MOXY Project: Restoration of Our Cultural Heritage
A New Technology for Cultural Heritage Restoration
What is the MOXY project?
In 2022, the European Commission awarded an Horizon Europe research grant to the project MOXY: Green Atmospheric Plasma Generated Monoatomic Oxygen Technology for Restoration of the Works of Art.
The MOXY project brings together 10 partners from 7 EU Member States: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Sweden, alongside various organisations. It began in 2022 and will run until 2026.
It brings together experts in plasma physics, green chemistry, heritage science, and conservation from 10 European research organisations, museums, SMEs, and NGOs across 6 EU Member States to introduce "space environment atomic oxygen" technology to the field of cultural heritage conservation.
The development of such a technology is now crucial to preserve cultural heritage assets, which represent an invaluable and irreplaceable resource for humanity. Today, this heritage is threatened by pollution, vandalism, and contaminants from fires.
The MOXY project brings together scientists to explore alternatives to current cleaning methods that rely on solvents, which can damage artistic materials and harm both health and the environment.
MOXY: An Innovation for the Future
The MOXY project represents a true innovation in restoration and cleaning methods. This Horizon project aims to develop a new sustainable, contactless cleaning technology based on atomic oxygen to remove contaminants without risks to health or the environment.
The objective is to "realise a radically new approach to cleaning cultural heritage material assets, based on atomic oxygen, enabling practitioners in various conservation fields to safely remove highly problematic contaminants through contactless, non-mechanical, solvent-free, and liquid-free action, with no risks to health or the environment, and without waste", according to the MOXY press release.
Artworks and cultural heritage buildings must be protected from the deposition of carbon-based contaminants resulting from pollution, transportation, fires, wildfires, and vandalism. Many porous and fragile materials, which make up many artworks, often cannot tolerate "wet" or "dry" mechanical cleaning methods using currently available techniques, which frequently involve chemicals and methods with harmful impacts.
The lack of green technologies makes sustainable conservation of cultural heritage difficult. The urgent need for ecological approaches has been highlighted for over a decade and was included in the 2014 Melbourne Declaration of ICOM-CC, but real progress could be faster.
The role of life cycle assessment in the MOXY project.
The work of MOXY aims to combine the extremely short lifespan of oxygen atoms on the surface with their high chemical reactivity as the basis for the contactless removal of carbon-based contaminants that deteriorate cultural heritage items – soot, combustion products, hydrocarbons, and organic compounds that literally degrade in nature, producing only small quantities of volatile by-products, such as CO2 and water vapour H2O.
The first year of the MOXY project concluded at the end of 2023 with a consortium meeting. This meeting took place on 8th and 9th November 2023, in Amsterdam. WeLOOP organised a eco-design workshop for the creation of the atomic oxygen device that will be used to clean works of art and cultural heritage.
During the eco-design workshop, all project participants from diverse backgrounds took part in a brainstorming session to identify the key technological, environmental, social, and economic challenges of the atomic oxygen device's lifecycle.
The initial results of an environmental hotspot analysis were presented by WeLOOP, which had already led to different design choices in the prototyping of the device. From this first phase of brainstorming, concrete action plans emerged, which will allow for the optimisation of the performance across all pillars of sustainable development.
What's next?
As the MOXY partners study the most promising technical use cases of the device based on substrate material and type of contamination, WeLOOP will prepare a comparative LCA to compare the performance of the atomic oxygen device with other cleaning methods. Over the next years of the project, WeLOOP will also evaluate the social and economic parameters.
MOXY is not the only project to have received Horizon Europe funding in the field of green cultural heritage conservation. A Green Cluster has been created, including the projects GoGreen and GREENART, in which WeLOOP will contribute to a shared understanding and evaluation of the definition of "green" cultural heritage conservation.