I would love to see some numbers and comparisons. As I said in a reply below, I suspect this is functionally ineffectual and that 30x the air cleaning of a regular plant is like saying 30x the intelligence of a regular plant.
I suspect this is functioning as a shiny, attractive prototype to fund further research to develop a 300x or 3000x plant or something in that neighbourhood. No judgment from me for that, prototype funding a bigger plan is a cool business model. I'd just love to get some absolute data.
EDIT: Reading a little bit about the NASA plant study[0] that I saw in the comments below. It says that it determined that you'd need 10-1000 plants per square meter (I don't understand this measurement? Wouldn't it be cubic meter?) to get the equivalent of outdoor-indoor air exchange. That's a really wide range, but does this mean you'd need 0.33...-33.33... of these neoplants to have the same impact? That's a lot of plants, but another 10x or 100x and you're actually getting somewhere in the range of reasonable. Counterpoint, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Makes me wonder if this could be used intentionally, as in a recipe that calls for baking soda left next to certain aromatic ingredients to infuse it with flavor.
It is why a small box of baking soda has a pull-off side revealing a permeable membrane. You put it in the refrigerator to absorb odors, aka volatile organic compounds. Baking soda is alkaline, so it neutralizes acids. As most volatile organic compounds form acids in water, they are essentially absorbed by the baking soda in a moist environment.
Ugh, the famous NASA study that everyone loves to quotes and nobody ever reads :)
It’s freely available from the NASA website, and it looks like that Wikipedia page includes a link in the footnotes.
At the very least, skim through it: they chose the plants to test based on what they could find at a random garden shop in Mississippi. They didn’t use pots filled with dirt - they built their own pots that had electrically powered fans and ducts. There’s a drawing in the report, you can make your own!
It’s definitely good to have houseplants; the more the better! But this report isn’t really of much value to the average homeowner.
Especially because the average homeowner can’t afford 10-1000 plants per square foot of flooring.
If you have helpful data, please share. I was just skimming as you kindly pointed out and would love some concrete numbers other than holistic senses of the goodwill of houseplants, $150 houseplants or others.
Actually, the only other study I’ve seen says that houseplants are of zero benefit in regards to VOC purification, but I doubt a startup would invest this much into fraud.
In real life snake plant wins, because it's the easier in maintenance. A common saying about it is "it thrives on neglect". I propagate them (have about 120 at my home right now, I even produced my own hybrid that's almost completely yellow) and give as gifts to many people, those who never had plants before and those who go for 2 months long holidays, so far no reports of any dead one. It's resistant to drought and overwatering, nothing bad happens when it has too much sunlight or not enough. Having 10 of them at home is work free, stress free compared to having 1 peace lily or other dracaenas.
I must be some special kind of strange.. my roommate left me with some low maintenance plants on his way out and the snake plant is the only one I've managed to kill
You produced your own snake plant hybrid... That's got to be one of the most fascinating conversation starters I've ever heard. Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
>Do you think there's any merit in this concept of air cleaning super plants?
Snake plants and some aloe are quite easy to mutate at random. We're seeing more and more of them every year. I know I have 2 aloe hybrids that didn't exist 5 years ago, got them on ebay. This year, all supermarkets in UK and Poland are full of them, on social media and plantnet [1] we're arguing on what they should be called as each distributor gives them different names. 100s of photos are misidentified, which... kinda isn't uncommon and hard to blame anyone for it.
I also have at least 20 subspecies of snake plants, 12 of them live in a single pot. The yellow one managed to create 3 individual offsprings, if they give yellow offspring again, I'm calling it a win and a new subspecies I _could potentnially_ sell. This is where things go hard. Snakeplant is hard to propagate a subspecies at scale. Fastest way is to cut a leaf and stick in water with any rooting hormone, but it doesn't keep mutations. Water propagation "reverts" mutations and produces the original specie. So, if you have a moonshine [2], cut a leaf and propagate in water, there are very high chances you end up with native [3], almost certain this will happen. You need at least 3-5 generations made in soil with identical mutation to make it more reproducible [4], that's a few years of waiting. Like this guy on reddit, had the plant for +10 years and spent 18 months propagating in water.
Pothos, which the article is about, are a lot different, you can create a subspecies quite efficiently and make it a reproducible process. Even without any gardening knowledge you can learn about it from youtube or reddit comments. Pothos grows really fast and offspring created from a branch is identical to parent (some people have different experience that it reverts to the original variation - jade pothos, but it doesn't seem to be the rule?), so propagation is drastically easier. My guess it that's why the company mutated/fed pothos not snakeplants or peace lily. The most difficult answer is, how to make it mutate to be a more effective air cleaning plant and how to maintain it when the plant grows and hits our homes. Neo P1 achieved that by making the plant to work with additional 3rd party microbiome, which is a bit cheating, but not uncommon [5-6] for humans to manipulate how plants feed.
