Entrepreneurs have unveiled what they called a successful indoor vegetable harvest made possible by carbon dioxide sucked in from the outside air.
The harvest, of lettuce, demonstrates the power of a proprietary carbon-capture technology that can feed essential carbon dioxide into indoor farms like one planned in a former Pulaski school where the demonstration took place Wednesday.
Celebrating was Pulaski-based Mova Technologies, which owns the technology. Officials said their devices could also provide the fizz for soda or beer or fill fire extinguishers, among other possible industrial applications, all while fighting climate change. Carbon dioxide is a resource, not merely a climate-changing pollutant, when made usable at the point of capture as in the Pulaski demonstration, according to Steve Critchfield, Mova's founder and president.
"The key thing is, why make new CO2 and increase the global warming problem when you can just capture it from the atmosphere and use it there?" Critchfield said.
Indoor farms offer advantages over traditional agriculture, such as year-around production, but must receive carbon dioxide to operate. The lettuce harvested Wednesday grew in a tent inside a classroom at the former Jefferson elementary school in Pulaski, which last had students 30 years ago and which the project owns. The tent contained 800 to 1000 molecules of carbon dioxide per million molecules of air, meaning a concentration about twice the level outdoors that is triggering global climate change, which was deliberate to enhance plant growth.
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