Daan Roosegaarde is a product designer and innovator based in the Netherlands. As the founder of Studio Roosegaarde, he works with his colleagues on projects that integrate technology with urban spaces, chiefly with the purpose of tackling pollution.
We previously looked at the Smog Free Tower, a kind of futuristic outdoor vacuum cleaner that turns contaminated air into jewellery. Now, Roosegaarde has introduced a new arm of the Smog Free Project, the Smog Free Bicycle.
It is a bicycle that inhales polluted air, treats it with ionization (like the Smog Free Tower does in larger scale) before expelling it around the cyclist. The design contains a compact version of the system that is installed in the tower, effectively mobilising it and making it mass-distributable.
The concept behind the Smog Free Bicycle is to dole out clean air while offering city dwellers a healthy, energy-efficient mode of transport and to reduce road congestion at the same time. Cyclists have the ability to generate purified air by pedaling through the streets. The project is also meant to line up with the rise in popularity of community bike sharing programmes such as those found in New York and Beijing, where cyclists take and leave bicycles in public areas for anonymous use.
According to Roosegaarde, “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.”
