Looking at Neo Px, you would never know it was anything other than a typical houseplant. But on a microscopic level, this plant is overloaded with billions of pollution-eating bacteria.
This week, France-based biotechnology company Neoplants launched the first houseplant bioengineered to remove harmful chemicals from indoor air. It targets volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are emitted by everyday elements in our homes: gas stoves, paints and even furniture.
NeoP1 looks like a regular marble queen pothos plant. Neoplants
Indoor air can be two to five times (and in extreme cases, up to 100 times) more polluted than outdoor air, according to the American Lung Association. This is partly due to higher levels of VOCs indoors. Long-term exposure to these compounds can cause eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches and dizziness, and even liver damage and cancer.
The best ways to eliminate VOCs from your home are to open windows and get rid of their sources, Glenn Morrison, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of Carolina, told BI. North which studies indoor air pollution. Some types of mechanical air purifiers can also remove them, but many of them can produce other harmful chemicals like carbon monoxide, ozone, and formaldehyde.
But Neoplants co-founders Patrick Torbey and Lionel Mora weren’t happy with those options. They argue that opening windows only temporarily reduces indoor pollution to outdoor levels and that not everyone can easily get rid of VOC sources in their home. Additionally, they believe that existing VOC removal technologies are not worth their drawbacks.
They then turned to biology to invent their own solution. The result, Neo Px, is 30 times more effective at eliminating indoor air pollution than the average houseplant, Torbey and Mora told Business Insider.
“What’s important to us is putting nature back at the center of innovation,” Torbey said.
Harnessing the power of bacteria
This petri dish was cultured with bacteria from Neoplants bioengineering. But only the pink side was also dabbed with toluene, a VOC. The dots on this side are bacterial colonies, showing that this species can live off VOCs. Neoplants
Non-artificial houseplants have some natural air-purifying power, and some types are more effective than others. But research has shown that it would take hundreds of ordinary houseplants to purify the air in a 1,500 square foot home.
Torbey and Mora wanted to purify the air with just one houseplant. To do this, they hacked the plant’s microbiome.
They targeted a strain of bacteria called Pseudomonas putida, which has a particular appetite for three common VOCs: benzene, toluene and xylene. There are tens of thousands of types of VOCs that can be present in homes, Morrison points out. But Neoplants chose to target these three elements because they are particularly harmful and prevalent in indoor spaces, Mora said.
This species of bacteria can live on VOCs as its sole carbon source, metabolizing them into harmless sugars and amino acids, according to the Neoplants white paper.
Additionally, these bacteria are naturally present in the soil around plant roots and form a mutually beneficial relationship with their host plants. If Torbey and Mora could figure out how to supercharge these VOC-eating bacteria, they would create a natural air purification system.
Using directed evolution – the process of breeding organisms in the laboratory to improve a selected trait over time – they created a new version of Pseudomonas putida that is extremely efficient at metabolizing VOCs.
“These are like tiny air purifying machines that build more air purifying machines as there is more pollution,” Torbey said.
But keeping these bacteria in abundance presented a challenge. Plant microbiomes are difficult to maintain, and their viability diminishes as soon as you ship that plant to someone, Jennifer Brophy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, told the MIT Tech Review.
To solve this problem, Neo Px comes with “power drops”, a solution of their engineered bacteria that can be used to replenish the plant’s microbiome once a month and ensure it is operating at its maximum plant purification capacity. air, similar to regularly replacing an air purifier filter.
Boundaries
UNC’s Morrison believes there are other limitations to consider before purchasing Neo Px. “It doesn’t matter how much they change the plant or the bacteria in the soil if they can’t get air in and through it,” he said.
Neo Px is encased in a biodegradable shell designed with vents to maximize airflow between the floor and the room, but Morrison says the airflow would still be too minimal to make a significant difference in the quality of the product. air for an average house. “It might actually eliminate some VOCs, but it wouldn’t remove much,” he said.
But Torbey and Mora are confident in their product. “We know that phytoremediation (plant-based solution) is not an approach that most in the indoor air quality community believe in,” Torbey told BI in a subsequent email in response to Morrison’s skepticism. He and his colleagues have built two VOC measurement rooms at their headquarters in Paris, which they will use to study the phytoremediation potential of their system.
“We will release this data as soon as possible to help the world better understand the power of phytoremediation,” he added.
Unboxing the Neo Px System
The Neo Px system comes with a potted marble queen pothos in a specially designed “shell” and a six-month supply of power drops. Neoplants
The Neo Px air purification system comes with a marble queen pothos plant, a popular species of houseplant that serves as an ideal host for their VOC-eating bacteria, Mora said.
Eventually, Mora and Torbey hope to expand Neoplants to include different types of plants, but for now, pothos are the only species available for purchase.
The Neo Px package includes the biodegradable and ventilated shell, which also has a built-in self-watering system. “Even people who don’t have a green thumb at all can take care of this plant very easily,” Mora said.
This $119 plan includes a six-month supply of power cuts. When they run out, customers can sign up to automatically restock them for $39 every three months.
In search of sustainability
Every part of the Neo Px Air Purification System is made in the USA. Neoplants
For Mora and Torbey, the most exciting aspect of this new product is that it is entirely made in the United States. Even the recycled plastic and agricultural waste used to make their self-watering shell comes from the United States.
Achieving that goal proved difficult, Mora said, but he and Torbey wanted to make their product as close to their core customer base as possible. To them, it made no sense to ship a product designed to purify the air across the world. And manufacturing Neo Px in the United States ensured that their product was made responsibly.
“What we’ve tried to do is create a product that is as sustainable as possible. So you don’t need to use electricity, you don’t need to replace filters that have a lot of pollution and throw them away,” Mora said.
This sustainable model is part of Neoplants’ overarching goal: to move toward solutions to even greater environmental problems.
“If we look forward five years from now, not only will we have this family of products for indoor spaces that people can install in their homes, but we will also start to take some of the first fundamental technical steps for climate change applications.” ,” Mora said.
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