air ink
Turning air pollution into ink.
In the last few decades, Asia has grown exponentially. But this growth has come at a cost - air pollution. Air-Ink is the first ink made entirely out of air pollution. We've repurposed pollutants into tools for art. Whenever the inks or markers are used to draw, write, paint or create, they’re literally making our streets more beautiful. While at the MIT Media Lab, we asked ourselves a simple question. How can we turn something as ugly as air pollution into something as useful as ink? That’s how we came up with AIR-INK. While cheaper carbon black inks are manufactured through the deliberate burning of fossil fuels, we use our proprietary device––what we call KAALINK––to capture soot that is already being emitted from vehicles. KAALINK is retrofitted to the exhaust pipe of vehicles/generators to capture the outgoing pollutants. It takes just 45 minutes worth of vehicular emissions captured by Kaalink to produce 1 fluid ounce of ink––enough to fill one pen.