(Newswire.net — December 16, 2015) –A Canadian company Vitality Air is selling bottled fresh air from a ski resort in the Rocky
Mountain town of Banff. First batch of 500 canisters filled with fresh air went on sale in China last month and was sold out within two weeks, CNN reported.
“Now we’re taking lots of pre-orders for our upcoming shipment. We’re getting close to the 1.000 canisters”, said Harrison Wang, director of China company that imports fresh air from Canada.
Depending on the size of the canister, Vitality Air sells fresh air anywhere from 14 to 20 dollars.
“I came up with the business idea last year after listing a bag of ziplocked air on eBay, which sold for 99 cents” explains Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam.
“Last month was madness. The site is working at full steam, thanks to online sales, all the stocks we sold almost immediately” said Harrison Wang.
Northern China often has problems with smog, especially during the cold winter months when people use coal to keep warm. Last week, Beijing issued red alert because of air polution. Schools are closed and traffic is restricted. But is imported air a solution to the smog problem?
“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. One bottle of air wouldn’t help. I would be very cautious”, Wallace Leung, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told CNN.
Moses Lam thinks differently.
“If China can import food, water, why shouldn’t they have the right to import air?”, he asked and explained that his company’s products are more than a gimmick.
“I make the four-hour journey to Banff once every couple of weeks and spends 10 hours bottling the air, because every one of these bottles is hand bottled. We want it to be fresh air and we don’t want to run it through machines which are oiled and greased” said Lam.