A new urban green infrastructure to actively reduce air pollution in urban hotspots

2026-07-22

Air Pollution is the world’s worst environmental health risk. Only in the EU, more than 400,000 people die prematurely and another 6.5 million people fall sick due to air pollution every year, with associated annual costs estimated at €1,200 billion. Current strategies for improving air quality have proven to be insufficient: (1) traffic restrictions face several barriers that hinder their immediate implementation; (2) natural vegetation is unable to improve air quality and it even shows negative effects in urban canyons, and (3) other solutions such as purifying towers are very expensive to build, have high operating costs, and generate waste. Our business opportunity relies on the urgent need of providing solutions to fight air pollution in a short-term, efficient- and costly manner, and easy to uptake by city authorities. The MossTree is an urban green infrastructure based on a patented combination of IoT & biotechnology. Moss cultures are able to attract air pollution from its surroundings and convert it into biomass without leaving any residue. The sensors incorporated in our solution monitor in real-time (1) the moss status, thus supplying automatically the required nutrients and water, and (2) the air quality enabling us to quantify the impact of our solution. Thanks to our own-developed IoT, we can maximise the filtering capacity of moss and guarantee its survival in urban environment. The MossTree Phase II project consists of the installation and certification of the impact of first MossTree Network in Berlin, with several units working in group symbiosis to showcase the efficiency of our solution in improving air quality in the real environment and specifically, in highly frequented open spaces. By 2024 we expect to have 600 MossTree Networks in Europe thus increasing the quality of life and health of 2 million European citizens. That year we expect to reach revenues of up to €250 million and have offices in several EU cities as well as Hong Kong, New York and Dubai employing more than 200 people.

Germany

2026-02-01