COURTESY CNN
Is imported air the solution to China’s smog problem?
A Canadian company selling air bottled in a ski resort says it’s now seeing huge demand from Chinese customers.
Vitality Air said that the first batch of 500 canisters filled with fresh air from the Rocky Mountain town of Banff went on sale in China last month and sold out within two weeks.
“Now we’re taking lots of pre orders for our upcoming shipment. We’re getting close to the 1,000 mark,” said Harrison Wang, director of China operations.
The air sells for $14 to $20, depending on the size of the canister.
Northern China is often cloaked in smog, especially during the cold winter months when homes and power plants burn coal to keep warm. Last week, Beijing issued its first ever red alert because of poor air quality, closing schools and restricting traffic.
Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam says he came up with the business idea last year after listing a bag of ziplocked air on eBay, which sold for 99 cents.
“We wanted to do something fun and disruptive so we decided to see if we could sell air.”
Lam, who is based in the city of Edmonton, says he makes the four-hour journey to Banff once every couple of weeks and spends 10 hours bottling the air.
“It’s time consuming because every one of these bottles is hand bottled. We’re dealing with fresh air, we want it to be fresh and we don’t want to run it through machines which are oiled and greased,” said Lam.
Sales in Canada are mainly for novelty value, says Lam, but in China people believe it has a real functional purpose.
“In North America, we take our fresh air for granted but in China the situation is very different.”
Wallace Leung, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told CNN that buying bottles of air was not a practical solution to China’s air pollution.
“We need to filter out the particles, the invisible killers, from the air,” said Leung, who conducts research on the effectiveness of face masks.
“One bottle of air wouldn’t help. I would be very cautious.”
But Lam says his company’s products are more than a gimmick.
“If China can import food, water, why shouldn’t they have the right to import air?”
“Our first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” co-founder Moses Lam says in a telephone interview with the Telegraph.
A crate containing 4,000 more bottles is making its way to China, but he says most of that shipment has been bought.
A 7.7 Litre can of crisp air taken from Banff National Park in the majestic Rocky Mountains range sells for roughly 100 yuan (£10), which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China.
Most of their customers live in big cities in the northeastern and southern parts of China where severe pollution warnings have become a common occurence.
State news agency Xinhua has posted a picture online of the city centre barely visible under a thick soup of smog on Tuesday and reflects local frustrations with the caption: “Heavy smog hit China, again!”
This comes just over a week after Beijing issued a red alert for pollutionthat forced half of the cars off the roads.
The Canadian company is not the first to sell fresh air to the Chinese.
Last year, Beijing artist Liang Kegang fetched the equivalent of £512 for a glass jar filled with air taken from a business trip in southern France.
In 2013, multimillionaire Chen Guangbiao sold pop-sized cans of air purportedly taken from less industrialised regions of China for 5 yuan (£0.50) each.
Vitality Air’s Mr Lam admits that he started out the company as a joke as well when he and co-founder Troy Paquette filled a plastic bag of air and sold it for less than 50 pence on the auction site Ebay.
A second bag sold for $160 (£105).
“That’s when we realised there is a market for this,” says Mr Lam.
Vitality Air sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to India and the Middle East. But China remains its biggest overseas market.
The company’s China representative, Harrison Wang, says their customers are mainly affluent Chinese women who buy for their families or give away as gifts. But he says senior homes and even high end night clubs have also stocked up on their product.
“In China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious,” says Mr Wang.
He says a number of distributors have contacted them to sell their products.
Vitality Air’s biggest challenge is to keep up with demand because each bottle of fresh air is filled by hand.
“It’s very labour intensive but we also wanted to make it a very unique and fun product,” says co-founder Mr Lam.
“We may have bit off more than we can chew.”
The growing orders have been a pleasant surprise for him since his friends and family initially mocked the idea of selling something that most Canadians take for granted.
“My parents told me not to quit my day time job,” he says.
So far, Mr Lam has heeded this advice and still holds a bank job in Canada.