I should be clear at the beginning, I propagate and create hybrids plants for fun, but know nothing about chemistry and genetics :)
Patrick here, CTO of Neoplants, thanks you so much for spending the time learning about what we’ve built. TLDR: we’ve put together a white paper explaining the technology behind what we do, as well as the performance data we’ve accumulated so far: https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB
As you pointed out, the range given by the Nasa study covers 2 orders of magnitude, this reflects the difficulty to extrapolate from their data to real life situations.
Even though our first product, Neo P1, is “only” 30x better than normal indoor plants, it’s already a great improvement over anything that’s been done in the scientific literature to date (usually improving phytoremediation by 2 or 3x) , and this is just the start of the adventure. As you said, we expect to continue to leverage our metabolism and microbiome engineering technologies to have even more performant plants every year.
If it does actually require regular maintenance of a proprietary microbiom then, eh, it doesn't clean the air like 30 regular plants; it's more like a subscription service for clean air that comes with a plant.
Yeah that bit feels weird. It's designed to require less water than normal, I assume because many forget to water their plant. It makes sense, given the cost. You can't very well have people accidentally killing an expensive plant. But they somehow expect people who can't remember to water to provide the same plant with a sprinkle of bacteria once a month?
I am also worried about proprietary plants, I don't know, maybe you can make cuttings? But yeah, still really cool.
But it's NASA. They are not thinking about forgetful plant owner on earth that needs help. NASA wants to scrub air in spaaaaace, or on other planets located in spaaaace.
We just want to use it on earth so we can show how cool we are that we have something from NASA while your "other" friends have Dyson gear.
What happens when you need to go out of town for an extended period? If it was just another ${X}aaS, you could temporarily suspend those plant instances and avoid the charges. Their work would be unused during that period anyway, so why pay for it? On-prem would still continue to accrue those charges. Also, what happens if you have your large extended family over for the holidays? Your on-prem plants would be unable to handle the load and start returning 504 type errors. With ${X}aaS you could just spin up a few more instances or even upgrade to larger instance types. Once the family holiday nightmare is over, you just spin them down again.
Hi David, Lio here from Neoplants, thank you for your comment! The plant itself is also bioengineered to purify the air, but for people who will want to maximize the performance of Neo P1 we will indeed recommend adding back the power drops (microbiome) on a regular basis.
Better than nothing, but the level that plants "clean the air" is entirely negligible. Every time you open the door, enough air enters your house where you would need to dedicate an entire room of plants for multiple days to clean that air.
Just get a filter that can filter VOCs if you have that kind of concern. And then add plants as you wish to make you happy.
Hey googlryas, Patrick from Neoplants here. Indeed, normal plants are too ineffective to remediate indoor air pollution. Which is why we are bioengineering them for this purpose! Unfortunately, according to government agencies like the EPA, there are no VOC purifying technologies that are effective and have no harmful by-products. If you want to deep dive, they published a technical report on these different technologies, their strenghts and drawbacks https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-07/documents/re...
We made a quick summary of keys insights of this report in the intro of our white paper https://bit.ly/3hjMqsB
What do you mean? The outside air is also typically an unwanted temperature (although heat exchangers can mitigate that) and may contain allergens or particulates from smoke or exhaust.
Ever been in a place where you have a room totally barren of plants, and then able to walk into a room with plants? Which room do you feel better in? Whether it is the air cleaning or not, rooms with plants just feel so much better to me than the sterile feeling of no plants.
They are generally cheap enough now that it's probably not worth the effort. I think my last 2 cost 35 a piece, and came with extra filters and such.
I used to think they were kinda useless until I had tile ripped up. The neverending dust was driving my wife insane. On a whim, bought a couple purifiers and it's cut the dust down by at least 90%.
If you're looking for more features and a more known brand, Costco has these for 99, which is a pretty good deal considering their size and that they come with all extra filters.
Rule of thumb: cut the quoted theoretical capacity in half. This one's theoretical capacity is 360 square feet, so you'd need eight of them in a 1500 square foot apartment.
Never heard of it. Perhaps for its Hepa, 99.9% jargon sure.
But we ran a single Bissel Air400 in a 2k sq ft area and it visibly reduced the dust you see on glass cabinets and such. We used to have to clean them about every 3 days. With that running, it was about every 2 to 3 weeks!
