Air-Ink: All you need to know about the first ever ink created from polluted air

By Prarthana Mitra

Graviky Labs, an Indian startup based out of Bangalore, which is a spin off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab, launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 to develop Air-Ink. What is it? It is the first ever attempt to utilise the carbon in vehicular emissions to create ink.

Within a year, the firm, led by Anirudh Sharma, had captured 1.6 billion micrograms of particulate matter, which equates to cleaning 1.6 trillion litres of breathable air, in a country where 13 of its cities feature among the 20 most polluted cities in the world.

Last week, the firm went on to win the Edison Award (Bronze), out of thousands of submissions, for developing a method to up-cycle air pollution waste.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BToHZLUA7AK/?taken-by=gravikylabs

Here’s what happened

The founders of Graviky Labs, Anirudh Sharma and Nikhil Kaushik, based their groundbreaking invention on a very basic observation—whenever air pollutants are released, the source and its surroundings become dirty with soot. “Incomplete combustion leads to carbon and pigmentation. You see a car pumping out vehicular pollution and these nanoparticles go into our breath and settle in our lungs. That was the starting point,” Sharma told online magazine Sbcltr.

Conversely, the production of ink involves an extensive combustion of fossil fuels. The team therefrom went on to create Kaalink, a retrofit technology that captures carbo-filled diesel emissions from trucks, ferries, chimneys, and cranes around Hong Kong and India, before they enter into the atmosphere. The captured pollutants are then recycled, and refined into real ink.

Air-Ink, as they call it, is a completely non-toxic ink that has been garnering huge support from artists all over the world, who are now reportedly using it to paint murals, thereby promoting this indigenous product.

Artist Kristopher Ho working with Air Ink in Hong Kong. Credit: Home grown

Air-Ink can be incorporated in a huge array of consumer products—from markers to spray paints, and even printer cartridges. According to a report by Fast Company, just one of their Sharpie-like pens is filled with ink made from 40 to 50 minutes of diesel car pollution. The company has created several grades of ink, with different applications—0.7mm round tip, 2mm round tip, and 15mm, 30mm and 50mm chisel tip markers, as well as screen printing ink.

 

Samples of emission particles. Credit: Smart Magazine

Why you should care

Making ink out of car exhaust doesn’t do anything to reduce what air pollution, which has been touted as the single largest environmental and human health threat. But, it does find a silver lining, by channeling all the gunk in our atmosphere to creative use.

As Sharma eloquently puts it in his December 2017 TED Talk, “[…]carbon is the source of life. It is the raw material for many things. So we extract carbon from pollution to create ink. Today Air-Ink is the perfect choice of more than thousand international artists. Those artists want to experiment with this new material and create a new community.”

Kaalink fitted to the tailpipes of cars, boats, and chimneys collect 95% of their emissions, and thus, “capture air pollution before it enters the environment,” said Kaushik, who hopes their creation will catch on, and find a widespread use in the battle against air pollution.

If we can create some good out of all the bad that currently plagues our planet, much like Graviky Labs has done, it will not only make the world more habitable and beautiful, but, also mark a huge victory for artists, designers and engineers, for successfully plugging the gap created by futile environmental agreements, and government inaction.