As Beijing continues to suffer from a worsening smog problem, Canadian startup company Vitality Air has cashed in by selling “fresh clean air” from Banff National Park for $10-$20 a bottle. 
 
 The air pollution has reached a critical level in Beijing, forcing the city to invoke its first-ever red alert, closing schools and factories. Restrictions to keep half the city's vehicles off the road have also been imposed. 
 
 As news of the red alert spread, the company took to Twitter to offer up their products. 
 
 China declared red alert for #smog. Need a breath of fresh air? Check out our products! #ChinaSmog pic.twitter.com/9wPWH090Ol — Vitality Air (@vitalityair) December 8, 2015 
 
 (MORE: The Worst Cities For Air Pollution) 
 
 Moses Lam and his business partner Troy Paquette founded Vitality Air in November 2014 after selling a plastic baggie of air on eBay. 
 
 "Literally we waved it [around] and then we sealed it up and taped it up," Lam told the Herald. 
 
 That first bag sold after a month for only 99 cents, but a second one earned them $168 US, and suddenly the idea of selling the crisp, clean air of the Canadian Rockies didn’t seem so crazy. 
 
 The store offers two types of “Bottled Goodness,” pure oxygen and air bottled straight from the shores of Lake Louise and other areas of Banff. Lam says that the process has been refined a bit since those first Zip Loc bags, the Edmonton Sun reports. 
 
 Vitality Air China representative Harrison Wang says that their main customers are affluent Chinese women who purchase the cans for their families or to give away as gifts, according to The Telegraph. Senior homes and even nightclubs have also bought up some of the product. 
 
 Cans range from containing up to 80 breaths to upwards of 200 breaths. ||||| There may not be an air shortage — as in Mel Brooks’ 1987 classic, “Spaceballs” — but that hasn't stopped one Canadian company from selling canned air to pollution-wary Chinese citizens. 
 
 Vitality Air is cashing in on the smog crisis in China by selling canisters of fresh, clean air from the Rocky Mountains to the country — and the Chinese are eating it up. 
 
 The company was born out of a jocular experiment in November 2014, when a group of friends wanted to see if a bag of air would sell online. 
 
 CHINA ORDERS KIDS STAY INSIDE AS SMOG REACHES TOXIC LEVELS 
 
 A Canadian company is taking the lead from the 1987 Mel Brooks film, "Spaceballs," by selling canned air to heavily polluted countries like China. (Jason Cressey/Youtube) 
 
 “We were sort of goofing around and said, ‘What the hell, let's throw it on eBay and see what happens,’ and lo and behold it sold,” Moses Lam, the co-founder of the company, told the Daily News. 
 
 “We knew we had a little bit of a venture here.” 
 
 The company has been in business for six months, and sells just two products: Cans of air and cans of oxygen. 
 
 The cans of oxygen, the company's co-founder said, are primarily sold to North American clients — like fitness buffs, who need fuel for their muscles, people nursing hangovers, or truckers who struggle to stay awake on the road. 
 
 The business boasts sales of about 400 oxygen canisters per month without any advertising, according to Lam. 
 
 Oxygen in a can by Vitality Air. (via vitalityair.com) 
 
 The fresh air, however, is specifically targeted towards heavily polluted regions like China, India and Dubai. 
 
 Detrimental levels of smog and pollution have blanketed China for months — and the enterprising company saw an opportunity to provide the people with what they no longer had at their disposal. 
 
 On Dec. 7, Beijing issued a red alert over air pollution and sales of the products have skyrocketed. 
 
 A sample order of 500 bottles sold out across China in just a week and a half, according to Lam. 
 
 “Air is something so ordinary but also something so precious to some in other parts of the world,” Harrison Wang, the company's China representative, told the News. 
 
 “We're trying to inject a bit of freshness into people's lives (in China), where they just don't have the access and the luxury of having fresh air readily available at their fingertips.” 
 
 The company sells air in two sizes: The 7.7 liters for about $15; and the 3 liters for about $11. 
 
 Lam said in order to collect the crisp air into canisters, employees venture to the mountainous region, Banff, in Canada, stay put for about 10 hours and then bring the bottles back to their headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta. 
 
 “It's a very tedious process, and everything is done with care and love — every bottle is pretty much hand-bottled — it goes through an extensive list of quality control checks before it goes out to our customers,” he said. 
 
 Both Lam and Wang admitted that because of this painstaking packaging and production process, the company has fallen short of meeting the inventory demands overseas. 
 
 China declared red alert for #smog. Need a breath of fresh air? Check out our products! #ChinaSmog pic.twitter.com/9wPWH090Ol — Vitality Air (@vitalityair) December 8, 2015 
 
 And that demand stems from an overwhelmingly positive response that the products have garnered from the Chinese population. 
 
