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EDMONTON — The 1676 English comedy The Virtuoso featured the ridiculous premise of a discerning gentleman bottling air from across England to store in his wine cellar.

“Most certainly the world is very foolish not to snuff up bottled air as they drink bottled drink,” says one of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack’s guests after cracking open a bottle of air from the English town of Bury.

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In the 1987 film Spaceballs, President Skroob indulges in cans of “Perri-air” after wasting all the air on his home planet. In 2012’s The Lorax, an industrialist destroys the natural world in order to commodify breathable air.

And now, inevitably, canned air is real. An Edmonton company has become the first to sell Rocky Mountain air for export.

“A gag gift, that’s how it started off, but you know what? There’s actually a lot of demand for this in … highly polluted countries,” said Moses Lam, founder of Vitality Air.

The concept started when Lam sold a bag of fresh Canadian air on eBay for 99 cents. And when a second bag bidded up to $168 “we thought ‘hey, we might have a market for this.’”