Company Sells Bottles Of Fresh Air To China And Is Struggling To Keep Up With Demand [1]

Source: www.ecowatch.com [2] | Original Post Date: December 19, 2015 –

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Reminiscent of a scene out of Space Balls [4] (Perri-Air anyone?), a Canadian startup, Vitality Air [5], is selling bottled air from the Rocky Mountains. It may have started out as a joke, but citizens of smog-choked cities in eastern China are buying it up.

@vitalityair [6] sells fresh Banff air to smog sufferers. No, this isn't Spaceballs. https://t.co/SF9PMki1sw [7] pic.twitter.com/HeIVYqkLeB [8]

— CBC-The Current (@TheCurrentCBC)

“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,” co-founder Moses Lam told the Canadian National Post [9]. The company was founded by Lam and Troy Paquette more than a year ago, but only began selling in China less than two months ago.

The idea came when Lam sold a bag of fresh Canadian air on eBay for 99 cents. That’s steep enough for something that most people have always considered free. But when a second bag bidded up to $168 “we thought ‘hey, we might have a market for this,’” Lam said.