Toxins In Soil Are Making Us Sick: How Greentech Startup Biomede Is Harvesting Earth Contamination

Surrounded by a mosaic of concrete, we travel through the world unaware of the mayhem taking place under the surface – within the dirty substance beneath our feet.

Toxins and chemicals leaking out of modern industry have contaminated most of our soil and it's making humanity, and the creepy crawlies living inside of it, sick. 

Patricia Gifu, Co-founder of Biomede, was working in cancer research when she connected the dots between proliferation in cancer cases and toxins in the soil.

"I observed that there's a bigger impact from the environment on human disease that affects us all. It's both a growing public health problem and a financial problem for our farmers. Too much copper in soil prevents farmers from obtaining a good yield," says Gifu. This discovery would change the course of her life.

95% of our food grows on topsoil, but half of the topsoil on the planet has been lost in the last 150 years, according to the WWF. And if soil degradation continues at the current rate, the world could run out of topsoil within 60 years.

Whether air, water, or the earth we trod on; humanity is out of touch with the failing health of its life support systems.

Metals destroy the quality of soil by eroding its structure and killing off the ecosystem; this threatens crop yields and leads to dead zones, erosion and nutrient pollution. Heavy metals infiltrate water and are absorbed by the plants we eat, with a real and devastating impact on human health - to pollute the earth is to pollute the people.

 "Toxic soil leads to degeneration and autoimmune disease, some studies have shown a link between aluminium and autism," says Gifu. This simple observation sparked a quest for solutions: "How can we use eco-friendly biological tools to eliminate copper? It's a very particular contamination that affects land surfaces around the world."

Together with Biomede Co-founder Ludovic Vincent, she hunted for answers by visiting copper mining sites and examining plants growing in the area. 

"On our visits to mining sites, we identified plant species that are extracting copper. We developed a mixture of plants that would work together and enhance each other's capabilities to remove heavy metals. We balanced all that with entrepreneurial activity – creating a network, recruiting people who could help us, finding investors. 

"Within a year, we had a viable product which we could take to market," says Gifu. They had created the world's first biological solution for extracting copper and Biomede was launched.

Biomede’s copper extracting plants have since taken root in French vineyards, and the business is set to expand into European agricultural practice. In Europe, an estimated 80% of agricultural soil is contaminated, but the problem has yet to enter the public consciousness fully.

Biomede has again turned to greentech innovation to help potential clients understand and quantify how the heavy metals pollution threat is affecting their harvest: "We developed a portable device which can measure the scale of the toxic contamination problem. We measure the soil first to demonstrate to potential buyers that their soil is contaminated, then we show the solution."

For farmers operating on small margins, improving soil health is a long-term investment that may not always be easy to make. But failure to introduce radical change in the way agricultural soil is treated could take the world down the slippery slope of a nutrient and food crisis.

Replenishing the earth will require widespread awareness of soil degradation and willingness to invest in innovative solutions like Biomede’s copper-extracting plants.

"We hear a lot about climate change and all the waste we produce, but we are bringing a solution to a problem that is often wildly overlooked. Greentech entrepreneurship is relatively new, and you need to persuade a lot of people and make yourself known," says Gifu.

Selling an innovative solution that's never been used before in agriculture, is "very challenging but very rewarding," she adds – "if you believe in what you do, you can convince and promote your solution."

Biomede will have a lot of persuading to do to take its ground-breaking solution into the mainstream, but for entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty, there's an entire world of soil at their feet.