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China may build a smog-eating 'forest city' filled with tree-covered skyscrapers

The Italian design firm Stefano Boeri Architetti is planning a "forest city" for China, modeled after the firm's completed green towers in Milan.

A rendering of a Nanjing Green Tower in China.

The eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, like many of the country's urban areas, suffers from intense smog.

The Air Quality Index, which uses a scale from 0 to 500 (with higher numbers indicating worse pollution), rates Nanjing's air quality as 132 — a level considered unhealthy for the public, especially those with.

The Italian design firm Stefano Boeri Architetti believes that building towers covered in plants could help the city reduce its pollution. The company recently announced that it will build two skyscrapers that will hold a total of

The "forest towers" in Nanjing will feature offices, a 247-room luxury hotel, a museum, and an architecture school. Here's a rendering of what they will look like:

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The Nanjing Green Towers will look similar to the two that Stefano Boeri Architetti designed in Milan, which measure 360 and 250 feet tall.

The Milan complex, called Bosco Verticale, was completed in 2014.

The balconies and rooftops are covered in approximately 900 trees (each measuring between 10 and 30 feet) and over 20,000 plants, ranging from shrubs to flowers.

On flat land, the plants from each tower would cover over 75,000 square feet, the architects said.

Collectively, the plants on Nanjing's towers will eat 25 tons of carbon dioxide each year and produce about 60 kg of oxygen daily, according to the firm.

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A typical vehicle emits an average of 4.7 metric tons of CO2 annually, meaning the complex would cancel out the emissions of about five cars every year.

The two towers' effect on Nanjing's overall pollution levels will be minimal, however.

The project is meant to serve as a blueprint for Boeri's imagined "forest city" in China, which the firm hopes to build in Nanjing, Liuzhou, or Shijiazhuang.

Boeri envisions that this futuristic development could contain up to 200 vegetation-covered towers, a train system, and lots of green space.

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Entire "forest cities" could collectively have a much larger impact on smog than individual towers.

Architect Stefano Boeri told The Guardian that forest cities could fundamentally alter China's urban areas. Chinese officials, he said, "have created these nightmares – immense metropolitan environments. They have to imagine a new model of city that is not about extending and expanding but a system of small, green cities."

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“We are working very seriously on designing all the different buildings. I think they will start to build at the end of this year. By 2020 we could imagine having the first forest city in China," Boeri told the Guardian.

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