 “We don't really advertise our products as a medical device, but people tell us in Beijing, when you're walking around for a whole day, breathing in the polluted air is the equivalent of smoking an entire package of smokes a day,” Lam said. 
 
 “So I think when their bodies are so used to this heavily polluted air, and they get a shot of this fresh air, their body can appreciate it.” 
 
 He also said that pregnant mothers have disclosed that upon breathing in their fresh air, they felt their babies kick for the first time. 
 
 Wang added that they are not raking in a ton of money, since the production cost is extremely high and they are also donating a percentage of the revenue to environmental causes. 
 
 “This is not a bunch of guys coming together to make a killing,” he said. 
 
 And for the skeptics out there, Lam is clearing the air — assuring this is not a ploy to prey on a foolhardy population. 
 
 “It's definitely not a hoax. I don't think this is a play on desperate Chinese people — at the end of the day, people have the right to purchase whatever they want,” he said. 
 
 “We're almost no different than the bottled water industry — you can get water out of a tap in China, but people would rather drink Evian or Dasani or other imported water, so why should air be any different?” ||||| (CNN) Is imported air the solution to China's smog problem? 
 
 A Canadian company selling air bottled in a ski resort says it's now seeing huge demand from Chinese customers. 
 
 "Now we're taking lots of pre orders for our upcoming shipment. We're getting close to the 1,000 mark," said Harrison Wang, director of China operations. 
 
 The air sells for $14 to $20, depending on the size of the canister. 
 
 Northern China is often cloaked in smog, especially during the cold winter months when homes and power plants burn coal to keep warm. Last week, Beijing issued its first ever red alert because of poor air quality, closing schools and restricting traffic. 
 
 JUST WATCHED Time-lapse video shows smog-stricken Beijing Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Time-lapse video shows smog-stricken Beijing 01:50 
 
 Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam says he came up with the business idea last year after listing a bag of ziplocked air on eBay, which sold for 99 cents. 
 
 "We wanted to do something fun and disruptive so we decided to see if we could sell air." 
 
 Lam, who is based in the city of Edmonton, says he makes the four-hour journey to Banff once every couple of weeks and spends 10 hours bottling the air. 
 
 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? This week, Beijing issued its first red alert for hazardous pollution, closing schools, restricting traffic and shutting construction sites. Residents tell CNN what it's like to live in the smog-cloaked city. Hide Caption 1 of 6 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Hide Caption 2 of 6 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Hide Caption 3 of 6 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Hide Caption 4 of 6 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Hide Caption 5 of 6 Photos: Beijing smog: What's it like to breathe the air? Hide Caption 6 of 6 
 
 "It's time consuming because every one of these bottles is hand bottled. We're dealing with fresh air, we want it to be fresh and we don't want to run it through machines which are oiled and greased," said Lam. 
 
 Sales in Canada are mainly for novelty value, says Lam, but in China people believe it has a real functional purpose. 
 
 "In North America, we take our fresh air for granted but in China the situation is very different." 
 
 Wallace Leung, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told CNN that buying bottles of air was not a practical solution to China's air pollution. 
 
 "We need to filter out the particles, the invisible killers, from the air," said Leung, who conducts research on the effectiveness of face masks. 
 
 JUST WATCHED China seizes faulty smog masks Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH China seizes faulty smog masks 04:23 
 
 "One bottle of air wouldn't help. I would be very cautious." 
 
 But Lam says his company's products are more than a gimmick. 
 
 "If China can import food, water, why shouldn't they have the right to import air?"
– It's come to this. Beijing's air pollution has gotten so bad—hitting red alert for the first time ever last week, prompting school and factory closures and restricting traffic for days, reports Weather.com—that some residents are not only staying indoors and wearing masks, they're buying fresh air in canisters from Canada. Vitality Air co-founder Moses Lam tells the New York Daily News that it all started on a whim in November 2014, when friends put a Ziploc baggie of air on eBay to see if it would sell. It did, and they figured if companies can bottle and distribute natural spring water, why not good old-fashioned air, too? Vitality Air was born, and employees began to trek out to the mountains around Banff, Canada, sit around with open bottles for 10 hours, and then head back to headquarters in Edmonton to bottle and mail the goods. They sell 7.7 liters, or as many as 200 breaths of fresh air, for $15, or roughly 100 yuan—which could fetch 50 bottles of mineral water—and recently sold 500 bottles across China in less than two weeks. A professor at Polytechnic University tells CNN that buyers are probably fooling themselves. "We need to filter out the particles, the invisible killers, from the air," he says. "One bottle of air wouldn't help. I would be very cautious." Still, Vitality Air's China rep tells the Telegraph that the company has found a niche market in affluent women, who tend to buy for their families and as gifts for friends. Other customers include nightclubs and retirement homes. The bottles are clearly not considered, ahem, gag gifts. (Check out the latest type of bottled water, infused with fat.)