In this segment, we look at business-themed documentaries, biopics, podcasts and TedTalks that are worth your time in the weekend.
Anirudh Sharma
Chennai:
Sharma says, “Most of the black ink that we use conventionally is produced by burning fossil fuels in factories. Carbon black is used to make black inks that we use on an everyday basis. But given that millions of litres of fossil fuels are already being burned out there by our cars and our engines, what if you could capture that pollution and use it to recycle and make those inks?”
When Sharma decided to give this experiment a shot, he went back to his lab back in Boston and conducted a small experiment. He burnt a candle and built this contraption that would suck in the candle soot, mixed it with some vegetable oil and vodka. The rudimentary form of ink resultant from that mixture would go into a cartridge, and one could print with it.”
He tells us, “After much work on the lab-level research, we got an offer from a big corporation to do a very big trial of this idea. Now the team’s goal is to create a company that can actually make some money. He sums up by saying, “We can’t claim that our ink will solve the world’s pollution problem. But it does show what can be done if you look at this problem slightly differently.”
When it comes to the question of saving the world, there are a few innovators who are in a league of their own. Anirudh Sharma happens to be one of them.
His brainwave – to counter the fallout of unending air and water pollution and hopefully save the environment, involved using pollutants, or rather residual pollutant particles to create ink, that can be used in everything from markers to printers to sketch pens. At his Ted Talk, audiences got an exposure into his creative process and the rather humble beginnings that inspired his start-up. He begins with a rather alarming statistic - Every year, more than four to five million people die due to exposure to outdoor air pollution around the world. He goes on to show us a petridish that contains approximately 20 minutes worth of pollution captured off a pyrolysis plant. These PM 2.5 particles are so tiny that our lungs – our bodies cannot filter them, and they end up staying in our bodies – ailing us with asthma and lung cancer if not treated at the right time.
Sharma says, “Most of the black ink that we use conventionally is produced by burning fossil fuels in factories. Carbon black is used to make black inks that we use on an everyday basis. But given that millions of litres of fossil fuels are already being burned out there by our cars and our engines, what if you could capture that pollution and use it to recycle and make those inks?”
When Sharma decided to give this experiment a shot, he went back to his lab back in Boston and conducted a small experiment. He burnt a candle and built this contraption that would suck in the candle soot, mixed it with some vegetable oil and vodka. The rudimentary form of ink resultant from that mixture would go into a cartridge, and one could print with it.”
He tells us, “After much work on the lab-level research, we got an offer from a big corporation to do a very big trial of this idea. Now the team’s goal is to create a company that can actually make some money. He sums up by saying, “We can’t claim that our ink will solve the world’s pollution problem. But it does show what can be done if you look at this problem slightly differently.”
SOURCE: ted.com/talks/anirudh_sharma_ink_made_out_of_air_pollution
SYNOPSIS: What if we could capture pollution in the air around us and turn it into something useful? Inventor Anirudh Sharma shares how he created AIR-INK, a deep black ink that’s made from PM 2.5 pollution. See how the inventor and the founder of Graviky Labs, an MIT Media Labs spin-off, hacked together a clever way to capture these tiny particles, and make the world just a little bit cleaner in the process. Sharma’s interest lies in deep-tech, science-based social entrepreneurship
SYNOPSIS: What if we could capture pollution in the air around us and turn it into something useful? Inventor Anirudh Sharma shares how he created AIR-INK, a deep black ink that’s made from PM 2.5 pollution. See how the inventor and the founder of Graviky Labs, an MIT Media Labs spin-off, hacked together a clever way to capture these tiny particles, and make the world just a little bit cleaner in the process. Sharma’s interest lies in deep-tech, science-based social entrepreneurship