Do you know that Smoke – one of the main culprits of air pollution, can be captured to produce inks and paints?

Smoke is inevitable in few vehicles, machines and industries. They cause a variety of diseases and breathing problems. Smoke has the potential to change the colour of anything that is light coloured or white like white cloths and walls. This property of smoke can be used to make useful products and beautiful art out of it.

“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” – R. Buckminster Fuller (American engineer, architect, and futurist.)

Cities are choking due to air pollution and everyone is complaining about it. But two Indian start-ups have gone beyond just complaining and see air pollution as a resource and use smoke to produce ink and paints. This helps in reducing air pollution and make a profit out of it.

Graviky labs

A Bengaluru based start-up established after three years of researching on how to purify and recycle carbon soot from vehicles into ink, oil-based paints and spray paints. This technology helps in capturing carbon soot emitted from the exhaust of vehicles. The soot collected is purified to remove carcinogens and other pollutants, then it is transformed into paint and ink. Air ink pen is a product developed by the company which contains ink made from 30–40 minutes of car pollution.

Chakr Innovation

A Delhi based start-up has come up with Chakr shield. The goal of this start-up is to improve the quality of air. They have developed a retrofit emission control device for diesel generators. This device has the potential to capture almost 90% of the particulate matter emissions from the exhaust of diesel generators.

The capture particulate matter is used as a raw material for producing ink and paints. The device can be attached to the exhaust of the generators without causing any damage to it. This technology is that it uses very less energy and is scalable. The technology has the potential to produce around 30L of ink a month. 1L of ink can purify over 35 million litres of air.

Recycling a pollutant to make a useful product can be a novel sustainable solution to control pollution.

Image: Antonio Francisco via Unsplash