Allison interviews Patrick Torbey from Neoplants about their Power Drops that you feed your houseplants to turn them into natural air purifiers.
Plants have a natural ability to help purify air, but a plant boosted with Power Drops is 30 times more effective at cleaning air than a regular house plant. A plant in a 6-inch diameter fed with one package of Power Drops can help purify air in a room up to 160 sq ft.
Power Drops come as a powder sealed in a small, air-tight pouch. To prepare Power Drops, just empty the powder into a glass container, mix the powder with water, and stir until fully dissolved. Then pour the liquid into the plant’s soil once a month to activate air purification.
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: Patrick Torbey just ran me down in the hall and said, “You have got to come see this. We’re here to talk about a natural air purifier?”
Patrick: Exactly. Actually, an air purifier that you already have in your home right now. What you can do is turn your own houseplants into an air purifier with what we created here. So inside this sachet is hundreds of billions of air-purifying bacteria. What you do, you pour it inside this beaker. This is the actual bacteria. Mix it with water here and then pour it on the soil of your plants. It will increase by 30 times the power of your plants to absorb VOCs, volatile organic compounds. Formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, these nasty chemicals that make the indoor air unhealthy.
Allison: Our plants already do this, but this is a multiplier?
Patrick: Yes, exactly. The plants already do this, but at very, very low amounts. So maybe we can show you a little graph.
Allison: I love your graph.
Patrick: So this is the level of pollution, how it goes down with a normal plant. And if you add power drops, it goes down 30 times faster with this.
Allison: Do you have peer-reviewed papers about this?
Patrick: So we’re going through the peer-review process right now. But to anticipate it, we’ve actually published available a white paper that explains everything about the technology. Power drops white paper from Neoplants. So we’ve shown all the raw results, all the data that we have coming out of our labs is expressed here. It’s currently under peer review and we just launched the product yesterday evening.
Allison: Oh my goodness. So I’m sorry, but introducing this sounds a little bit like Botox, you know? I’m going to introduce some kind of weird thing into the system. So adding bacteria in order to enhance the plants. Talk to me more about it.
Patrick: Yes. So normal bacteria won’t do so much of a good job. What we did is we found bacteria within nature that are able to grow in polluted environments. Then we changed its genetics over six years and 20 scientists have worked on this to create this product. And once you pour it on the plant, it forms in symbiosis with the plant, meaning that it’s healthy for the plant and the plant is healthy with it. And we traced the pollution so we can trace the molecule of formaldehyde or benzene to make sure that what’s inside the bacteria, it’s only turned into healthy compounds, sugar, and amino acids, and builds more bacteria.
Allison: So it grows on the pollutants.
Patrick: The more polluted the air is, the more it will thrive.
Allison: I didn’t know that I had, you know, formaldehyde in the air at my house. Do I?
Patrick: Yeah, you do. It’s between 10 to 80 parts per billion. Parts per billion means it’s very, very low amount. But chronic exposure to these leads to a range of issues from asthma symptoms, allergies, and cancer over repeated exposure. It’s always in the top five of the problems of the Environmental Protection Agency. Every year they publish what’s the top five public problems. Indoor air pollution due to VOCs is always in the top five.
Allison: Wow. I thought it was outdoor smog.
Patrick: Outdoor problem is mostly about particulate matter.
Allison: Right, right, right, right.
Patrick: Volatile organic compound comes from inside the house. It’s from the paints that you put on the wall, from the furniture that you have. When you buy a piece of furniture, you have aldehydes that’s put in the woods. Aldehydes react with the light and temperature to form formaldehyde. So it’s constantly emitted by everything you have in your home.
Allison: That is fascinating. That’s a really good answer, I’ve got to say. So if people want to learn more about Neoplants, where would they go?
Patrick: They go on neoplants.com. And we just launched the product yesterday. So you can pre-order the product and we start delivering on the 30th of January.
Allison: So this is simply a powder in a packet. What’s your price point on this?
Patrick: So it depends how much you want to buy. But it starts at \$5 per sachet. And with $5, you have to re-inoculate the plants every month. So every month you pour it once on the plant and you really turn it into an air purifier. We let biology do the rest.
Allison: Wow, that is fascinating. Thank you very much for running me down in the hall.
Patrick: Thank you very much, guys.