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Smog Rings Clear Air for Beijing

Daan Roosegaarde found a way to incorporate a noxious mixture like pollution and fog to create a high-end designer product, the smog ring. Credit Studio Roosegaarde

 

More and more eco-friendly jewelers are coming up with pieces that contribute to a cleaner world, whether using recycled materials, or in this case, smog.

“It’s weird how the city [Beijing] is covered in smog and no one is doing anything,” Daan Roosegaarde remembers thinking.

What started as a common — albeit worrying — observation, soon became a quest for the designer: He wanted to find a way to incorporate the noxious mixture of pollution and fog in another one of the poetic-pragmatic projects for which he has become famous since founding Studio Roosegaarde some six years ago.

The result is a highly ambitious project by Studio Roosegaarde to create smog-free parks in Beijing.

Daan Roosegaarde found a way to incorporate a noxious mixture like pollution and fog to create a high-end designer product, the smog ring. Credit Studio Roosegaarde

And a by-product of that project is the smog ring, an elegant piece of designer jewelry intrinsically linked to the new reality of urban pollution and the fight against it.

“I like the notion that you take something high-end and combine it with the problematic,” he said.

The ring — which is still in its design phase — will be a simple band mounted with a small clear center stone containing smog particles extracted from Beijing city air. The black dust, which is largely carbon soot from coal, will be configured in a millimeter cube, to symbolize a cubic kilometer of smog that each ring has cleared.