Ink is all around us, particularly if you're a sketch-happy designer. And I remember reading that ballpoint pens all use non-toxic ink, so I never thought there was any health concerns involving ink. However, researchers Scott Fulbright and Steve Albers feel that there may be, and that there certainly are environmental concerns:

Regular ink has a problem that most people don't know about: It's dirty, dirty stuff. Most colored pigments found in regular ink are made up of heavy metals like cadmium, copper, chromium, iron, lead, and aluminum.

Carbon black is the most common pigment used in black inks. It's most commonly made from of the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products such as tar; that's right, TAR! It's a product that is labeled as carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Ink isn't only made of pigments, a considerable amount of ink is made up of binders, carriers, and solvents. Most carriers are petroleum oil, while most solvents used in inks are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), all of which have detrimental human and environmental impacts.

That being the case, Fulbright and Albers—who cut their teeth developing algae for biofuels at Colorado State University en route to earning PhD's—started a company called Living Ink Technologies, for the purpose of creating ecologically-responsible, algae-based ink. And what they've developed comes with a twist or two:

I like the idea of ink coming from algae rather than heavy metals, though I can't see a practical application for disappearing/reappearing ink. Actually, scratch that--if we can figure out how to get this stuff into our fellow renderers' markers, ideally before a presentation, I see an entertainingly prank-filled future!

The Living Ink Kickstarter campaign is here, and has handily surpassed their $15,000 goal with 27 large at press time. There's still over a month left, for pranksters seeking to get in on it.