I'm confused as to why they are calling it a vacuum cleaner. It's not a vacuum cleaner at all. It's an industrial sized air purifier. Essentially just a scaled up Oreck air purifier.

Would be more efficient to stop or control pollution at the source. There was a similar 'news' article on Gizmag earlier, where someone said it would not help with pollen, but pollen is least of our problems, man made pollution can and should be cleaned up at the source - put all cars in a tunnel and clean up the air before it is released (better still make cars carry their own oxygen and treat the exhaust).

Stopping the pollution in the first place is pretty key. However, if these things were 100% solar powered then maybe it's not a bad idea otherwise they'd just suck. Not sure how many times a day you'd need to replace the filter though in some places!

China could use these.

And how much energy will this air cleaner be using during its 24/7 operation? And where and how do you discard the full filters?

Every small step is needed!

If governments assisted in making clean-green vehicles affordable to the average worker - the emission levels would drop rapidly. These would be a good thing around factories and industrial areas that put out loads of crap into the air. Fact is, the technology to run cars on hydrogen produced from water has been readily available for many years - the petrol giants have constantly petitioned governments to hide the facts. One fact is plain though, petrol cars will continue to exist because the cost of living keeps rising and the wage of the average worker never keeps up. The common man in the street can't afford a Prius or a Tesla - get real people, governments need to step in and help. People want to help, but just can't afford to.

Its not April the 1st is it? I think the last paragraph is all you need to read - as these are the most important questions - what happens to the waste - what is the frequency or filter change out, power uses, who pays for it all etc etc - else you are just moving one problem to another place

@jetserf : Have you ever been in "China" , What part of this almost 10 millions km² ? Even Beijing is not a 365days polluted city (fortunately) And chinese life expectation has dramatically increased, specially in towns (more polluted than countryside ?). Thanks to you using vacuum cleaner brain.

Factories. just add stack scrubbers, they should be mandatory these days, even in "developing" countries.