the super plant that tackles air pollution

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 a bioengineered plant capable of purifying indoor air on an unprecedented scale, the first in a long potential line of super-powered organisms.

“It’s the equivalent of 30 classic houseplants in terms of air purification,” explains Lionel Mora, co-founder of the startup Neoplants.

“It will not only capture, but also eliminate 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 purify the air,” Mora said during a tour of a rented greenhouse in Lodi, Calif. two hours from San Francisco.

Protected from the elements, several thousand modified pothos plants, green speckled with white, waited their turn to be potted, packaged and shipped.

The French startup began selling its first products in the United States in April.

The United States is a particularly promising first market, since many Americans already widely use air purifiers.

“We do our best to send out as many plants as possible each week, but it’s not enough to meet demand right now,” Mora said.

– Forest fires –

Americans greatly appreciate cleaner air given all the recent “issues associated with wildfires,” which have become an “increasingly significant” problem in the country, Mora said.

“One of the pollutants 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 because of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

VOCs are gaseous pollutants that can accumulate indoors and negatively impact air quality and health.

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Opening windows won’t help much as VOC pollution can come from solvents, glues and paints, and could therefore be hiding in cleaning products, furniture and walls.

“These chemicals are associated with a range of adverse health effects, including cancer,” particularly among young people, older people and those who are already vulnerable, said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California at San Francisco.

“They can have effects on the respiratory tract or reproductive health… such as adverse pregnancy outcomes, premature births, miscarriages, as well as neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease,” she said. declared.

Neo Px does not absorb chemicals itself. The plant is sold for a starting price of $120 with sachets of powder containing a microbiome, essentially a strain of bacteria.

“This bacteria colonizes the roots, soil and leaves of the plant,” said Torbey, the company’s chief technology officer, at its research lab in Saint-Ouen, France, just outside Paris.

– Bacteria powder –

The bacteria “take up the VOCs to grow and reproduce. The plant is there to create this ecosystem for the bacteria. So we have a symbiotic system between the plants and the bacteria,” he said.

In the future, Neoplants plans to produce genetically modified plants whose metabolism will directly do the job of purifying the air.

And in the longer term, she hopes to tackle problems linked to global warming.

“We could increase the ability of trees to capture CO2,” Torbey said.

Or “develop more drought-tolerant seeds,” Mora added.

Their vision, coupled with the team’s scientific expertise, led Vincent Nallatamby, product manager at Google, to invest in the startup from the outset.

He now has his own bacteria-enhanced pothos plant, which goes unnoticed in his San Francisco living room, already well stocked with houseplants of all sizes.

“It’s mostly my wife who takes care of them, except that one. That one’s me!” he joked, pointing to his Neo Px.

“I am often seduced by technological objects and I want to bring them home,” he says.

“It was one of the first times I had no trouble convincing my wife.”

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