Beijing: Making money off the intense and hovering air pollution issues, a Canadian start-up company bottling fresh air from the Rocky Mountains has seen sales to China soar. Vitality Air was founded last year in the Edmonton, but began selling to China less than two months ago. “Our first shipmen of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,” co-founder Moses Lam said. With a crate containing 4,000 more bottles on its way to the Asian country, Lam says most of the shipment has already been brought.
A 7.7 Litre can of crisp air taken from Banff National Park in the majestic Rocky Mountains range sells for roughly 100 yuan (£10), which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China. Most of their customers live in big cities in the northeastern and southern parts of China where severe pollution warnings have become a common occurrence. However, the Canadian company is not the first to sell fresh air to the Chinese. Last year, Beijing artist Liang Kegang fetched the equivalent of £512 for a glass jar filled with air taken from a business trip in southern France.
Lam said he started out the company as a joke as well when he and co-founder Troy Paquette filled a plastic bag of air and sold it for less than 50 pence on the auction site Ebay. A second bag sold for £105. “That’s when we realised there is a market for this,” Lam said. Vitality Air sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to India and the Middle East. But China remains its biggest overseas market. The company's China representative, Harrison Wang, said their customers are mainly affluent Chinese women who buy for their families or give away as gifts. But he says senior homes and even high end night clubs have also stocked up on their product. “In China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious,” Wang said.
The company finds trouble keeping up with the constant demand as every bottle is filled with hand. “It's very labour intensive but we also wanted to make it a very unique and fun product. We may have bit off more than we can chew,” he said.
