8/19/2023 0 Comments White india ink markerNow, Sharma’s AIR-INK is on display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, in the exhibition “ Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” co-organized with the Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands. They take this idea beyond the science and the impact,” he explains.Īs artists realized that AIR-INK pens produced high-quality, long-lasting, deeply-pigmented, non-toxic pigment using recycled material, word spread fast. “Art wasn’t the way to make money for us - it was the way for us to build a community. In 2016, he paired up with the Singapore-based brewery Tiger Beer to create street art and murals using AIR-INK in Hong Kong's Sheung Wan district. When it came time to start sharing the product with the rest of the world, Sharma knew he wanted to start with artists. Sharma and his team started his company Graviky Labs, which handles operations for both Kaalink and AIR-INK. Each marker holds about 30 milliliters of AIR-INK, which is equivalent to approximately 45 minutes of diesel car pollution. Now, Kaalink can by scaled up to filter air pollution from just about any source, like a smokestack on small machinery or even straight out of the air, and turn it into soot, which is then hydrated to form ink that can be used in AIR-INK pens and markers. They first developed a filtering device called Kaalink, derived from the Hindi word “kaala” meaning black, that was comprised of a steel cylinder that could be affixed to an exhaust pipe. “People started seeing AIR-INK as an opportunity to get rid of their waste, so it doesn’t end up in a landfill.” “They started coming to us and asking to send it to us because we were making something people can buy,” Sharma says. They put a call out to area factories asking for their carbon particulates, and it wasn’t long before polluters started contacting him to collect their waste. Without systems in place to get rid of the waste, plenty will end up in landfills or even rivers, Sharma explains. However, in places like India where regulations are more relaxed, waste builds up quickly at small to medium-size businesses because it can be expensive to dispose. Sharma explains that in Western countries, like the United States, stricter regulations already require companies to dispose of carbon particulates responsibly. In the six months they spent in India refining their technology, it wasn’t hard to find pollution sources for experimenting. When it worked, he and his team built a lab in a small garage in Bangalore to create a device that could capture air pollution at the source, in engines or factory machinery. It started as a small proof of concept experiment using soot from air pollution to make paint. A year later, following the completion of his master's degree at MIT, Sharma returned to India to focus fully on developing what would become a product called AIR-INK, the first commercial ink made entirely from air pollution. In 2013, Sharma and a few friends “hacked” an inkjet printer cartridge to print using ink made from soot from a candle at the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." Buckminster Fuller: "Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. He reflects on a quote from 20th century inventor and architect R. Fashion and textiles use black ink,” says Sharma. “Ink is such a powerful medium to connect with people. If he could find a way, he thought, to capture the particles that produced that stain on the wall in his photograph, he could not only reduce the amount of pollution released into the air, but also turn it into something new, or perhaps something beautiful. But you shouldn’t need to burn new fossil fuels just to make ink. “The black color in the pen you use is made by burning fossil fuels to make ink. “So, if you can do it with soot, can we do the same with air pollution?” Sharma explains. The powder is mixed with a polymer and a solvent to turn it into smooth, flowing black rollerball ink. The technical term for the substance is “ carbon black,” and it is the powder that remains after burning coal or oil. The black ink we use in our pens or in inkjet printers is essentially made from soot. That dark, triangular stain made Sharma, who was then a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, think seriously about pollution-and also about pigments, like ink. On a trip to India in 2012, Anirudh Sharma captured a photo of a diesel generator blowing black soot against a white wall.
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