Kickstarter project sells world’s first ink made out of air pollution

By Luke Dormehl Published February 8, 2017

Let’s be honest: Unless you’re the heir to the Parker Pen Company fortune, there is nothing overly exciting about the way that ink is made.

Unless you ask the folks behind Graviky Labs, that is. They found a way to recycle air pollution — which causes more than 7.2 million deaths each year — by using a proprietary method to transform it into something you can write with. The fluid ounce of ink needed to fill a pen can be gathered from 45 minutes of car emissions, courtesy of Graviky’s smart process, developed while the founders were studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Recommended Videos

“We started as a small DIY experiment while at MIT Media Lab 3.5 years ago,” Anirudh Sharma told Digital Trends.

The research involved repurposing the soot particles produced by almost all air pollution sources. In the original iteration of the project, a soot-catching pump was connected to an HP C6602 inkjet cartridge and Arduino to become a 96dpi print platform.

1 of 5

kickstarter ink air pollution solvents test — Image used with permission by copyright holder

kickstarter ink air pollution products decorated with — Image used with permission by copyright holder

kickstarter ink air pollution capture on car — Image used with permission by copyright holder

kickstarter ink air pollution capture on motorcycle — Image used with permission by copyright holder

kickstarter ink air pollution multiple products 1 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

“Since then we’ve taken our system through numerous iterations and eventually made something that’s deployable,” Sharma continued. “In 2016, we partnered with Tiger Beer to do an art campaign, which received further positive feedback. [Following that,] thousands of artists, environmentalists, and nature lovers have written to us to bring these inks to them.”

The result is a new Air-Ink Kickstarter campaign, which offers the innovative ink to customers for the first time. Five different grades of Air-Ink have been produced for the project, with the product being applicable to everything from fabric and outdoor paints, to screen printer, oil painting, and markers.

It functions as both a neat science exercise and a provocative statement on pollution. As Sharma notes as part of the campaign, “Each stroke made with Air-Ink arrests particulate matter, which would have otherwise ended up in the lungs of common people. Scaling this is saving lives.”

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can pre-order a bottle of Air-Ink for $25, with higher price points also including entire printing sets. Shipping is set to take place in June.

Former Contributor

I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…

Topics

Cars

The Apple Car may be dead, but it became the foundation of Apple Intelligence

A decade of work on a canceled car project reportedly laid the groundwork for Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence in Apple Car

The Apple Car may have never left the garage, but it apparently gave birth to Apple's AI ambitions. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's canceled autonomous vehicle project, one that consumed more than a decade of work and over $10 billion before being scrapped in 2024, ended up laying the technological foundation for Apple Intelligence. In a rather ironic twist, one of Apple's most expensive failures may also become one of its most important long-term investments.

The Apple Car forced Apple to think like an AI company

Emerging Tech

Researchers hid a prompt injection inside a PNG, and AI fell for it

Hacker

AI coding assistants like Claude are becoming every developer's favorite coworker. They can review code, explain confusing functions, and even write entire features with a single prompt. But new research suggests that this growing trust could also become their biggest weakness.

A team of security researchers (professor Sudipta Chattopadhyay and researcher Murali Ediga) has demonstrated an unusual attack that doesn't target the AI model directly. Instead, it targets what the AI doesn't pay enough attention to during code reviews. Rather than hiding malicious instructions in lines of code, the researchers tucked them inside an image file. Since many AI review tools treat images as decorative assets rather than as something worth inspecting, the pull request can appear perfectly harmless and sail through the review.

Emerging Tech

AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the go-to tool for everything from writing emails and summarizing meetings to helping students study or developers debug code. But the same technology that saves people time can also be misused, and a new report suggests that terrorist organizations are finding ways to do exactly that.

According to a research paper shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication, researchers found evidence that members of Boko Haram have been using popular AI chatbots to support both day-to-day activities and combat-related tasks. Interviews with 27 former members conducted in Nigeria over the past two years suggest that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek were used to gather technical information, troubleshoot weapons, and even assist with planning attacks.