner,” the tower will be able to provide clean the air of an area of nearly two miles, affecting about 75,00 people in the Delhi area where it is planned to be built. According to the developers, the tower will use nine filters and filter 99.99 percent of pollutants from the air. The estimated cost of each towers is about $250k.
Based on the success of the Xian tower and the promise of the Delhi tower, it seems that air purification towers could be the future of polluted cities across the planet — giving us all a reason to breathe easy.
