{"id":175055,"date":"2015-12-17T08:43:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-17T08:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=175055"},"modified":"2015-12-17T08:47:24","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T08:47:24","slug":"chinese-buy-up-bottles-of-fresh-air-from-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=175055","title":{"rendered":"Chinese buy up bottles of fresh air from Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Canadian start-up company bottling fresh air from the Rocky Mountains has seen sales to China soar because of rising pollution levels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vitality Air was founded last year in the western Canadian city of Edmonton but began selling in China less than two months ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cOur first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were sold in four days,\u201d co-founder Moses Lam says in a telephone interview with the Telegraph.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A crate containing 4,000 more bottles is making its way to China, but he says most of that shipment has been bought.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Banff<\/span><\/p>\n

Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada<\/span>\u00a0 Photo: Alamy<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A 7.7 Litre can of crisp air taken from Banff National Park in the majestic Rocky Mountains range sells for roughly 100 yuan (\u00a310), which is 50 times more expensive than a bottle of mineral water in China.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Choking smog more than 50 times health guidelines blankets China<\/p>\n

Most of their customers live in big cities in the northeastern and southern parts of China where severe pollution warnings have become a common occurence.<\/p>\n

State news agency Xinhua has posted a picture online of the city centre barely visible under a thick soup of smog on Tuesday and reflects local frustrations with the caption: \u201cHeavy smog hit China, again!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Canadian company is not the first to sell fresh air to the Chinese.<\/p>\n

Last year, Beijing artist Liang Kegang fetched the equivalent of \u00a3512 for a glass jar filled with air taken from a business trip in southern France.<\/p>\n

\"Beijing<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2013, multimillionaire Chen Guangbiao sold pop-sized cans of air purportedly taken from less industrialised regions of China for 5 yuan (\u00a30.50) each.<\/p>\n

Vitality Air\u2019s Mr Lam admits that he started out the company as a joke as well when he and co-founder Troy Paquette filled a plastic bag of air and sold it for less than 50 pence on the auction site Ebay.<\/p>\n

A second bag sold for $160 (\u00a3105).<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s when we realised there is a market for this,\u201d says Mr Lam.<\/p>\n

Vitality Air sells bottled fresh air and oxygen across North America, to India and the Middle East. But China remains its biggest overseas market.<\/p>\n

The company’s China representative, Harrison Wang, says their customers are mainly affluent Chinese women who buy for their families or give away as gifts. But he says senior homes and even high end night clubs have also stocked up on their product.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn China fresh air is a luxury, something so precious,\u201d says Mr Wang.<\/p>\n

He says a number of distributors have contacted them to sell their products.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very labour intensive but we also wanted to make it a very unique and fun product,\u201d says co-founder Mr Lam.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may have bit off more than we can chew.\u201d<\/p>\n

The growing orders have been a pleasant surprise for him since his friends and family initially mocked the idea of selling something that most Canadians take for granted.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents told me not to quit my day time job,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

So far, Mr Lam has heeded this advice and still holds a bank job in Canada.<\/p>\n

This comes just over a week after Beijing issued a red alert for pollutionthat forced half of the cars off the roads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Vitality Air\u2019s biggest challenge is to keep up with demand because each bottle of fresh air is filled by hand.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
–<\/div>\n
Source: The Telegraph<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Canadian start-up company bottling fresh air from the Rocky Mountains has seen sales to China soar because of rising pollution levels. Vitality Air was founded last year in the western Canadian city of Edmonton but began selling in China less than two months ago. \u201cOur first shipment of 500 bottles of fresh air were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":175058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-175055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-togbe-afede-xiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/175058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}