The Indian startup Chakr Innovations designed a device that cools the exhaust, making it easier to catch particles of soot, and then stores it in a solvent. Clean air comes out the other side, and the soot can later be used to make black ink. Dell, which is printing its packaging in India using the ink, is the first company to use it on a large scale.

Dell senior executive Piyush Bhargava said the company discovered the startup as part of its ongoing search for innovations “where we think there are opportunities for us to take promising, and in some cases nascent, technologies and then bring our playbook and our expertise in terms of what we do well for scaling technologies and our expertise on supply chain”.

The move is part of its circular economy efforts, it has also worked with mushroom-based packaging and collaborated with a designer to make jewellry from gold found in e-waste, and is currently scaling up a programme to make other packaging from plastic that otherwise might have ended up in the ocean.

Dell found that the ink works as well as regular ink and is just as safe. Dell now hopes to use when it prints user guides and other materials, and that it thinks could be used more broadly. “It’s not something that only has limited use and application”, a Dell rep said. “It’s our belief, based on what we’ve seen with Chakr so far, that this has potential for industrial scaling, not just in technology applications or in packaging, but anywhere print is used.”

The ink is already in use to print on textiles.