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A chemical engineer combined her science know-how and love of design to create the world’s first live moss products and installations that act as both an air filter and inspiring art.
In recent years, “moss walls” and “living walls” have been an increasingly in-demand interior design trend. This “biophilic design” — the practice of bringing the natural world into buildings — essentially connects nature and people in living and working spaces to benefit health and well-being.
Jamie Mitri, a graduate of the University of Rhode Island with bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and biology, learned most moss wall art is made of preserved moss. “And that is actually filled with really, really bad chemicals. Preservatives have a really strong chemical smell, and because of all the chemicals that are added to it, it falls apart,” Mitri explains. “All of these companies were calling it ‘sustainable’ and ‘eco friendly,’ and I'm just like, ‘No, it’s not.’”
Early in her career, Mitri took a typical career path, starting out in biotech, building medical devices used in the intensive care units of hospitals. Later, she worked as an environmental engineer overseeing treatment of wastewater. While focusing on air pollution control, stormwater, and waste compliance, she earned several environmental accreditations, furthering her passion for sustainability. Over time, Mitri, who was born in Lebanon, began to see a market gap. Many sustainable products were just not aesthetically pleasing.
“I built high end products, and because I was an environmental engineer at heart, I could make them and formulate them to be environmentally friendly and innovative,” Mitri says.
She started researching the health benefits of live moss more deeply, learning how it acts as a natural air filter. Live moss absorbs water and nutrients in the air around it, and filters the surrounding air, removing carbon dioxide, allergens, volatile organic compounds, bacteria, viruses, and specific metals.
In 2020, she participated in a startup competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lebanon Challenge, which brought together professionals and individuals with an academic background from across the Lebanese diaspora to find solutions to Lebanon’s biggest challenges — one of which is air pollution. Her team’s live moss design was engineered to mitigate air pollution and reduce its damaging effects. It took top honors. “Because it won first place in our track of the startup competition, I was then selected to attend the two-month MIT Accelerator Program in June 2020, where the MBA program at MIT, along with entrepreneurs, helped me launch Moss Pure. It was at this time that I developed the products, was doing testing, and came up with prototypes,” Mitri says. Later that same year, Moss Pure was invited to participate in the United Nations Development Programme, where it won Top 10 Startup. Using patent-pending science, Mitri says she “basically developed a multilayer piece that creates a semi-permeable membrane for water — not just water but any type of material — so the moss keeps itself alive within this design that I made, but I hide it; that was in the aesthetic of the piece.”
Moss Pure’s contemporary pieces of live moss art include framed live moss in different sizes and designs, moss trays, bowls, and 3D geometrical glass containers filled with moss, succulents, and cacti. The containers were featured on Oprah’s “Graduation Gifts They’ll Actually Use” list in 2023, growing the company’s customer base overnight.
“The live moss, the frame material, the air filter, and the scientific living environment are all at least 95% made of eco-friendly materials,” says Mitri. Moss Pure creations require no watering, sunlight, or maintenance, since the moss captures, absorbs, and feeds on the particles, pollutants and nutrients in the air around it. They can self-sustain and live indefinitely.
“I wanted to create pieces that actually improve your air quality, so I designed it for anything that causes allergies or asthma, cancer causing compounds, bacteria, and viruses — those are the core pollutants — because I have really really bad allergies in my family and I have a family history of cancer as well, so these hit really personally to me,” adds Mitri.
Moss Pure’s air filter passed certified air quality results in a U.S. lab, which is exceptional, as no other plant-based product has these results, Mirti says. “Every square foot of Moss Pure captures 300,000 ppm of co2 and 1.5 million pollutant particles including allergens, dust, pet dander, wildfire, smoke, metals, bacteria, viruses, toxic gasses, and more.” The living environment Mitri creates for the moss keeps it alive by making the pollutants in the air and the moisture in the air the food source and the water source for the moss, she explains.
Moss Pure custom pieces have been installed in numerous businesses and professional offices. For the corporate office of Bevi, a Boston-based company providing smart water coolers as an alternative to traditional bottled water, Moss Pure created nine installations in collaboration with ChopValue, which transforms used chopsticks into furniture and other home goods. The company made frames for Moss Pure’s pieces from 2,052 recycled chopsticks.
Mitri just unveiled her latest piece, a massive outdoor logo moss wall for The Big Dam Waterpark in Texarkana, Arkansas, and she’s been contacted by companies in Denmark, Dubai, and beyond for future installations.
“First and foremost, I make products that are really, really cool and have a cool aesthetic, but because I can control the design of it, I decided to make something more sustainable,” Mitri says. “But I also wanted you to be able to have an environmental feel to it without even knowing it. I wanted it to be normal. I want sustainability to be normal.”
I’d love to print some of the articles but since there are very large colourful images that would use all my ink — and I don’t know how to print without including them — what do you suggest? we aren’t all wizards at tech, like some.