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posted by janrinok on Friday October 28 2016, @01:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-idea-sucks dept.

a team of Dutch inventors has unveiled a giant air-cleaning vacuum that they say filters out fine particle pollution from the surrounding air, but this project isn't about art, it's purely about functionality.

"It's a large industrial filter about eight meters long, made of steel... placed basically on top of buildings and it works like a big vacuum cleaner," Henk Boersen of the Envinity Group, the makers of the device, told the AFP.

The device can suck in air from a 300-meter radius and from up to four miles above and can clean 800,000 cubic meters of air an hour. It filters out 100 percent of fine particles and 95 percent of ultra-fine particles, based on prototype tests carried out by the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands.

All they need now is to build another two dozen coal-fired power plants to run the vacuums.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Friday October 28 2016, @05:37AM

    by gnuman (5013) on Friday October 28 2016, @05:37AM (#419741)

    Or more importantly, the heart attack causing NOx - thank you Volkswagen!

    The easiest way to clean the air is not polluting it in the first place, and planting vegetation like trees that actually cleans the air of the bad gasses not just particulates.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:00PM (#419804)

    it's already to late to 'not pollute' at best we can 'not pollute further'

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Friday October 28 2016, @08:41PM

      by Francis (5544) on Friday October 28 2016, @08:41PM (#419953)

      Yes, but this technology does nothing to help with the pollutants that we most need removed from the atmosphere. And the energy necessary to run these machines is going to set us back in terms of climate change. Even under the best case scenario it's carbon neutral.

  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Friday October 28 2016, @02:31PM

    by Francis (5544) on Friday October 28 2016, @02:31PM (#419853)

    C02 was just the first to spring to mind, there's all sorts of them like the NOX, methane and ozone that aren't particulates, but cause a lot of harm when breathed in anyways.

    As somebody else stated earlier, the dust itself is a self-solving problem. The moment people stop releasing it into the air is the moment that the dust we've created starts to leave the atmosphere. Some of it's likely to be up there for quite a while, but it will eventually fall down to earth and just be the same as the rest of the dirt.

    The main advantage I see to this is that some of the manmade dust is rather toxic.