Bangalore, India-based Graviky Labs, is turning polluted air into paint and ink. The lab is the brainchild of Anirudh Sharma who co-led the MIT Media Lab India Initiative for two years, where he worked on creating an innovation ecosystem in India.
Vehicular emissions are one of the biggest contributing factors of India’s serious pollution woes, and “because of this, we wanted to create technology that can capture a vehicle’s carbon emissions without compromising the performance of the vehicle. Our vision is to arrest the vehicular, environmental soot in a way that it doesn’t reach our lungs,” says Sharma.
CNN Style reports that the carbon soot is captured using a cylindric device that is fitted over the car’s exhaust pipe. Then the soot is purified to remove heavy metals and carcinogens. The purified carbon soot is blended with other materials to turn it into a durable paint.
“The soot is blended with oils to create oil-based paint, the spray paint is packaged with compressed gas and canned — to a user, the end results are materials that function much like any other paint they use,” adds Sharma. A single Air Ink pen, Sharma claims, contains 30-40 minutes of carbon emissions from a single car.
