Hasta La Ideas

Even if you don’t live in a hip neighborhood, art might be in the air. The designers behind the Kaalink pollution filter want to keep airborne carbon out of the atmosphere and back in your sketchbook. Their project, called Air-Ink, is a result of several years of research at MIT’s Media Lab, where the team investigated ways to harness and repurpose particulate matter caused by daily combustion. Even with required filters the world’s cars, stoves, and fires send out loads of extremely harmful pollutants that contribute to smog, environmental degradation, and poor health outcomes. Is it possible to reuse some of that mess before it hits the air?

After a lot of tinkering their solution was the Kaalink filter. It’s an add-on chamber that catches particulate leaving an exhaust pipe without creating dangerous back pressure. The unit catches carbon and other bits left over from incomplete combustion, the particles of which are just one or two micrometers across, and small enough to easily lodge in your lungs for nasty surprises later.

Taking the produced schmutz out of the filter, the team decided to strip out the carbon from the more harmful heavy metals, and convert it for creative use. The carbon is crushed, refined, and processed with traditional solvents to create a deep ink useful for illustration, lettering, and painting. 

The Air-Ink produced is freshly up on Kickstarter and already well over goal for a first production of markers, paints, and screen printing kits. The current campaign is offering 2mm, 15mm, 30mm and 50mm chisel and thin tip markers, as well as a 150ml screen printing ink set, with sights set on oil based paints, fabric paints, and weatherproof options in the future. 

Though the output is averaged, they estimate that going through 30ml of Air-Ink would use 45 minutes worth of pollution output. Bit vague metric, but that’s probably a bit of a gram saved from the city air and streets.

The ink and their markers are said to be safe, refillable, high-quality, and water resistant. While artists tend to have strong feelings about their material choices, they also tend to believe in creative problem solving, and these idealistic pens seem to have breathed some life into green material solutions.