Turning the Air into Perfume – The New York Times


Carbon emissions, a bad byproduct of many industries, are the greenhouse gas most responsible for climate change. Emissions play an important role in our extreme weather patterns and in many of the more common environmental disasters.

While preventing carbon dioxide from being freely vented into the atmosphere turns into a very lengthy negotiation between our world leaders, capturing and reusing it is another option. And this alternative has proven promising by the four-year-old Air Company, which uses carbon dioxide in all the products it creates. His latest creation is a perfume – Air Eau de Parfum – and the first fragrance made largely from air.

The perfume contains an alcohol base, which when combined with some water and a measured proportion of fragrance oil, becomes juice that you spray on your pulse points to exude the aroma you desire. Ethyl alcohol (or ethanol) is most commonly used because it is inexpensive, smells neutral, and evaporates quickly, thus acting as an efficient delivery vehicle for fragrance oil.

What Air Company can do is convert carbon dioxide into a very pure form of ethanol. And with the addition of water and fragrance oil, you get perfume made mainly of air.

“We believe products are one of the best ways to educate people about a much bigger story, and that story is climate change,” said Gregory Constantine, the company’s founder and CEO, via email. “When you can create tangible products, it’s easier for people to understand the power of technology and what we can do with our carbon conversion technology.”

This technology was developed by Stafford Sheehan, founder and chief technology officer of Air Company. After the meeting in 2017, Dr. Sheehan and Mr. Constantine have teamed up to transform the most abundant greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) into products that are not harmful to the planet.

Air Eau de Parfum is the company’s third consumer product. It started with alcoholic beverages – a vodka in 2019 – and then a disinfectant spray in 2020, the year of sanitizing hands.

The fragrance itself was formulated and blended by Joya Studio, a Brooklyn-based design studio specializing in custom perfumes. Fresh and crunchy, it resembles a ray of sunshine through a cloud, with a hint of mineral sea spray.

If this sounds like the title screen of a BBC nature documentary, that’s the point.

“We wanted to allow people to reconnect with the outdoors and nature, especially after spending so long indoors during the pandemic,” Mr. their technology. Think of these elements as the scent signature of the brand.

If you’re looking for a more traditional scent distribution, the juice has top notes of fig leaf and orange peel, middle notes of jasmine, violet and freshwater, and base notes of powdery musk and tobacco.

Fragrance is not marketed to a specific gender. Available for pre-order at: aircompany.com It’s $220 for 50 milliliters, and the company plans to ship in early 2022.

The Air Company is what Mr. Constantine calls “source independent,” meaning it gets its CO2 from multiple suppliers in addition to directly capturing air. One of these partners is an industrial alcohol factory in New York that collects carbon dioxide (which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere) from fermentation processes. This CO2 is cooled, pressurized, liquefied and packaged in tanks before being delivered to one of the Air Company’s Air Innovation facilities in Brooklyn.

Mr. Constantine explained that a bottle of Air Eau de Parfum uses around 56 grams of CO2, resulting in a net environmental removal of 36 grams in production processes, including life cycle emissions of renewable electricity, production equipment and carbon dioxide capture.

As fun as environmentally sustainable spirits and perfumes may be, it could be argued that they are not perhaps their most beneficial use for this technological innovation. Still, Air Company has bigger ambitions.

“The opportunities to exploit carbon emissions are as big and broad as we would like them to be,” said Mr. Constantine, adding that the company is working with industrial partners to push its technology to more global targets for much greater impact.

Air Company wins NASA conversion contest By successfully converting carbon dioxide to sugar in 2019, and the company hopes to help develop a carbon-free jet fuel that can replace liquid methane, a non-reusable fossil fuel.

“We understand that our climate impact is still somewhat small, but if we applied our technology to all viable industries, we would have reduced global CO2 emissions by just over 10 percent for a single technology,” said Mr. Constantine.



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