Pulaski startup aims to turn pollutants into profit

Where some people see pollutants, Steve Critchfield sees the potential for profit and to improve the environment.

As founder and president of Pulaski-based MOVA Technologies, Critchfield developed and patented a filter about the size of a refrigerator that captures selected air pollutants and breaks them into byproducts that can be sold and reused. It’s based on technology developed by the late Arthur Squires, a Virginia Tech professor who worked on the Manhattan Project.

MOVA started out aiming to get into the competitive market for developing carbon capture technology, but as its board and backers became impatient for returns, Critchfield says, the company pivoted to producing an ammonia-capture filter for the poultry industry, its first product launch.

Instead of exhausting highly soluble airborne ammonia from chicken waste into the air, where it can wind up polluting waterways through runoff, poultry farms can capture the ammonia with MOVA’s filters and turn it into fertilizer.

Following a successful pilot test with a poultry producer in Delaware this spring, MOVA is planning an early 2025 rollout for the ammonia-capture filters.

That’s not to say that MOVA is getting away from carbon capture, though. After completing a $2 million seed round in September and receiving about $500,000 in federal and state grants to develop and test its technology, MOVA announced in October it will collaborate on a carbon dioxide capture program with Pulaski-based Vegg Inc., a controlled environment agriculture startup for which Critchfield is the largest shareholder.

MOVA’s industrial-sized point-source filters will capture carbon dioxide from the air to feed plants that Vegg will grow at an indoor, vertical farm being established in Pulaski’s former Jefferson Elementary School building, which Vegg bought last year for $100,000.

“It’s like we’re just harvesting [carbon dioxide] and hooking the spigot up to the building,” says Vegg co-founder Luke Allison, also director of advancement and stockholder relations for MOVA.

MOVA’s innovation comes as Virginia moves toward its state mandate of net-zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2050.

Unlike carbon storage systems designed to indefinitely capture carbon emissions, MOVA’s filters are intended to recycle carbon dioxide for industrial uses, Critchfield says.

If the pilot with Vegg is successful, Critchfield sees possibilities for expanding beyond indoor farming into serving industries like bottling and brewing: “No more carbon dioxide will need to be created. That’s huge for global warming.” 

Freelance writer Paul Bergeron contributed to this story.