Rethinking Phyona

The capacity of plants to adapt to their local environment to improve their likelihood of survival is an exciting and fascinating feat of nature. Certain plants known as hyperaccumulators, have the ability to extract metals from the soil while allowing their roots to clean their local environment.

This approach can be used to recover metals from the soil as a sustainable mining strategy. While the use of plants as a metal recovery method appears to be green, sustainable and easily acceptable, early engagement with users (residents, visitors, council and local supply chains during the first quarter of the project Resilient Nature have highlighted some contentious points such as potential risk to wildlife, aesthetic quality of the sites, speed of recovery and subsequent soil remediation.

Further assessment of our processes and products have indicated challenges in the usability of the equipment and transportation of large quantities of biomass. All these points can be resolved by a planet and human-centred approach to developing and testing improved technologies and ideas, hence we propose the use of planet-centred design to develop life cycle analysis (LCA) of the process and products using a range of scenarios such as the re-use of materials on-site and the use of local supply chains to achieve negative carbon footprint, as well as using human-centred design to ensure optimal phytomining garden design, inclusive equipment design and effective supply chain.

The ability to use such approaches while the technology is at TRL 5 (Technology Validation in Relevant Environment) ensures great freedom of technological development in being able to test the new ideas and concepts, while accelerating the development and optimisation towards a more sustainable and responsible upscaling, ultimately to reach TRL7, with higher standards and quality for customers, investors and community.