How our dirty air is inspiring innovation

Domestic air purifiers were almost unheard of a decade or so ago but with air quality plummeting across cities, it’s become the new gotta-have-it home appliance. This rising demand has also inspired a lot of innovation, be it on Indian campuses or in the R&D labs of global appliance giants.
Engineer-turned-entrepreneur Ravi Kaushik, who grew up in Delhi and saw the city’s air take a turn for the worse every winter, says he was surprised to find that even people who owned purifiers hardly ever turned them on. “If you ask people with air purifiers how often they use it, it’s mostly for two months of the year. Say you enter a room, you first turn on the light and then some kind of ventilation like an AC or fan,” says the 29-year-old CEO of Airth. As most people are loath to turn on yet another device, his idea was to incorporate access to cleaner air into air conditioners themselves. Airth’s filters can be attached via velcro to split ACs, making one’s air conditioner act like an air purifier. He describes the product as a topi (cap) you put on your AC. While the idea was born when he was studying environmental engineering at IIT-Bombay, it was developed at IIT Kanpur & IISc Bangalore, and now retails on e-commerce sites at a price of around Rs 3,000-4,000.
Urban Air Labs is a Delhi-based startup that has developed a more sustainable plant-based alternative to mechanical purifiers. Co-founder Sanjay Maurya says, “Mechanical purifiers are a quick fix solution. But their filters get clogged and they have to be thrown away, at which point it becomes someone else’s problem. It didn’t seem right that you’re creating a new set of problems to solve another one,” he says, pointing out that it would take almost 40 years for HEPA filters to naturally degrade.
In response to this, the startup worked on developing a plant-based alternative. “Plant-based air cleaning is something that’s being studied in multiple universities abroad and Indian traditional knowledge suggests the use of tulsi or peepal trees for this purpose. We tested this out and found that while plants do clean the air, the process is very passive. So, you’d need about 100 plants to clean the air of even a small room,” Maurya says.
The question then became about how one can magnify this natural ability. After years of R&D, they developed products called UBreathe. Essentially, you plug a plant (they have a list of 10-odd plants that’ll do the trick) into their machine and it absorbs polluted air from the surroundings and releases clean air. Their technology, backed by IIT Roorkee and Kanpur, and tested in IIT-Kanpur’s air purification lab, is currently pending a patent. They retail three sizes of products, the smallest costs Rs 3,500 and the largest retails for Rs 40,000.
Large conglomerates are also racing to come up with better ways to clean the air though their devices are priced higher. Philips, which already sells a range of purifiers, has come up with a mask that is a portable purifier. It is battery-powered with a built-in fan that leads to constant circulation and is priced around Rs 7,000. Dyson has put a purifier within headphones that cancels noise and pollution but with a stiff price tag of Rs 59,900. It can monitor AQI with the added bonus of looking like something out of Batman.


Dyson products undergo a POLAR (Point Loading Auto Response) test, says Ian Brough, Head of Category, Environmental Care Engineering. “It mimics a real living room environment within tightly controlled, scientifically robust conditions to ensure the machines are capable of thorough, even, full-room purification, instead of relying on small lab tests as seen in some industry standards. This guarantees that purified air is effectively projected to every corner of even large living rooms.”

Airth’s AC filters, which have been validated by CSIR-IMTECH and are now being incubated at Centre for Medical Innovation & Entrepreneurship at AIIMS, have been selling well, even in months when AQI is not severe. Kaushik says they were surprised when orders came in from cities in Kerala and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu where the air is nowhere as bad as the metros. “A lot of people in south India use our filters to tackle dust. One customer told us that they use a mosquito net that his wife would clean monthly and now, after four months of using Airth, no cleaning is required,” he says.
Another startup is Nanoclear, which specialises in nanofiber technology to tackle dirty air. Founder Prateek Sharma claims their devices can filter out the smallest of pollutants like PM 10, PM 2.5, pollen, dust and mites. “We have a number of products. The first one we launched was the nasofilter, a wearable air purifier that sticks inside the nose,” he says. They use this technology to create mesh filters for ACs and windows as well.
The market has seen some fluctuation in recent years, he admits. “After three years of R&D, we launched in 2018. It did very well during Covid, when we adapted the product to also filter out bacteria and viruses. But after Covid, people felt fed up with protective gear,” he says. So, while sales surged during pollution season, they plateaued the rest of the year. That is partially why they’ve used this technology to create a product they hope is evergreen — cigarette filters that claim to help people quit smoking. “We have three categories of filters— one filters out 30% of the tar in a cigarette, the next does 50% and the last one filters out 80% of tar and nicotine. This is now our top-selling product,” he says.
Maurya says the long-term goal is to create an air wellness space, with pollution only being one part of it. Being able to control the air in our surroundings — whether to prevent allergies or to repel mosquitos — can be a broader category.
And while all this anti-pollution tech is great for those who can afford it, the truth is that it still won’t make the air outside our homes and offices any cleaner.