China's vacuum-cleaner artist turning Beijing's smog into bricks

His idol is Subcomandante Marcos, the masked Mexican rebel; his weapon of choice a 1,000-watt vacuum cleaner.

Meet Nut Brother, the Chinese activist-artist attempting to vanquish toxic smog by sucking it up through a black plastic nozzle..

As the latest coal-fuelled “airpocalypse” engulfed northern China this week and world leaders gathered in Paris to debate the fight against climate change, Nut Brother hit the streets of Beijing hoping to raise awareness of his country’s deadly smog crisis.

For the last 100 days, the activist, whose real name is Wang Renzheng, has used the industrial appliance to extract dust and other lung-choking pollutants from the city’s atmosphere before transforming them into a dark brown “smog brick”.

“I want to show this absurdity to more people,” Wang, 34, said on Tuesday as pollution levels in the Chinese capital soared to levels 40 times higher than those deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.

“I want people to see that we cannot avoid or ignore this problem [and] that we must take real action.”

Until the onset of this winter, Beijing’s 20 million long-suffering residents had expressed some optimism that things were on the up, after a comparatively smog-free 2015.

But the city’s latest “airmageddon” – to which the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, made no reference during his address to the UN climate summit in Paris on Monday – has underlined the scale of the challenge that remains.

Despite government claims that “effective measures” had been taken to combat the hazardous smog, China’s capital has for days been coated by a putrid, nicotine-coloured haze.
Read More: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/01/chinese-vacuum-cleaner-artist-turning-beijings-smog-into-bricks
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