Smoke in your eyes, the inexhaustible resource!

How do you turn air pollution into ink? Anirudh Sharma, Nikhil Kaushik and Nitesh Kadyan, co-founders of Graviky, have done just that! Air Ink gathers its raw material through Kaalink, a gadget that filters exhaust fumes from automobiles diesel generators and stores the carbon, which is then processed into ink. They talk to Darshana Ramdev about the journey that led to the 1.6 trillion litres of polluted city air!  

In 2013, conditions caused by air pollution killed 1.4 million people in India. The report, presented by a group of scientists from the United  States, Canada, China and India, listed air pollution as the fourth highest risk factor for death globally. We might not think about this when we breathe (we take in about 12 litres of air every two minutes), but we do notice the grime that settles on our clothes, the smog that fills the air. To Anirudh Sharma, Nikhil Kaushik and Nitesh Kadyan, the co-founders of  Bengaluru-based startup Graviky, this was just carbon, which simply needed to be captured and put to a more constructive use.

Switch to 2016. The art exhibition at UB City here in Bengaluru, comprises a very unique series of paintings by Pavithra Chowdappa, done with black markers. These aren't just any markers, however. The ink they contain is made from air pollution! This is Air-Ink, one of Graviky’s flagship products, which has found a number of applications including ink for printers, markers and pens and emulsifiers.

Sharma, who was part of the MIT Media Lab when the idea first took root, wondered if polluting fumes could be collected before they entered the atmosphere. These fumes are composed of carbon, produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. The soot particles are 2.5 micrometers, 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human air. These are the most harmful, travelling deep into the lungs and even entering the bloodstream. “Yes, it's a bad thing, but at the end of the day, it's carbon. And carbon is the basis of pretty much everything. The simplest solution, it seemed, was to capture it and put to good use."

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sharma created a gadget that could capture soot from a candle, combine the particles with oil and rub alcohol to create a pigment. In 2013, Anirudh, with his cofounders, created a prototype using a HP Laser InkJet printer. "It drew in pollution from one side, mixed it with solvents and produced ink." The idea was widely appreciated and Anirudh decided to move back to India to launch his company.

"I've always been interested in things that are well, magic," he smiles. Before he went to MIT, Sharma started the Lechal shoe project and co-founded Ducere Technologies Pvt Ltd. These shoes were designed with in-built navigation systems for the visually impaired and fetched him the Innovator of the Year award.

After returning to India, Sharma turned to the most obvious source of raw material for Air Ink – automobiles and diesel generators. They began work on a contraption, Kaalink, that can be attached to the exhaust pipes of generators and automobiles, which, he says, are the major causes of air pollution in cities. “This soot trap can filter about 95% of the effluents, releasing clean air into the atmosphere,” Sharma explained. This includes particulates between 2.5 and 10 micrometres in diameter. A single Kaalink will take about 45 minutes to collect enough carbon for one fluid ounce of ink, just about enough to fill a pen.

The Kaalink imparts a positive electrostatic charge on the particles as they leave the exhaust pipe. They are then drawn to a negatively charged chamber. “It's designed with a bypass system so that there is no back pressure or impact on the engine,” he said. The Kaalink can work without intervention for about 20 days, after which a red light alerts the user to the full tank. “This carbon can be stored in tanks,” said Anirudh. Now a few whiffs of this can prove fatal, but it’s what he describes as “devil in a box. It's only dangerous as long as it's in the air”. These carbon banks are transported back to the laboratory, where it is fed into the 10 generators the team has up and running. “It's combined with solvents and oils to produce five grades of ink,” he said.

Installed at 75 locations, Kaalink has purified roughly 1.6 trillion litres of air. “All we had to do was step outside. The pollution levels here are nearly three times the permissible limit. There's plenty to go around.” Needless to say, the concept spread like wildfire. An Air Ink mural was placed at Piccadilly Square in London on a billboard. The team was also taken to sustainability events in Berlin, London, Hong Kong and Bengaluru. They did demonstrations and allowed artists to paint murals with the ink. 

“At the moment, the process is very tightly controlled and well-managed, but scaling up will bring different challenges.” Consumers will have to bring their full carbon banks to the labs "We're thinking of incentivising this for them. We're looking at different models at the moment, because this is all very new.”