© Ebay, UK
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.
However, selling bottled air has become a craze, particularly among the Chines 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 clamming 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.
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