Early November this year, Delhi knocked every other city in the world to bag the position of being the world's most polluted city. Pollution from increasing number of vehicles, dust, farmers burning crop stubble in neighboring states and fire crackers after the festival of Diwali meant the national capital was covered in a thick blanket of toxic smog.
Every parameter to measure pollution, from PM 2.5 to air quality index went off the charts. The World Bank
has pegged the cost of air pollution
globally at $5.11 trillion in welfare losses and an estimated 3 million deaths a year are linked to exposure to outdoor air pollution.
In Delhi, TERI says 35% of the total pollution is due to vehicle tailpipe emissions, road dust and refuse burning. The numbers are frightening and grim, but if Graviky Labs
has its way, pollution from vehicles can be a thing of the past.Dirty business
"Air Pollution Soot includes the fine black particles, chiefly composed of carbon, produced by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. The common trait of soot particles is that they are extremely tiny - 2.5 micrometers or smaller in diameter," says Graviky Labs, Team Lead, Co-founder and Director, Anirudh Sharma
According to Sharma this is smaller than dust and mold, and is about 1/30 the diameter of a human hair. It can travel deep into the lung, where the compounds it consists of can do some serious damage.
"Our research has been around capturing this soot/pollution and re-purposing it to consumer safe inks," says Sharma.Kaalink
was seeded at the Fluid Interfaces Group, MIT Media Lab, Boston and first presented at INK Conference 2013. By 2014, the startup started working on air pollution sensing, control and capture as a tailpipe retrofit. Next year the several chemical processes were evaluated to detoxify the captured particulate matter, and to retain consistency and good flow rates.
"In 2016, Graviky Labs was incorporated and we started our real world pilots. We started the Air-ink campaign held in Hong Kong in partnership with Tiger. Artists and environmentalists around the world supported the idea," says Sharma. The first video was launched and it became a rage with 2.5 million views in 10 days. The startups soon saw 1,000 plus commercial enquiries.
Sharma says the startup uses proprietary technology, Kaalink, to capture soot emitted from vehicles. "Kaalink is a contraption retrofitted to the exhaust pipe of vehicles to capture the outgoing pollutants. This does not affect vehicle/engine performance. Soot collected by Kaalink undergoes various proprietary processes to remove heavy metals and carcinogens. The end product is purified carbon based pigment. In the final stage, the carbon is taken through another chemical process to make different types of inks and paints," says Sharma.
The journey has not been easy for the co-founders as each stage had its own challenges. "Right from figuring the optimum technique for harvesting pollution from vehicles, the challenges of operating under different climate conditions with different types of exhaust pipes, removal of heavy metals, dealing with carcinogens and then optimising product mix for the development of a variety of inks and paints," says Sharma.
Graviky says 30ml of ink it makes arrests air pollution equal to about 45 minutes of car emissions. "Over 2,500 hours worth of vehicular air pollution harvested from already plying vehicle," says Sharma.