Photo by Kevin Dooley
It’s pretty clear that many of China’s cities have a problem with pollution. Case in point: as I write this, the current air quality index (AQI) is rated “unhealthy” in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, and a number of other Chinese cities. You can beat the smog by moving to the countryside, or by wearing a mask and buying an air filter. Or, if you’re feeling particularly lazy, you can beat it by buying fresh air online.
Chinese state media agency Xinhua recently reported that hundreds of cans of bottled sea air from Hainan were sold at a trade expo, but of course there’s an online market for bottled air, too. On Taobao, for example, you can buy air from a variety of firms.
There’s no benefit to breathing bottled air
But the sales winner, with dozens of bottles sold in the past month, is a Canadian startup called Vitality Air. Vitality Air claims to offer air from the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and it’s apparently pretty good – a single 8L bottle of it will cost you US$20 on Taobao. Vitality Air also has its own website, and it claims to have shipped thousands of bottles of air to China already.
Of course, there’s no actual benefit to breathing bottled air unless you’re willing to spend an absolute fortune. The average human breathes about 8L of air every minute. That means that to replace your Chinese air intake with fresh Rocky Mountain Vitality Air for just 24 hours, you’d need to spend US$28,800 – enough that you could easily pay to just fly to the Rocky Mountains yourself and spend a few days there.
Still, some Chinese buyers are apparently enjoying it. “I just tried a bit, and it’s fresh and clean, although I’ll have to wait and see about the long-term effects,” wrote one Taobao reviewer. “When you spray it a few times, you can really feel the freshness, I’ll keep buying these!” wrote another. Not everyone is sold, though. “Other than rust, it doesn’t smell like anything,” wrote a less satisfied customer.
Perhaps the most astute review: “It’s so light, almost like there’s nothing inside[.]”
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