Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey rain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vocal Bomb Here. Have you ever looked at the
Speaker 1: dirty haze and lung clogging smog caused by air pollution
Speaker 1: and thought, hey, this could be art. Sounds ridiculous, right,
Speaker 1: But the ridiculous is becoming a reality in a process
Speaker 1: that can turn air pollution into ink. A company called
Speaker 1: Gravicki Labs is transforming the microscopic particulate matter in machinery
Speaker 1: exhaust resulting from burning fossil fuels what we might call
Speaker 1: soot and is more officially called PM two point five
Speaker 1: into black inc whether from cars and trucks or generators
Speaker 1: and factories. What would have been inhaled by millions or
Speaker 1: dirty buildings or contaminated water and soil can now be
Speaker 1: used for drawing and printing. As the Gravicki Labs website states,
Speaker 1: our vision is to arrest the urban PM air pollution
Speaker 1: in a way that it doesn't reach our lungs or
Speaker 1: waste streams. Their goal is quote to confine and mind
Speaker 1: that captured pollution into high grade inks that everyone can
Speaker 1: use to express themselves through art or writing. The ink
Speaker 1: they make from this process is called air Ink. Graviki
Speaker 1: Labs grew out of the work that company co founder
Speaker 1: Annie rouch Armad did as a graduate student with m
Speaker 1: I T Media Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his studies,
Speaker 1: on a trip home to India in twelve, he took
Speaker 1: a photo of a white wall covered with a triangle
Speaker 1: of soot caused by diesel generator exhaust. He saw potential
Speaker 1: in the pollution. Carbon black, a byproduct of the incomplete
Speaker 1: burning of petroleum products, is normally used to produce ink,
Speaker 1: as well as as a component in rubber paints and plastics.
Speaker 1: Rather than burn new fossil fuels for ink production, Terma
Speaker 1: and his colleagues wanted to create ink from vehicle and
Speaker 1: machinery exhaust already being produced, thereby also reducing particular matter
Speaker 1: in the air from these sources. Experiment with candle soot
Speaker 1: and an improvised printer cartridge led to a lab set
Speaker 1: up in India in twenty where pollution and restrictions are
Speaker 1: not as strict as in the US, allowing for easier
Speaker 1: particular capture and more effective testing. The trial and error
Speaker 1: of attaching strange equipment two cars in Bengalore for capturing
Speaker 1: PM two point five produced a small device they named
Speaker 1: call Inc, which can be retrofitted to exhaust pipes. This
Speaker 1: electro mechanical device can capture of PM two point five
Speaker 1: in the exhaust without any adverse effect on engine performance.
Speaker 1: Once the particular matter is filtered, ground to a standard
Speaker 1: size and liquefied in a Gravicky Labs proprietary process, the
Speaker 1: result is a densely colored, free flowing black ink. One
Speaker 1: thirty million liter pen is the equivalent of forty five
Speaker 1: minutes of diesel production. A number of Indian companies have
Speaker 1: contacted Gravicky Labs to dispose a particular matter that otherwise
Speaker 1: would end up in a river or landfill. Kickstarter campaign
Speaker 1: raised more than forty thousand Singapore dollars equal to a
Speaker 1: bit over twenty nine thousand in US bunny for more
Speaker 1: than six and eighty contributors. In addition, Singapore based tied
Speaker 1: Or Beer partnered with Graviki Labs for an art campaign
Speaker 1: making air Inc available to artists and cities such as
Speaker 1: Hong Kong, Berlin and London to create murals and other
Speaker 1: public artworks. And yes, air Inc Is available for purchase.
Speaker 1: Though they're not a sponsor of this show. We just
Speaker 1: think they're cool. Since Gravicky Labs has been able to
Speaker 1: clean one point six trillion leaders that's trillion cubic inches
Speaker 1: of air, producing more than one thousand, two hundred liters
Speaker 1: of air inc. But with the Colink device capable of
Speaker 1: customization for larger applications including factory smokestacks and capturing particulates
Speaker 1: directly from the air, those numbers should only increase. Charma
Speaker 1: and his colleagues could then scale up to tackle industrial
Speaker 1: applications including inkjet printers, textiles, and publishing. As inventors and entrepreneurs,
Speaker 1: the Graviki Labs team would be able to breathe a
Speaker 1: little easier, and so would we. Today's episode was written
Speaker 1: by Jim Marion and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff
Speaker 1: is a production of Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For
Speaker 1: more in this lots of other topics, visit our home
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