Via anirudh.me: 

Black printing ink is one of the most consumed products in the industry. Most of this printing ink is produced in factories with complex chemical procedures. Companies like HP/Canon make 70 percent of their profits by selling these cartridges at 400% margin.

This is not an attempt to win over the pollution. Just a minor itch that led me to build something cool from observations arising from nostalgia of the days back in India.

There’s so much soot/pollution around us, esp. in crowded cities. What if the same could be repurposed to generate ink for printers? 

Rubbing alcohol+oil substrate+soot= lowtech non-uniform ink

For printing we assembled a  Nicolas’ ink shield with arduino interfaced with our Soot-catcher pump design. This shield allows you to connect a HP C6602 inkjet cartridge to your Arduino turning it into a 96dpi print platform. It only uses 5 pins which can be jumper selected to avoid other shields.