Soil Remediation Using Natural Organisms

Innovation: Industry

Novobiom

2021

Image: Dylan de Jonge / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Capture, Absorb, or Filter Chemical Entities

Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.

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Generate Soil/Renew Fertility

An ecosystem can’t survive long without building up its soils and preventing them from being depleted of fertility. Organic matter, minerals, and other nutrients in soil support organisms, from microorganisms to the largest mammals. Raw soil consists of weathered minerals, such as silica. But organisms need more than minerals to survive, and minerals alone are poor at storing water needed by organisms. Therefore, soil has organic matter to support an ecosystem of organisms that, in turn, contribute more organic matter, make nutrients more accessible, and hold water. The dung beetle is an organism that enhances soil fertility. This beetle gathers and transports animal dung, feeds on it, buries it in the soil, and lays eggs on it. The dung provides its young with food when they hatch. At the same time, it adds nutrients and organic matter to the soil, benefitting the ecosystem as a whole.

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Detoxification/Purification of Air/Water/Waste

Ecosystems must be effective at cleaning air, water, and waste because so much of what is in the air, water, and waste is valuable to organisms as resources. In contrast to functions that detoxify or purify at the organism level, this is at a larger scale. To be effective at the ecosystem level, it isn’t the individual efforts of a few organisms that detoxifies and purifies, but the actions of a wide diversity of organisms each contributing to the whole. For example, as water flows through an ecosystem, either aboveground or in the soil, a diversity of organisms take different actions to slow it down, capture excess nutrients from it, and break down harmful chemicals into more benign ones.

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Novobiom uses fungi and microorganisms for the remediation of contaminated industrial soils.

Benefits

Sustainable
Reduced chemical use

Applications

Industrial clean-up
Contamination sites

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 12: Responsible Production & Consumption
Goal 15: Life on Land

Bioutilization

Fungi

The Challenge

The Global Bioremediation Market was valued at USD $105.7 Billion in 2019 and is forecasted to reach USD $334.70 Billion by 2027. Focusing on soil contamination in Europe, only 650,000 site have been identified as requiring remediation but only 15% have been treated so far. Soil contamination addressable via mycoremediation represents about 64% of all the contamination occurrences.

Innovation Details

Novobiom is tapping nature’s most powerful recyclers, fungi and microorganisms, for use in brownfields, Superfund sites, and other contaminated industrial land. By selecting for naturally occurring fungi that target specific contaminants such as oil or heavy metals, they perform mycoremediation on site, without the need for hauling away soil to a central treatment facility. Novobiom has the potential to revitalize millions of contaminated sites around the world by naturally decomposing harmful toxins through this systems-level biomimetic approach.

Watch how Novobiom developed an environmental remediation process inspired by healthy living soil ecosystems.

Biological Model

All living things contain enzymes, s that help other molecules react with each other by juxtaposing them in just the right way. As organisms that specializing in decomposing things, fungi have a particularly impressive array of enzymes at their service. Many of these break down fungus food such as plant parts. Some, it turns out, are also incidentally very good at breaking down pollutants that humans introduce into the environment. The reactions they can turn harmful chemicals into harmless substances such as carbohydrates, water, and oxygen.

EXPLORE THIS BIOLOGICAL STRATEGY

light orange fungi grow on a tree seen from below

Biological Strategy

How Fungi Can Clean Up Pollution

Fungi

Chemicals in fungi break down contaminants.

Ray of Hope Prize

The Ray of Hope Prize® celebrates nature-inspired solutions addressing the world’s biggest environmental and sustainability challenges. Created in honor of Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. and a business and sustainability leader, the $100,000 Ray of Hope Prize helps startups cross a critical threshold in becoming viable businesses by amplifying their stories and providing them with equity-free funding. The prize shines a light on the innovative, nature-inspired solutions that we need to build a sustainable and resilient world. Novobiom was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Ray of Hope Prize.

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