Not exactly. As I understand it furnace filters will just filter out particulate matter which is measured on the order of micron. It doesn't really do much for VOCs, which are measured on the order of picometers(0.2 microns = 200,000 picometers).
You need another filter like activated charcoal which works differently than particulate filters (adsorption vs merely trapping particles in a winding path)
VOCs are nanometer scale. A rough estimate for atomic bond length in organic compounds is .15 nanometers. CO2, which should be smaller than basically any VOC, is half a nanometer across.
I used MERV 11 and still got tons of dust everywhere, and the ductwork is also musty smelling in the spring and fall.. prefer summer and winter because it's not as noticeable then.
The numbers don't check out. It looks like he is using a weird definition of recycle the CO2 produced by an adult human.
A normal person need about 2000 kcalories per day. That's approximately 500g (1/2 kg) (1 pound) of sugar. Eating only sugar is bad, but most carbohydrates and proteins have a similar kcalories to weight ratio.
If the plant absorbs all the CO2 produced by the person, it must rebuild all that sugar back (and store it as cellulose, or starch or even proteins, but again all have a very similar similar kcalories to weight ratio.) So the plant must grow approximately 500g (1/2 kg) (1 pound) per day.
That is like 15kg (30 pounds) per month, that is a weigh of a small child. Or like 150kg (300 pounds) per year that is the weight of one or two adults. Plant's don't grow so much.
(Note that you can reduce the weight to one half is the plant only makes oil instead of as cellulose, or starch or even proteins, but it still too high.)
Edit: Self nitpicking: About the reduction of weigh using oil, I used calories per gram instead of carbon per gram.
Oversimplifiying: In sugar the simplified unit is COH2, that has one carbon per 12+16+2=30 atomic units. In oil, the simplified unit is CH2 that has one carbon every 12+2=14 atomic units. So the ratio is aproximately 30/14=2.14 instead of the calories ratio that is 9/4=2.5. Both are very similar, so the end remark is still correct. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or if I think hard enough about energy per atomic bound it get obvious.
Proteins are harder, because amino acids are more diverse. I left the exact calculation for someone else, but as a rough simplification let's use achain of valine. The building block is C5ONH9 that is a carbon for every (12*5+16+14+9)/5=19.8 atomic units, so it's something in between. Anyway, don't expect your plant to make too much proteins. Even soy overdosed with fertilizer has only like a 15% of proteins.
Don’t forget that the plant would also need to receive enough insolation to do this AFTER inefficiencies in photosynthesis. As photosynthesis is only 11% efficient, and conversion to sugars is going to be only a partial fraction of that due to needs of the plants to support their own health and growth, we’re talking a VERY large amount of insolation. A completely impractical amount to have indoors, frankly.
2000 kcal == 2.3kwh.
If we assume the plant manages to put half of it’s total photosynthesis output into sugar (very generous), and hits maximum theoretical photosynthetic rates, 5.5% of sunlight would be converted.
A peak sun hour is 1kw per square meter. 5.5% of that is 50 watts.
You’d need 46 square meters of peak sun for an hour to produce 2.3kwh worth of output, even assuming a lot of ideal output efficiencies.
Carbon in, carbon out. In order for plants to balance that equation they have to grow about a pound of dry mass per day. There’s a reason the space station doesn’t just have a few plants up there instead of an advanced system to scrub and recycle air.
Sure but this is about VOCs, not CO2, though lowering CO2 levels indoors certainly isn't a bad thing, especially if you're in a small room without ventilation.
Pothos are easy to grow and easy to propagate. One pothos could turn into 30 without a huge amount of effort.
I kinda like the idea of living in a space with 30 pothos plants.
I guess the engineered one would also be easy to propagate? Which raises an interesting question, after I buy one, can I just give away dozens of clones? Are there IP restrictions? Does the plant die without the special sauce bacteria?
>after I buy one, can I just give away dozens of clones? Are there IP restrictions?
The grapes, apples, chestnuts you buy at a supermarket are already IP-protected and propagation is already restricted or forbidden. Even some hybrid plants in IKEA have "propagation is against the law" labels, you are expected to kill any offspring.
As far as I understand, what is forbidden is not to propagate but to then sell the propagated plants or fruits, I.e. propagating plants from IKEA to give to a number of friends should be OK. This would be like saying you cannot make copies of a book you bought for personal use.
Most Pothos are free to propagate. Things from Costa farms and some other places are things to look out for. IP on plants is an interesting thing. One popular plant in the recent past - Raven ZZs - was IP protected.
