Johnnie Walker Used Ink From Air Pollution for Special Black Labels

It’s time to add some new Johnnie Walker bottles to your collection … if you can find them. Limited-edition Black Label “Keep Walking City Collection” bottles turn pollution into art.

The labels were printed with ink from air pollution via Graviky Labs’ Air-Ink technology. The company captures carbon from chimneys and car exhausts, separates the carbon from remaining waste, and mixes it with a polymer and a solvent to create a black ink.

Targeting a Gen Z audience that, according to research, relates more to their city than their country, bottles depicting Warsaw, Madrid, Bangkok, Delhi and Istanbul launched the campaign, with additional cities debuting next year. Gives a new meaning to “made in.”

“We were approached by Johnnie Walker’s innovation team, who wanted a project to introduce the brand to the next generation of whisky drinkers, drawing people closer to the global brand at a local level,” says Rory Harker, associate creative director at Bulletproof, the agency behind the campaign. “But in terms of what this actually looked like, we were given a lot of freedom.”

Bulletproof also teamed up with local artists to create murals from Air-Ink throughout each city: Alek Morawski of Warsaw, Okuda San Miguel of Madrid, Shilo Shiv Suleman from Delhi, Mr Hure of Istanbul and Gongkan from Bangkok.

Click the images to enlarge:

“We chose graffiti artists because street art is typically seen as something that makes cities dirtier,” Harker tells Muse. “We wanted to subvert that and highlight the artistic talent behind it. When it came to the actual artists, they had to be from the city, truly, to give the work its local authenticity. But also, their work had to translate well in a purely black-and-white aesthetic. We found a lot of artists whose work we loved but their style relied heavily on color and therefore wasn’t right for this project.”

A run of 2,500 bottles was created for each market and sold out within days.