Source: AFP
It may look like an innocent green plant, but its name suggests something much closer to a robot or an interstellar rocket.
Neo Px is an industrial plant capable of cleaning indoor air on an unprecedented scale, the first in a potentially long line of such supercharged organisms.
“It’s equivalent to up to 30 regular houseplants in terms of air purification,” said Lionel Mora, co-founder of startup Neoplants.
“It will not only capture, but also remove and recycle, some of the most harmful pollutants you can find indoors.”
Five years ago, the entrepreneur met Patrick Torbey, a genome editing researcher who dreamed of creating living organisms “with functions”.
“There were plants around us, and we thought the most powerful function we could add to them was to clean the air,” Mora said, during a tour of a rental greenhouse in Lodi, California, two hours from San Francisco. .
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Protected from the elements, several thousand modified pothos plants, speckled green with white, awaited their turn to be potted, packed and shipped.
The French startup began selling its first products in the United States in April.
The United States was a promising first market, as many Americans already widely use air purifiers.
“We’re doing our best to send as many plants as possible each week, but it’s not enough to meet the demand right now,” Mora said.
Fires
Source: AFP
Americans strongly value cleaner air, given all the recent “issues related to wildfires,” which have become an “increasingly” problem in the country, Mora said.
“One of the pollutants that comes from combustion is benzene, which we are targeting,” he added.
Indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, primarily due to VOCs, or VOCs.
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VOCs are gaseous pollutants that can accumulate indoors and negatively affect air quality and health.
Opening windows won’t help much because VOC pollution can come from solvents, adhesives and paints, and therefore could be hidden in cleaning products, furniture and walls.
“These chemicals are linked to a number of adverse health effects, including cancer,” especially for the young, the elderly and people who are already vulnerable, said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. .
“They can cause respiratory-related effects or reproductive health effects … such as adverse pregnancy outcomes, premature birth, miscarriages, as well as neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease,” he said.
Neo Px does not absorb chemicals by itself. The plant is sold at the starting price of $120 in powder packets containing a microbiome, essentially a bacterial strain.
“This bacterium colonizes the roots, the soil and the leaves of the plant,” said Torbey, the company’s chief technology officer, at its research lab in Saint-Ouen, France, just outside Paris.
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Bacteria powder
Source: AFP
The bacteria “absorbs the VOCs to grow and reproduce. The plant is there to create that ecosystem for the bacteria. So we have a symbiotic system between plants and bacteria,” he said.
In the future, Neoplants plans to produce genetically modified plants whose metabolism will directly do the work of cleaning the air.
And in the long run, he hopes to tackle problems linked to global warming.
“We could increase the ability of trees to sequester CO2,” Torbey said.
Or “grow seeds that are more drought tolerant,” Mora added.
Their vision, combined with the team’s scientific expertise, led Google product manager Vincent Nallatamby to invest in the startup from the ground up.
Now he has his own bacteria-enhanced pothos plant, which sits unnoticed in his San Francisco living room, already filled with houseplants of all sizes.
“It’s more my wife who takes care of them, besides her. That’s me!” he joked pointing to his Neo Px.
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“I often get carried away by the tech stuff and want to bring it home,” he said.
“That was one of the first times I didn’t have a hard time convincing my wife.”
Source: AFP