Engineered Poplars to clean contamination sites

[openspaceman]

Bio-acumulation is nothing new. Birch and Sycamore are used down here by AI et al for mine spoil decon. Many bioacumulators inc soft plants are seeded and harvested with quite considerable heavy metal uplift.

 

Way back in the days of flower power a mate was studying shellfish in the Tawe estuary for a degree. This river collected run off from all the mines up the valley that had been sources for lead, tin zinc etc.

 

He reckoned that the shells were within an order of magnitude of being smelted to recover the heavy metals.

[MATTMOSS]

Poplars must be one of the best for the cleaning up the environment, werent all the Black Poplars planted around the northwest in the early 1900's to help clean the pollution from the air that all the cotton mills were producing?

Shame that they have all mostly been lost to Venturii now.

[RobArb]

Poplars must be one of the best for the cleaning up the environment, werent all the Black Poplars planted around the northwest in the early 1900's to help clean the pollution from the air that all the cotton mills were producing?

Shame that they have all mostly been lost to Venturii now.

 

There's still quite a few hanging on though, seen some nice specimens out and about in Manchester:biggrin:

 

Sent from my Galaxy S2

[-Mikey-]

Thanks for the extra info Pedroski; I'll make a brew and have a read later!!

My personal Interest lies more with the engineering for a specific end use (and greater efficiency). It is exciting to see a (semi-) natural solution to some of the environmental problems we are realising. Along with other developments like I-Tree this can surely provide a better future for urban planting and tree management.

Other than improved environmental aspects it would be interesting to see an improvement to maximum sizes (big fan of forest giants); just a shame I'd never get to climb any in my lifetime!!

[HCR]

Very positive. Shame they won't be doing much remediation in the winter...

 

But as has been said, this is development rather than innovation. Even the Victorians did it. It gets my vote though and should, in my opinion, be more widely used as a supplementary technology.