Chinese man turns air pollution into brick

While most Chinese are trying to avoid the choking smog shrouding much of the country during winter, one Chinese man has been using the acrid air to build bricks.

A man from the southern Chinese city Shenzhen, who calls himself "brother nuts" on microblog Sina Weibo, collected airborne particles using a dust collector in Beijing for the past one hundred days.

He then sent 100 grams of the dirty air particles to a factory, where workers used clay to fortify them into a brick.

During that period, the dust collector, capable of trapping pollutants measuring more than 0.2 micron in diameter, worked four hours a day, filtering the amount of air equivalent to that inhaled by dozens of adults each day.

The man said he didn't specifically look for heavily polluted areas, such as construction sites, to collect pollutants, but rather placed the dust collector around the city's most visited tourism and culture sites as well as the central business district.

He positioned the collector at roughly the same height as human nostrils.

A picture of the pollutant-based brick, still in the making, was widely circulated on the Weibo after he posted it on his account.

He added this uniquely composed brick would look just like regular brick, which usually weighs 1.5 to 2 kg when completed.

Some offered tens of thousands yuan to buy the pollutant-based brick. But the man said it will end up among the piles of bricks used in construction in Beijing, where the pollutants came from. Endi