Money That Grows On Trees 268
parvez1 submits this piece about a process that uses plants to soak up and accumulate contaminants - and gold - from near gold-mining sites. Then the plants are harvested for their metal content. The plants aren't bio-engineered - he's taking advantage of the natural tendency for certain plants to accumulate heavy metals.
Baked.. (Score:5, Informative)
pre-Beyond2000 ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Baked.. (Score:3, Funny)
Mmmmh.. Bananas... The yellow gold!
Lead contamination (Score:5, Interesting)
This was about 5 years ago, and she said this process has already been in use at that time.
Re:Baked.. (Score:5, Interesting)
People have known for a long time that animals and plants tend to concentrate minerals. Some good. Some bad.
Fish apparently are very good at concentrating mercury from the ocean. Fish that eat fish that eat fish become interesting little mobil chemical factories. This a good reason why estuaries and oceans aren't good places to dispose waste. The fish will concentrate the waste and give it back to us in tasty McFish sandwiches. For that matter, the food chain is pretty good at concentrating heavy metals in the belly of beasts. This has been known for quite a while.
The reason we need to clean up tailings piles is because humans are really good at concentrating chemicals.
One of the most interesting chemical/animal relations that I've heard of lately is that salmon bring up a great deal of nitrogen from the ocean. They fertilize the forests that provide the nutrients for baby salmon. Blocking the salmon run with damns decreases the value of the wood in the forest.
Re:Baked.. (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds efficient to me.
British steel use reed beds. (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't just the reeds themselves which clean the water, they support microbiological colonies which break down organic and inorganic toxins and fix heavy metals in the soil keeping them out of the ground water.
*Ding!* (Score:4, Funny)
OMFGLOL i kill myself.
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
And why would that be?
Understand: tree-huggers is your name for them. Granted there are probably some neo-druids in the bunch who would get pissed off. However, what most of these folks (both people who want to preserve forests and those who want to keep mining regulated) are concerned about is the fouling of habitat. Just like hunting enthusiasts or fishermen (like me) are, but for different reasons.
It's the shameless fouling of habitat, leaving somebody else to clean up after them, that gets the "anti-mining" (your word for them again) people pissed. It's when the clean water regulations are rewritten so that miners can dump their tailings in streams that gets them pissed. Hell, that gets me pissed, but I'm not anti-mining. Mine all the hell you want but clean up after yourself and keep your crap out of the public's way. By your logic I'm anti-shitting because I don't want you to take a dump the sidewalk in front of my house.
Most environmentalists (including many who are engineers) want to create closed cycles (recycling get it?) in which waste products are reprocessed into goods. Like this guy is doing.
So, no, there aren't going to be many "tree huggers" objecting to this.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm getting pretty sick of right wing nutcases who "score points" with each other with arguments that are just plain stupid. I don't have a problem with guys like Bob Dole or John McCain who are intelligent and principled conservative. For chrissakes there's nothing that shows what a sorry state the Republican party is in than the fact they could have had McCain and they chose Bush (oh crap now you really got me going).
Getting back to this post, it's an intellectually slimy exercise: make an incredibly stupid argument, and dress it up as a joke. This is Rush's excuse when he's caught saying something that is utterly stupid: he's not a political commentator, he's an entertainer. Understand I have no problem with making a political point with a joke, but if you want to make a political point, have something at least minimally logical to say, no matter how you say it. Just because something is a joke doesn't man it has to be stupid. You don't get a fricken pass if you say your bullshit with a smirk.
I'm sick and tired of truth getting trashed, and I'm not gotting to let that crap pass anymore. Sorry to the rest of your folks, you didn't need to hear that.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, no can do. You see, in a democracy, there's nothing I can do on one hand to keep those people from expressing their opinions, and on the other from keeping the right wing character assasination machine from taking the opinion of the "loonies" and making it stand for the whole
Please, take back the environmental movement from the loonies.
