Land is a precious resource, especially in major metropolitan areas. In almost every city in the United States, demand on land is increasing from manufacturing, logistics, and housing — while at the same time, hundreds of thousands of plots of land around the country sit unused.
Why aren’t we putting that land to use? Simply put: These pieces of land are contaminated.
There are upwards of half a million sites across the U.S. polluted with substances toxic to human and environmental health, and are barred from development until they are cleaned. This includes EPA designated-Superfund sites, decommissioned military bases, gas stations, manufacturing sites, airports, areas polluted with runoff from crop fertilizer or hazardous substances from industrial production, and much more.
There is no single, comprehensive data source that tracks the full extent of contaminated land in the U.S., so visualizing the entire scope of the problem requires a mix of federal, state, and local data sources. Even in the nine-county Bay Area region of California, long known for its environmental stewardship, has 2,500 sites marked as contaminated:
As these plots of land languish unused, dangerous substances like heavy metals, oil, and synthetic chemicals leach into the soil. This pollutes groundwater and natural waterways, causing significant harm to human health ranging from cancer to autoimmune disorders to infertility.
Yet, as pervasive as this problem is, the vast majority of contaminated land stays that way. Today, environmental remediation projects are expensive, time-consuming one-offs that are inherently not repeatable. Often, the solution is simply digging up contaminated soil and shipping it to hazardous waste landfills across state lines — if it’s done at all. For example, California alone sends hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated material to Utah and Nevada every year.
Remedy aims to change this reality. The company’s first product is a system to destroy toxic contaminants in soil with mechanical chemistry — a process of physically breaking down the contaminants inside what is essentially an industrial-scale blender. The company, which was formed in 2023 in partnership with Eclipse Venture Equity and is launching with $11M in funding, has built a modular, mobile decontamination system designed to be deployable on contaminated sites in a matter of hours — versus the months or years it currently takes environmental management companies to set up a treatment project.
“There’s basically an infinite supply of contaminated land, but current remediation methods can’t scale to meet that demand,” says Remedy Scientific CEO and Founder Randol Aikin. “You drive by any fenced-in old gas station or a warehouse with a caved-in roof and wonder why it hasn’t been torn down and had something built — it’s because it’s contaminated and nothing is being done about it.”
Remedy’s machine uses ball-milling and steel blades to break down the molecular bonds of toxic substances, producing a fine, contaminant-free dust that can be safely disposed of, or used for backfill. The machinery uses sensors and connected software to measure the contaminant levels and calibrate any part of the remediation process — time, power, the type of chemical additives used — to specific soil and its toxins. This closed-loop system actively learns as it is working, constantly adapting to changes in the soil and adjusting treatment needs. Remedy intends to develop a suite of decontamination products for a range of use cases, with each system able to be easily brought to the project site on a flatbed truck.
“We didn’t set out to build one piece of machinery tailored to just one toxin. We set out to productize environmental remediation so it can be done anywhere and everywhere, quickly,” says Aikin. “Today, the rate at which we can do environmental clean up is gated by the number of trained environmental scientists in the world. We want to be limited only by the number of automated systems we can ship.”
The company’s first target is per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), synthetic chemicals found at contaminated airports, air force bases, and manufacturing sites across the country. Since they do not break down easily in the environment and accumulate in the body over time, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals,” and have been linked to various diseases, including cancer, liver damage, and thyroid disease. Over time, Remedy will build out a suite of decontamination systems tailored for different use cases.
PFAS is the first target due to its abundance, as well as urgency from the federal government to remove it. In 2022, the National Defense Authorization Act ordered the Department of Defense to stop incinerating PFAS — meaning mechano-chemical processing like Remedy’s ball-milling system is the only destructive method for removing PFAS from soil at scale in order to make a meaningful difference. In 2024, the EPA officially designated PFAS as a hazardous material, further incentivizing the DoD (which has the largest share of PFAS-contaminated land) and major chemical corporations to clean up their sites.
“PFAS is an obvious first target. The toxicity is very bad, the liability is very high, and the market is not well-served by scalable solutions,” says Aikin.
In addition to the drastically reduced time it takes for Remedy to set up and start cleaning soil, it’s significantly less expensive than the standard course of action. Digging and hauling hazardous substances to landfills costs on average $489/ton according to the government, but can be substantially more. Remedy’s product will be priced at a considerably lower rate.
After less than a year of R&D, Remedy has scaled its destructive treatment process for PFAS in soil by over 1000x. After an initial pilot deployment this month, Remedy will be delivering on its first paid government contract later this year, and aim to move quickly onto other DoD sites next year. From there, the possibilities are (unfortunately) endless, from defunct paper mills and old gas stations to airports and textile factories.
Eclipse’s core focus is building the New Economy via transforming physical industries with game-changing hardware and advanced software. Remedy epitomizes this focus, and we believe they have the right vision, scale-up strategy, and extensive experience building mechanically complex systems to make environmental remediation a mainstream industry. Randol holds a PhD in physics and has spent his professional career leading sensing technology and systems engineering at companies including Apple, Uber, and Ike. He has built an incredible team with deep experience across complex chemical and mechanical disciplines, as well as environmental law and policy.
Clean, usable land is at the crux of any effort to revitalize our cities. As we push for more urbanization, expanded electrification, and a range of industrial revitalization, such as the resurgence of onshore manufacturing, the need for remediation and redevelopment will increase. Remedy is the only company positioned to meet that demand.
“Any story about housing development, infrastructure improvements, semiconductor manufacturing, rare earth metals, you name it, it all comes down to land use, and all of those things have to contend with environmental contaminants,” says Aikin. “Technologies like automation and sensing are the only way we break through the false choice of accelerating industrial development and protecting human health.”
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