The chemistry of the future depends on plants
It had already made its mark with an innovative technique for soil decontamination using plants. Today, the team led by UM professor Claude Grison has made a name for itself with the invention of "ecocatalysis": a revolutionary process that opens up new horizons for green chemistry.
Plant Follies
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Their names are Noccaea caerulescens, Iberis intermedia and Anthyllis vulneraria. These very special plants have a special feature: they are able to extract heavy metals from the soil. In Saint-Laurent-le-Minier in 2011, Claude Grison's "plant follies" demonstrated that they alone could rehabilitate soil damaged by centuries of mining.
Since then, similar plants have been used in Crete, New Caledonia, Gabon and China. Everywhere, plants selected by Bio-inspired Chemistry and Ecological Innovations Laboratory (ChimEco, CNRS/Université de Montpellier), have extracted the metals disseminated in soils rich in zinc, lead, cadmium, copper, manganese, nickel and palladium.
A new green industry
Not content with fulfilling their ecological mission, these miraculous plants can also recover metals that are sometimes as precious as they are toxic. For these "hyper-accumulators" have a super-power: they are capable of storing heavy metals in their leaves... All that's left is to recover them, thanks to a 100% environmentally-friendly thermal and chemical treatment.
Better still, Claude Grison's little protégés also prove to be incomparable auxiliaries for a very common chemical operation: the "reduction of carbonyl derivatives". This process is widely used in industry, but generates a lot of waste and requires the use of expensive metals.The market is huge," reveals Claude Grison, "because this process is used in the manufacture of most everyday objects. For the same operation, processes using hyper-accumulative plants are more ecological, and even more efficient".
The eco-catalyst revolution
So effective that they are attracting growing interest from industry. The ChimEco laboratory has already filed no fewer than 36 patents on the use of ecocatalysts in chemistry. The fields of application are countless. Biocosmetics, but also perfumes, the pharmaceutical industry, biopesticides, or those "key molecules" that industry is so fond of, most of which today come from petroleum derivatives.
Producing high value-added molecules while at the same time decontaminating soils: the prospect, which reconciles industry and ecology, is very appealing. "By providing the funding needed to develop large-scale production of depolluting plants, the chemical industry itself will soon be pulling the whole ecological sector upwards," says Claude Grison. Pollution control would thus become an economically viable project. A revolution.