Impossible to do dir, since it never belonged to them.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
Anti-progress sums it all up. Here is an interview [pbs.org] with a psychologist who studied a certain breed of environmentalist (anti-nuke) and describes their psychopathologies.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Your entire argument can be summed up as follows:
"Don't ascribe to an entire group a property that applies to only a subset of it."
Don't try to be clever. You're not.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
Therefore every every member of A has property P.
Actually, there is this thing called statistics which basically states:
1) If C is a simple random sample of the members of A, and
2) C is sufficiently large to be representative of A, then
3) Conclusions drawn from sample C are reflective of A
And in such a situation, the statement according to the laws of logic, if your argument is valid, it is likewise valid for any values of
Re:Heh (Score:2, Interesting)
Greenspirit [greenspirit.com] is not too far off. It's by one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, I believe, who stopped liking Greenpeace. His "environmentalism for the 21st century" is all about benefitting humans.
In any case, I could replace "environmental group" with "group" in your question and have the answer still be "no".
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, I just stick to volunteering at my local arboretum.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
The important question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The important question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The important question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, the low gold content in alluvial fans, downwash from the Chocolate Mountains outside Glamis Calif. never interested the gold-rushers of the 1800s, but since heap and vat leaching was introduced in the 1970s, probably more gold has come out of that mine than in all the placers in the north. Last I checked (it was a while ago) they had pulled more than half a billion dollars worth of gold out of there. Larger mines exist in Nevada and Montana.
The bio process is being refined because the mining companies fear tightening environmental regulations will result in the eventual banning of the cyanide-based processes.
Re:The important question is... (Score:3, Informative)
microbial mining [spaceship-earth.org]
microbial mining and manufacturing [globalcommunity.org]
Re:The important question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't sound like they are making too much money off the process, rather that it is simply self-sufficient.
The gold harvested from the process pays for the cleanup - with money left over for training in sustainable agriculture.
I suppose they sould end the training and end up with some sort of profit.
Re:The important question is... (Score:3, Informative)
What the article does say is that he gets his money back. The harvested metals pay for the cleanup. It might not be a huge profit, the article doesn't mention anything about that, but at least it appears self-sustaining.
Re:There's another question (Score:3, Insightful)
The ashes from burning the harvested plants {which does put CO2 back into the atmosphere, but only as much as the plants took out while growing -- and you can do something useful with the heat you generate, thereby saving you from having to burn a quantity of fossil fuel which would have produced the same amount of CO2 without taking it out first} will contain the metallic elements absorbed by the plant, either in their pure states {if they are particularly unreactive, e.g. gold} or as o
In other News... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In other News... (Score:3, Funny)
If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:2)
recycled Levis.
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:2)
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:2)
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:3, Informative)
And cotton grows on. . . Chevys?
It's a plant fiber, just like wood. Paper is felted plant fibers. Cloth is spun and woven fibers (plant or otherwise). Paper money is paper and has absolutely no resemblence to cloth, other then the fact that they're both made of plant fibers. It is the processing that determines whether said plant fibers are paper or cloth. You simply have an ingrained way of thinking cotton=cloth=blue jeans, wood=pulp=paper.
And you can
Re:If money doesn't grow on trees... (Score:2)
Oh puh-lease. (Score:4, Offtopic)
Point One: The USA is the only *country* in the world with the name America in it, so far as google and I know,
Point Two: The people of a country always have a descriptive name related to the name of said country. For example: Russian, French, Italian, Canadian, etc.
Final Point: Would you really have us called 'YouEssAyyans'? 'Staters'? 'United People'? What -- seriously, can you think of a more descript name for the citizens of the US of America?
"America" does indeed describe to continents, and yes, most, ahem, Americans know it. If there was country called 'The United Factions of Europe', you can damn well guarantee they'd call them Europeans, and everyone would know what they meant. As a matter of fact, I have a friend who's South African. No one questions the legitimacy of this description of his homeland, even though there are certainly other countries that could be called South African (the continent). Everyone, everywhere in the world knows what someone means when you say 'American' (and yes, it's usually conjures negative connotation).
