GoRolloe fighting air pollution with a bicycle wheel

“Imagine that an air purifier and a bike wheel had a baby,” says Kristen Tapping, describing her invention, GoRolloe. “As the wheel rotates, it has a set of fins that pull air in and pass it through filters, and expel it back out cleaner.”

Tapping works as an industrial designer based in London, where she is field-testing her latest creation. The concept is simple but novel: attach a lightweight device to a bicycle wheel, which removes pollution from the air as it spins.

GoRolloe began as an entry in a design competition, one of many ideas Tapping had developed.

“At first, it was literally the fun engineering of it, using motion as an air-filtration method,” says Tapping. “But as I started to research air quality, I realized it’s an invisible problem. People don’t realize there’s actually stuff that’s killing them in the air. No one says, ‘That person died of air pollution.’ But it affects all of us, and that’s what fascinates me about the issue.”

Tapping has lived in London for most of the past five years and is headquartered at London South Bank University. Up until now, Tapping has taken a long and winding road: She spent her early years in Rennes, France, and moved frequently throughout her childhood. She earned a B.A. in public relations and advertising from the University of Northern Colorado and worked as a bartender, publicist, and personal trainer before discovering industrial design. She earned degrees in the subject from Metropolitan State University of Denver and London South Bank.

“It just fit exactly what I was looking for,” she recalls. “It was really hands-on. It was more product-based, not building-based. It was the right fit, right away.”

GoRolloe is still in development — and patent pending — and Tapping expects it to hit retailers no sooner than spring of 2023. But the invention has garnered a lot of attention: GoRolloe won the Design Innovation in Polymer Award in 2020, and she’s received support from a host of organizations. The Imagination Factory, for example, is a London-based design firm that is helping Tapping with air-flow, filtration impact, and assembly. A company called Total Sim is studying GoRolloe’s Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and Tapping has partnered with healthcare provider BUPA and its ECO Disruptive programme.

One of her latest partnerships is with Distrupol, a polymer distributor based in the UK. The company has helped Tapping utilize sustainable materials for the construction of GoRolloe, including recycled tires and contact lenses. When GoRolloe is finally mass-produced, Tapping expects the device to cost about £40 ($54US) and last about four years.

It’s always risky, to depend on the altruism of customers, but Tapping is working to make GoRolloe an enticing piece of green technology.

“One, I made it as good-looking as possible,” she says. “The other is it can carry advertising space, so for city bikes and last-mile delivery, it’s a no brainer. And the third is that it’s quite cheap to manufacture.”

Tapping plans to release an app as well, which will inform users how much pollution they have sucked out of the atmosphere. The app will also “track performance, issue rewards, and alert customers of when their next filter change needs to be made.”

Today she bikes a great deal, but Tapping doesn’t consider herself a lifelong cyclist. When she lived in Spain, she got around by mountain bike; in London, she commuted by hybrid, but the bike was quickly stolen. Then she upgraded to a Specialized road bike, and she embraced the speed and thrill of urban cycling. “I fell in love,” she says. “It’s an amazing tool. In London, you can beat the traffic. I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and I like to race with buses and cars. You have to weave in and out of traffic a bit.”

Robert Isenberg is a writer and multimedia producer based in Providence, Rhode Island. You can find some of his essays about cycling on Medium.