Why someone would want to breathe in London air, with London’s poor standing in terms of global pollution, is the initial puzzlement. By January 8, 2016, London had taken just one week to reach its pollution target for the whole of the year. This is why selling London air might not be all that it seems.
However, selling bottled air has become a craze, particularly among the Chinese middle-class, under the misapprehension that taking a gulp of air from a jar or can is in some way healthy. As an example, a Canadian company (called Vitality Air), which started out bottling Rocky Mountains air as a joke, has seen its product fly off the shelves in pollution-hit China. Here a 7.7-liter can of air taken from Banff National Park sells for 100 yuan ($15). This is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China.
Cities like Beijing and Shanghai are certainly smog-polluted; however, the short duration and quantity of so-called “clean air” that is taken in would have no long-term health benefit for the person drawing it in. This is if the air, from a particular locale, can be really captured and bottled.
Now adding to the new wave of air-bottling industries, a website has been set up which appears to sell bottled London air — for £20 ($25) per jar. The website, called ‘ShoreditchAir‘, stocks air from some different London regions. According to the Evening Standard, these are: Brixton air, Croydon air, and two varieties of Shoreditch air — morning or afternoon.
This website is not claiming any health benefits. Instead, it seeks to capture the smell of the area, allowing users to have an enriched experience of breathing in the gas combinations from different areas of London.
This threw up two options: either the website was a money-making scheme to export London air; or there was something else going, perhaps a joke or perhaps something else. Checking this out with the website founder Carl Casis over Twitter, it seems Carl Casis put up the website in order to get attention and secure employment. In particular, the young entrepreneur wants to be a Sales Hacker for Shopify and thought the idea of selling London air was the best way to attract attention. Here he told Digital Journal “It was a job application+satire.” He added: “It’s a way for me to prove that I have a good idea and can do marketing and promotion.”
A pretty good dose of satire it was to, for he fooled both the BBC and the main London newspaper, the Evening Standard into swallowing the idea that people might pay high sums for gulps of London’s diesel enriched air.