Anyway, descriptors of continents often connote ethnic background, which isn't applicable here at all. 'South American' suggests a clear ethnic origin, as does 'European', 'Asian', and 'African'. But what does 'North American' suggest? The only valid use of 'North American' is for discussions of geography, in which the word 'continent' would usually be applied anyway. I can *absolutely* say that if you're in Mexico and guarantee something with American money, they won't be expecting pesos.
That would be great (Score:3, Interesting)
if Gold was actually scarce, the reality is it is not uncommon at all, why go through a complicated refining process to extract grams when the same amount of extraction energy would be better put to extracting tonnes
Re:That would be great (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That would be great (Score:2)
Re:That would be great (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That would be great (Score:2)
Gold is Where You Find It (Score:5, Informative)
It's true that gold is not uncommon. My grandfather, a rockhound, used to observe that gold is very widely distributed around the world. He'd say: "Where is gold? Gold is where you find it."
What makes this plant-based reclamation process valuable is that it allows people who own low-grade deposits (e.g. mine tailings) to recover the gold. Say I'm a mine owner, and I've dug up all the gold on my land. I'm in the gold-mining business, but now my business will die, for lack of gold. Sure there's more gold in the world -- but can I afford to buy another mine? If not, I can at least use phyto-remediation to extract some gold from my otherwise useless mine tailings.
Besides, the main point of phyto-remediation to remove toxic metals from the environment. The process may not generate enough gold excite the envy of Croesus, but it does pay for the toxic-metal cleanup
-kgj
Re:Gold is Where You Find It (Score:5, Informative)
That's true, but misleading.
All elements have what we call "crustal abundance". However, that does not mean that you can profitably (key word here) extract aluminum or gold or whatever you're mining for unless natural processes have concentrated the element many times higher than crustal abundance. There is, for example, gold found in the human body. But, like seawater, the relative amounts are so small that there is currently no profitable mining/extraction method.
As for gold, the fact is that gold nuggets are far more rare than diamonds. Most large nuggets mined before 1992 have been melted down. This is part of the reason a gold nugget is worth 2x-3x or more of the spot price for gold. And make no mistake, gold is used as a medium of exchange, perhaps not at your corner fuel station, but certainly between investors, countries, and others. Especially people who don't trust the fake money printed out by governments, which rely soley on the perception of value. Disclaimer: IAAM (I am a miner).
I'd love to see something like this coupled with something like this: Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets [alaska-freegold.com], since I am thinking that only the smallest particles would be recovered by the corn method.
-cp-
Re:Gold is Where You Find It (Score:2)
Thanks for the informative post -- good info.
Regarding my grandf
Re:That would be great (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not so much about getting every last bit of gold through an involved process.. The process is there to clean up the ground from all the contaminants from the mining, so the land can eventually be used for food crops.
Been doing that already... (Score:5, Funny)
Just be careful, some of them have bee hives.
Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:2)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:3, Informative)
Platinum is more rare and scarse than gold and silver, which gives it a much higher value per ounce.
Prices are defined by supply and demand on the open market. Latest prices can be seen here:
Metals [barchart.com]
gold is backed by... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:4, Informative)
And yes, the (asian) Indians do eat it. They pound either Gold or Silver into an extremely thin foil, then wrap their medicines in it, and swallow it. Likewise, in the Bible the children of Israel had to eat their golden false god calf.
Gold is also especially useful as a retirement and security account for Indian women. Their jewelry doubles as cash, if need be.
Gold is still valuable. On the other hand, one might ask what the US dollar is backed by. Some would say "the US economy". More knowledgable people might perhaps say "the fact that OPEC takes dollars". Yet others would say "the Japanese economy, which buys up dollars to obtain a favorable balance of trade." My brother would say "the requirement by the US government for us to pay our taxes in dollars." I'm not sure... but I'd bet that Gold has more inherent value than US dollars.
