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The lack of quality air problems seen in Mel Brooks’ spoof film Spaceballs are a reality in China, but now a company is bottling up air and shipping it to the polluted country. Vitality Air bottles air from Banff and Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada, and sells three liters for $19 Canadian or about $13.63 USD.
A restaurant in Zhangjiangang, China, recently started adding a one yuan ($0.15 USD) air purification surcharge to customers’ bills to subsidize the cost of a new air filtration system. A recent study by nonprofit Berkley Earth found that air pollution was responsible for 4,000 deaths daily in China.
Vitality Air captures that Rocky Mountain freshness and bottles it "without contamination." So far, the company started with 500 sample bottles, but found demand for another 4,000 bottles. Already, Chinese fans pre-purchased 1,000 of those bottles.
CNN reports that Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam "came up with the business idea last year after listing a bag of ziplocked air on eBay, which sold for 99 cents." Once a week, he travels to Banff and Lake Louise to hand-bottle air for 10 hours.
