Man Shows Just How Polluted China is By Vacuuming Up Its Smog For 100 Days

December 2, 2015

A Chinese artist who took to the streets of Beijing with a vacuum cleaner to collect dust from the city’s smog has made a brick from the particles.

Over a period of four hours a day for 100 days, 34-year-old performance artist Nut Brother pushed a 1,000-watt industrial-strength vacuum cleaner around China’s capital city with its nozzle held in the air, reports Quartz.

Yesterday, on the 100th day of his project, he took the collected dust to a brick factory in Tangshan, Hebei province, where it was mixed with clay and turned into a brick.

On the same day he made his brick, Beijing, which has a long notorious reputation for air pollution, was experiencing its worst air quality in over a year. The government issued an “orange” pollution alert on Sunday for the highly hazardous smog cloud that has overtaken the city, whose residents have been encouraged to stay inside, according to Reuters.

Nut Brother, who was a copywriter before becoming an artist, developed his “dust plan” in 2013 after experiencing the city’s densely polluted air for years as a resident and then wanting to get others to think about the “relationship between human and nature.”

He plans to place the brick at a Beijing construction site where it will be used in a new building. According to Nut Brother, the brick will “disappear into the concrete jungle, just like putting a drop of water in the ocean.”

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