the super plant that fights air pollution

It may look like an innocent green plant, but its name is more reminiscent of a robot or an interstellar rocket.

Neo Px is a genetically engineered plant capable of cleaning indoor air to an unprecedented extent, and is the first in what could be a long line of such superpowered organisms.

“In terms of air purification, that’s equivalent to up to 30 normal houseplants,” says Lionel Mora, co-founder of the startup Neoplants.

“Some of the most harmful pollutants that can be found indoors are not only captured, but also removed and recycled.”

Five years ago, the entrepreneur met Patrick Torbey, a genome editing researcher who dreamed of creating living organisms “with functions.”

“We were surrounded by plants and thought the most effective function we could give them was to purify the air,” Mora said during a tour of a rented greenhouse in Lodi, California, two hours from San Francisco.

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

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

The United States was a particularly promising first market because many Americans already widely use air purifiers.

“We are doing our best to ship as many plants as possible each week, but that is currently not enough to meet demand,” Mora said.

Forest fires

Given the recent “issues related to wildfires” that have become an “increasing” problem in the country, Americans have a strong desire for clean air, Mora said.

“One of the pollutants produced by combustion is benzene, and that is our goal,” he added.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, indoor air can be two to five times more polluted than outdoor air. The main reason for this is volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

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

Opening the windows doesn’t help much, because VOC pollution can come from solvents, adhesives and paints and can therefore lurk in cleaning products, furniture and walls.

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

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

Neo Px does not absorb the chemicals itself. The plant is sold at an entry-level price of $120 along with powder packets containing a microbiome, essentially a strain of bacteria.

“These bacteria colonize the roots, soil and leaves of the plant,” said Torbey, the company’s chief technical officer, in his research laboratory in Saint-Ouen, France, just outside Paris.

Bacteria powder

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

Neoplants plans to produce genetically modified plants in the future whose metabolism directly takes over the work of air purification.