Gregory Anderson

Industrial development often leaves behind contaminated soil, creating derelict brownfield sites that can remain abandoned for decades. These landscapes pose risks to both communities and the environment, while the high cost of conventional remediation often makes redevelopment uneconomic for local authorities, regeneration companies, and landowners.

Turn Systems is a speculative nature-based remediation service that uses phytoremediation and bioremediation to restore contaminated land through ecological processes. Carefully selected plants, fungi, and microbes are deployed across sites to absorb, stabilise, and break down pollutants commonly found in post-industrial landscapes, including heavy metals and hydrocarbons.

The project combines living systems with emerging monitoring technologies. A distributed network of soil probes and underground electrodes interfaces with plant root systems and mycelial networks, translating biological and electrochemical activity within the soil into real-time environmental data. This allows remediation progress and soil conditions to be monitored in real time, enabling adaptive management of moisture, pH, nutrients, and microbial activity to optimise the remediation process.

Rather than leaving brownfield sites inactive while awaiting redevelopment, Turn Systems reimagines them as active landscapes of ecological recovery. The system positions phytoremediation as an interim land-use strategy that can improve biodiversity, reconnect communities with nature, and contribute towards Net Zero and biodiversity gain targets while preparing land for future development.

Rooted in systems thinking, sustainability, and stewardship, Turn Systems explores how design can work with natural processes to restore damaged landscapes and create new relationships between people, ecology, and the post-industrial city.

From our collaborative project Creating Future Worlds, exhibited at the Advanced Research Centre in Glasgow, our group employed an iterative, research-led approach to develop this design proposal in response to the theme of Planetary Health: Civic. To contextualise the project, we developed a future narrative grounded in current trajectories and plausible environmental and socio-political shifts.

In 2035, the climate crisis reached a critical tipping point, triggering widespread global restructuring and the strict enforcement of the Polluter Pays Principle. This shift led to a dramatic reduction in material extraction, petrochemical manufacturing, and exploitative labour practices, compelling industries to account for the environmental and social costs embedded within global production systems.

As these systemic changes unfolded, society began to confront the toxic material cultures that had long underpinned consumerism and industrial growth. Efforts toward ecological repair became inseparable from broader attempts to restore relationships with land, reconfigure material circulation, and reshape collective attitudes toward consumption and responsibility.

However, despite these transformations, harmful substances remain embedded in everyday life, from synthetic fibres shedding microplastics to toxic dyes and chemical residues persisting within products and environments. This raises a central question: how can society address the long-term legacy of contamination already woven into modern material culture?

In response, the team behind MatterLabs™ emerged to confront the consequences of historic manufacturing practices through a series of remediation technologies and treatment processes. Their work enables society to continue using existing materials and products while actively reducing their environmental and biological harm.