“The court heard the question of whether Schmeiser's intentionally growing genetically modified plants constituted "use" of Monsanto's patented genetically modified plant cells. By a 5-4 majority, the court ruled that it did. The Supreme Court also ruled 9-0 that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto their technology use fee, damages or costs, as Schmeiser did not receive any benefit from the technology.”
I have bought other houseplants (bromeliad hybrids, for one) that say they are patented and can't be propagated. I see that in theory that applies to individuals[1] but I am skeptical there's any kind of enforcement unless you're selling your pirated plants.
The unspoken rule of the horticulture world is that hobbyists have a gift economy in “illegal” propagations. Over a longer time horizon the “gift economy” is bartering with credit. I give you some when times are good, I accept some after a pest infestation or a lousy house sitter.
Only commercial growers license plant patents.
I’m filling a fifth of an acre with purchased plants and it gets expensive quick, especially if you aren’t very very patient. I’m already propagating cuttings of mostly natives and a few herbs to trade with others. Few can afford retail.
Then you have 30 plants to take care of and find space for. It would be basically impossible to stop you from propagating and giving away cutting if the plant can do that. All of that other stuff seems like extra cost to develop with questionable gains to sales.
Based on the OP post and the notion of a wait list for something that should be trivial to propagate as you mentioned, I'm guessing this whole thing is a $$/Month subscription to a proprietary variant of a common plant.
"Just one Neo P1, as the company dubbed its initial product, can remove as much pollution from a home’s air as 30 regular plants, the company says. Neo P1 was in development for four years, and is a bioengineered version of a common houseplant called Pothos."
What does this even mean? What is 'pollution' in this claim? Just grow and happily propagate regular pothos which are wonderful plants, and if you need to filter your air... get certified filters?
Four years seems extremely fast for that. Every iteration you have to grow enough plant mass to test it. That must take weeks or months, even with the most optimal growing conditions.
As for proprietary variants, some Pothos already come with tags saying that propagation is forbidden (which, to me, at least, means I will propagate the hell out of it even if I didn't really want to).
Hi missosoup,
Lio here, co-founder of Neoplants. At this point we are not considering subscriptions for Neo P1, only bundles to keep things simple. When it comes to that article quote, it is referring to the 4 pollutants we are targeting: Benzene, Toluene, Xylene and Formaldehyde, which are the 4 main Volatile Organic Compounds commonly found in houses, highly carcinogenic and very hard to eliminate (not just capture). You can learn more about that on our Product Page here: https://neoplants.com/product
> Then you have 30 plants to take care of and find space for.
Pothos are pretty much vines, so seems pretty easy to put the pot on a high surface and let them fall down or creep along, unless they're too structurally solid to do that?
Hi socialismisok, Lionel here from Neoplants. We do not want to prevent our customers from propagating their neoplants, so Neo P1 will not die without its soil nor without its microbiome, so if you feel like sharing some cuttings to your friends for them to discover our concept, you’ll be able to do it. However, when it comes to air purification performance, purchasing the full value proposition will be needed, not only to ensure the bioengineering features are well expressed in the plant but also for the microbiome, the shell and the size of the plant that play a crucial role in our products. In addition, all of the bioengineering we do is proprietary IP and we will deliver a certificate of authenticity with your Neo P1.
Their algae is also claimed to be as effective as 25 regular plants.
In reality, to have a noticeable/measurable impact on indoor air quality (specifically CO2), these products would still need to improve in absorbtion rates well beyond the 30x- probably to about 3000x.
However, I like the Aerium for its visual and auditory qualities, irrespective of inefficient CO2 consumption. And real plants of course are also pleasing to many people.
I have hopes that through genetic and other engineering products like the Pothos and the Aerium can get that 100-fold improvement over the next 10 years.
That does look attractive, but getting some sticker shock at $225 initial + monthly installments. I could just as easily buy and kill several $5-$10 plants from Home Depot on a monthly basis. At least then I would get some variety.
I watched an interesting TED talk years ago on cleaning indoor air with plants[0]. After digging into the study and understanding the numbers, it was humbling how little each plant on its own does. You basically needed to fill every square inch of floor space with plants in a normal office for it to have a noticeable impact. Bringing in outside air via the HVAC system was many times more cost efficient and effective.
Which is why we need to be preserving the biosphere like our life depends on it. Because if we don't have that, if we don't have a lot of plants and trees, we're in a lot of strife.
Where is the talk about adding small-scale hydrogen electrolysis with 21st century new construction to increase oxygen rates in inhabital areas inside a residence?
I agree with many of the comments about the limited performance of passive plants to effectively remove contaminants with indoor air pollution.
