This device doesn’t just suck soot out of the air—it repurposes the stuff as printer toner.

Anirudh Sharma, co-leader of a student-run science lab at MIT, has invented something called Kaala, a device that adds alcohol and oil to polluted air and creates printer ink.

The idea first came to him while channeling childhood memories.

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“(It was) a minor itch that led me to build something cool from observations arising from nostalgia of the days back in India,” he said on the device’s website. “There’s so much soot/pollution around us, in crowded cities. What if the same could be repurposed to generate ink for printers?”

Sharma, a Masters student and Research Assistant at the Fluid Interfaces Group, also wrote that he believes the model makes good business sense for existing ink providers.

“Companies like HP/Canon make 70 percent of their profits by selling these cartridges at 400% margin.”

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Sharma is basically an unstoppable force of human innovation.

He won the ‘Innovator of the Year’ award from the MIT Tech Review TR35 for his work designing footwear to provide the visually impaired better mobility, by connecting insoles to your smartphone via bluetooth that will guide you hands free.

(WATCH the video below to see how ink is made) Photo: Kaala video

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