Mossy posse: the plant with hidden properties

From designers to scientists, believe it or not, moss is now the material du jour
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Barbara Chandler30 April 2012

Rolling stones may gather none of it but it’s a different story now for designers and scientists. For them, humble moss — abundant, free, cushioned, springy and very green — is highly desirable as a newly valuable element in technology, design and decoration. A moss-covered table is making electricity, a mossy vase is an art object, and a large sports store opening this week near the Olympic site has a 10 metre-high moss wall.

The elegant metre-wide white plastic table, designed by scientists at the universities of Cambridge and Bath, has a round top made up of dozens of spongy pots of moss — 112 of them, to be precise. This is not conceptual art but a serious foray into the future, because this table is creating enough energy to power a small digital clock, using new so-called biophotovoltaic (BVP) technology, which generates electricity through photosynthesis.

Plants use energy from sunlight to turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the organic compounds (such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids) they need for growth. When moss photosynthesises, it releases some of these organic compounds into the soil, where they are broken down by bacteria.

At this point the process releases electrons. And the ingenious scientists have put “conductive fibres” inside the Moss Table to capture these electrons and harness energy otherwise wasted. “The

moss-pots are what we call bio-electrochemical devices,” explains Alex Driver, an industrial designer and mechanical engineer, and one of the visionary team working on the project. “This means they convert chemical energy into electrical energy using biological material.”

He concedes that for the moment its current is but a trickle. The table can produce about 520 joules (J) of energy per day. A typical laptop requires about 25J per second, so in a day the table as it is would only produce enough energy to power a laptop for about 20 seconds.

However, the Moss Table team are fully charged with optimistic future-telling talk. At the moment, they say, the moss generates about 50 milliWatts per square metre (mW/m²). But they are confident they’ll get that up to 3W/m².

“New low-energy laptops could operate using as little as 1W so, yes, we could have a plant-powered laptop,” says Driver. “And in this futuristic scenario, the Moss Table could power a laptop for more than 14 hours.”

Actually, the lamp on the side of the Moss Table is aspirational and as such remains a concept. A moss-powered light is still a green dream. But London designer Pia Wüstenberg sees moss as an emotive element of her conceptual art and design (piadesign.eu).

“Moss is so beautiful and resilient — it infiltrates the most inhospitable of grounds,” she says.

To tell her ongoing “Moss Story”, she talked to “bryologists” at the Natural History Museum and then created rugs with moss, as well as

her poetic concrete Strange Vase, featuring moss-filled vertical grooves.

“Moss doesn’t like a change of environment,” she says. “So I get mine from the cracks in London’s concrete pavements — I’m doing the council’s job really.”

A delicate moss wallpaper was created recently in Japan. After the tragedy of their tsunami, Japanese designers are enjoying a new burst of creativity, with Oki Sato of the celebrated design agency Nendo getting a lot of attention. Sato and his wife Asami Kiyokawam, herself a well-known Japanese artist, decorated the walls and woodwork of their renovated wooden house in Tokyo with a delicate swirly pattern traced out in lines of moss inspired by the river bank outside.

Meanwhile, working in Berlin, Austrian company Freund has found a practical way to deliver moss to any wall. Its Evergreen panels (60sq cm) are simple to apply and to maintain because moss growth has been arrested. They will line a 10m-high wall for mountain gear store

Marmot, which opens this week at Westfield Stratford.

Green grow the mosses-o all over the capital, with a new status for a humble plant beloved by florists but often despised by gardeners.

biophotovoltaics.wordpress.com

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