Anirudh Sharma and his team at the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces division wanted to find a way to use air pollution as a tool for good. Sharma’s team member Kunal says being born in India, many people experience soot early in life as their grandmothers rub kajal into their eyes to ward off evil spirits. Pollution from vehicles in overpopulated areas, and burning fuel for personal use also contribute to the high fume count that can be inhaled over a lifetime. The Fluid Interfaces group decided to harness the pollution to make black ink.
After early work in 2013 the Kaala printer was developed as a machine that could turn soot into printer ink. The printer was built around an HP C6602 inkjet cartridge and controlled by an Arduino board, resulting in a 96dpi print system. Commercial printer ink uses smaller particle sizes and after opening the holes in the printer cartridges several successful tests were run. After spinning the project off into its own company Graviky, Sharma and his team estimate that they’ve cleaned 1.6 trillion liters of air and turned it into ink. The team is currently running a Kickstarter for AIR-INK, the world’s first ink made out of air pollution.
The first step in the pollution-to-ink process is collection. The KAALINK device is a cylinder placed over tailpipes and generator exhaust pipes to capture pollutants. Next soot is processed to remove heavy metals, dust particles and carcinogens, creating a pigment with high carbon content. This carbon is taken as the base material and follows commercial ink making processes and turned into markers and screen printing ink.
Kickstarter is being used here both as a means to ramp up higher volume production, and also to build a network of users who are passionate about the environment and art. This is a great project aimed at being sustainable and emphasizing the Art part of STEAM initiatives. There is a frustratingly small amount of detail currently available as the proprietary methods of soot collection and processing but the team is moving forward to commercialize both processes. The campaign is already funded and will end on March 9, with rewards expected to ship June 2017.