Imagined conversation:
“Hey man, that’s a sweet painting you have there.”
“Thanks, it’s made from burning dinosaurs.”
“Sorry, what?”
“You heard me.”
That conversation can now freely take place thanks to the ingenuity of an MIT Media Lab spinoff company called Graviky, which has figured out a way to capture vehicle emissions, detoxify them, and turn them into inks and paints.
Photo: Graviky
The device itself is called Kaalink, and can be used to capture up to 95% of particulate matter coming from tailpipes or other pollution sources (without creating harmful back-pressure). That particulate matter is then refined and turned into AirInk—according to Graviky, it takes 45 minutes of vehicle emissions to produce one fluid ounce of the ink.
Photo: Graviky
Graviky describes the project like this: “Our vision is to arrest the vehicular soot in a way that it doesn’t reach our lungs. The process of creating AirInk carefully detoxifies heavy metals and particle carcinogens from the soot or carbon. The pollutants which could have been in the lungs of millions of people are now beautifully resting as art.”
Unfortunately, so far the process to produce Air Ink is very labor-intensive and can only be performed on a small scale, and the company has turned to KickStarter for funding, offering different-sized refillable AirInk markers and a screen printing ink.
These guys need to get their hands on some of the cheating VW diesels—that would give them 50 times the amount of soot than they would get from other cars.
News Source: Treehugger
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