There are two facts of life about living in Shanghai that we all have to accept at some point or other: 1) the air quality can be preeeetty iffy, and 2) the easiest and fastest way to get around is by bike. On the roads. With the cars. And all that pollution. What's a Shanghaier to do?
Suck it up, cycle and suffocate, mostly. But now there is hope on the horizon: some clever designers and scientists have designed a 'Smog Free Bicycle' which purifies the air around you as you ride.
The bike works a bit like a vacuum cleaner – it sucks in the polluted air around it, cleans it, and releases clean air around the cyclist. It's based on the same technology that brought Beijing the Smog Free Tower last year.
The Smog Free Tower claimed to remove up to 70 percent of PM10 and 50 percent of PM2.5 from the air around it up to a ten-metre radius, and these results were recently confirmed by scientists at the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands.
That's science, folks.
The Dutch designer behind the Smog Free Bicycle, Daan Roosegaarde, said that his team 'want to bring back the bicycle as a cultural icon of China' and make the bikes part of 'the next step towards smog free cities'. Make bikes great again!
The bikes have yet to be put into mass production, but they are on display at the Tianjin International Design Week, which runs until 17 May. The smog-free future may be coming, but until it does it's probably still worth investing in some good old fashioned masks.
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