It looks like an estimate of 3.2 million people succumb to indoor air pollution annually on a global scale with lifestyle choices (or the lack of choice).
Environmental factors may actually make superplants a resonable addition for wellbeing (placebo effect), but lifestyle choices make inventorying 20th century convenience items and amenities part of a healthy spring cleaning routine (with updated information).
I'm a bit skeptical of needing a "special pot" and adding some bits to support a microbiome. My partner got me into pothos and we've been growing our collection ever since. They're very easy to maintain and require very little attention as long as you give them some light and keep them away from drafts.
Hi Kodah, Patrick from Neoplants here. Pothos are indeed super easy to maintain and very robust. But even then, not everyone has a green thumb and might overwater or underwater the plant. Which is why we designed our pot or “Shell” with a water reservoir. But more importantly, the Shell is designed to maximize the soil/air surface for maximum efficiency of the entire system.
I’ve heard pathos described as “thriving on neglect”. When WFH hit I imagined empty offices choked and overgrown by pathos allowed to run amock. (Having said that I’m aware they need watered.)
In 2019 I emailed a professor at UW working on a similar project asking for a cutting of their genetically engineered pothos but they said they couldn't send me one because they were still looking for partners for regulatory approval and commercialization. Glad to see someone did it!
This is why regulation of GMOs needs to be structured in terms of risk/benefit instead of safety alone. I absolutely support genetic modification of major calorie crops, and I think there's a strong case that the environmental risk from such modifications is smaller than the risk of alternative paths (spray more chemical pesticides, clear more land, etc.) to achieve the same total yields.
The benefit here is very close to zero, though; one wild-type pothos won't affect indoor air quality in any way known to be significant to human health, and neither will thirty. We've already got escaped transgenic GloFish in Brazilian streams; those haven't caused any significant harm yet, but I'd rather we stopped rolling the dice before something does.
If you're ok with a bit of DIY, I recently got some Qwiic I2C sensors combined with an ESP32 running ESPHome. The Qwiic connectors made the hardware part really plug and play.
There's no information that I could find about the rate of removing volatile organic compounds. I suspect adequate ventilation along with normal filter system to remove particulate matter is still the best bet.
Of course, the first step regarding volatile organic compounds would be to test using an air quality monitor that can detect VOCs to see if you actually have a problem.
Don't you see what these plants are capable of? You put one in your house and it cleans your air... but then, the plant makes the air cleaner and keeps on making it more clean... Can you imagine it? What would it be like for your air to be way, way too clean? I'll tell you something: you don't want to know and I don't know.
I wonder if anyone remembers an old experiment they did with houseplants and removing VOCs. They did the experiment right and had one plant have all leaves removed and it removed as much or more as the plant. The source of VOC removal? The potting soil and the life within. That's my memory of it.
Pothos is very easy to propagate in water. I bought one from Home Depot several years ago and now my office features 12 of them, all cut from the same plant (some are even second-generation clones)
I really doubt a passive plant can get even close to an active air purifier machine with HEPA filters. This sounds like it'll do great with the "but it's natural" crowd though.
I suppose the plant could mate and procreate with regular Pothos plants? I'm wondering what the implications would be if that happens in the wild, ie those special genes spreading further.
Pothos naturally almost never flowers; it's propagated mostly vegetatively both by humans and in the wild. That decreases the risk, though I still consider the concept reckless given the lack of significant benefit. They apparently haven't yet received the USDA approval necessary to sell their GMO, though I'd guess that under current regulations they will.
I would assume functionality. To me this reads as a funding round to kickstart further development. I want some numbers, because my initial assumption is that 30x a regular plant is still essentially zero overall impact. The longterm goal would be to breed a plant that has 300x or 3000x effectiveness. I don't see anything wrong with this, by the way. Prototypes funding future success is an effective business model. I just suspect that this prototype doesn't really do anything other than present exciting possibilities for the future in a really nice package.
I suspect this is functioning as a shiny, attractive prototype to fund further research to develop a 300x or 3000x plant or something in that neighbourhood. No judgment from me for that, prototype funding a bigger plan is a cool business model. I'd just love to get some absolute data.
EDIT: Reading a little bit about the NASA plant study[0] that I saw in the comments below. It says that it determined that you'd need 10-1000 plants per square meter (I don't understand this measurement? Wouldn't it be cubic meter?) to get the equivalent of outdoor-indoor air exchange. That's a really wide range, but does this mean you'd need 0.33...-33.33... of these neoplants to have the same impact? That's a lot of plants, but another 10x or 100x and you're actually getting somewhere in the range of reasonable. Counterpoint, I don't know what I'm talking about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study