Pollution-Fighting Vertical Forests Coming to China

China is said to be building a Vertical forest, a pair of pollution-fighting residential towers stylized with over 3,000 plants and designed by Italian architect Stefano Boeri, CNET reports.

The Nanjing Green Towers will be the first Vertical Forest built in Asia and will help "regenerate local biodiversity" and "provide 25 tons of CO2 absorption each year and will produce about 60 kg of oxygen per day," per a press release.

The pollution is so bad in China that it kills about 4,000 people every day, according to a report published by a U.S.-based nonprofit group called Berkeley Earth.

"When I was last in Beijing, pollution was at the hazardous level; every hour of exposure reduced my life expectancy by 20 minutes," said Richard Muller, scientific director of Berkeley Earth and one of the paper's coauthors. "It's as if every man, women and child smoked 1.5 cigarettes each hour."

Milan, Italy and Lausanne, Switzerland also have Vertical Forests. The Green Towers will stand at 656 feet and 354 feet tall, with the taller building to include office space, a museum, green architecture school and a private club on the rooftop. The second tower will have a Hyatt hotel with a swimming pool on the rooftop. It will house shops, a food market, restaurants and conference hall and exhibition spaces.

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