Project description
A new way to get rid of weeds
With concerns about climate change rising in countries worldwide, people are searching for ways to prevent it or at least diminish its impacts on the environment. One of the sectors that have garnered a lot of attention is agriculture, more specifically regarding the use of chemical herbicides against weeds and the damaging effect they have on the environment. This issue, unfortunately, has not seen much progress as far as a solution is concerned. The EU-funded BioWeedControl project is introducing a new approach to combat the problem: instead of using active substances to kill weeds, it will impede their growth by adding a semi-permeable physical layer into the soil.
Objective
"For the past four decades, weeds within agriculture have been mainly controlled through chemical herbicides but their widespread use has put great pressure on the environment, raised the number of herbicide-resistant species and partly even threatened human health. Increasing legislation, banning of chemical herbicides and opposition from farmers and citizens are forcing the agricultural industry to quickly find alternative solutions. Despite the growing demand for chemicals free herbicides, specifically in large scale row crops, today no solution has been adapted on larger scale within the market. Furthermore, no new mode of action for herbicides has been introduced since the early 1980s.
Bind-X is an award-winning start-up company with the vision to improve sustainability, profitability and innovation within the agricultural industry. Bind-X offers a radically different approach to prevent weed growth. Instead of the use of an active substance to kill weeds, ""BioWeedControl” impedes weed growth by inducing a mechanical/physical layer in the soil. Based on a bio-geochemical process Bind-X technology induces a semi-permeable layer within the soil matrix. Its weed prevention performance has already been demonstrated in multiple field tests on several specialty crops in cooperation with relevant partners in the industry. With this project, Bind-X is adapting its formulations for row crop applications and scaling up its production processes to achieve target costs and application volumes.
Bind-X offers a highly efficient solution to prevent weed growth, contributing towards removing thousands of tonnes of chemicals from our food chain and therewith to a more sustainable production of food. This project will further reduce the time-to-market, enable quicker international expansion and increase the company’s lead over competition. At the same time, the commercialisation of BioWeedControl will allow to generate 37 highly qualified jobs in Bind-X until 2023"
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
82152 Planegg-Martinsried
Germany
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.