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:5, Informative)
Sadburger
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:3, Informative)
They're designed to be evocative of the original eagle series from the 1800s through ~1930. Quarter Eagles were worth $2.50, half eagles were worth $5, eagles were worth $10, and double eagles (produced for a short time only) were $20.
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:5, Informative)
In 1975, it was made legal again to own gold bullion. But money it ain't.
France, too (Score:5, Informative)
but there is a more interesting tale from France. In the 1700's, France engaged in the Mississippi Scheme, a stock-jobbing plan based on expected returns from the Louisiana territories.
It had the classic effect, most recently repeated in the Internet boom and crash.
At the height of the Mississippi boom, the stock in the Mississippi corporation was a better currency than the franc, and was used as the national medium of exchange.
When it turned out that nothing was really happening in Mississippi at all, the paper money suddenly became worthless, and everyone tried to convert it into gold, then sneak that gold out of the country.
As a result, the king ordered that gold be illegal as a medium of exchange, and that ownership of more than a pittance was also grounds for confiscation.
When the U.S. prohibited the owning of large amounts of gold, it was entirely different... they wanted to maintain the stability of the metal itself, as the underpinning of the U.S. dollar, rather than suppressing gold ownership entirely.
Don't forget that when the U.S. was on the gold standard, having a dollar MEANT owning gold. That dollar was a certificate for that much from the federal reserve.
Re:France, too (Score:3, Informative)
Sadburger
Re:Is gold even used as money any more? (Score:2, Insightful)
In theory, to use gold as currency, one equates the amount of gold in market with the value of the rest of the goods and services in the market. If both gold mining and resource development are going at the same rate, the value of gold stays approximately the same. However, since there is only a fixed amount of gold on earth, the mining yield would exhaust one day, possibly before other goods and services are exhausted so, especially considering that one can associate value with services as well, not just g
Wow - purple leaves (Score:5, Interesting)
so where can get that chemical spray for the soil? I like to apply some to around here
Re:Wow - purple leaves (Score:2)
Nah. The purple is probably due to the dilute solution (cyanide?) that he's using.
Nuggets (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see it now... (Score:2)
Re:I can see it now... (Score:2)
Let's just hope this plant doesn't have a 'tendency to disrupt carbon-based molecular structures'
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:from the money-for-nothing dept. (Score:2)
So.... (Score:4, Funny)
"Sir, please no squeazing the fruit!"
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
Extraction Method? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Extraction Method? (Score:3, Informative)
There is nitrogen and sulphur in plants, but it comes from the air or from the ground. Nobody cared when it was there before the plants you grew pulled it out, elements don't change into other elements {except in a nuclear reaction which we are not considering here} so why should anyone give a monkey's toss when you pu
Vision & Ingenuity (Score:5, Interesting)
This example in particular is very simple and will have a smaller effect but it can potentially have a very vital effect on those in the region.
Other things like this will come around and some of them are going to have an amazing effect. I can't even define what that invention will be obviously...but maybe someone will someday make the air to electricity machine from Atlas Shrugged?
With computing power slowly ramping up and in some time nano technology being moved to a consumer level in combination with the printing of electronics (if we really even need that...with true control over molecular movements we technically could create whatever we wanted in a nice little microwave or whatever - a la star trek - and it really isn't all that science fiction...its just time and patience and some science)
People could soon be inventing the most amazing things in their own homes on random weekends...each of us will become research and creation experts...
its bright
Re:Vision & Ingenuity (Score:2)
Smoking is Bad for you (Score:5, Informative)
This gets it out of top soil... (Score:5, Insightful)
-matthew
Hitchhiker's Guide? (Score:3, Funny)
They used leaves as money; the only problem was the galloping inflation that was caused by everybody suddenly becoming so rich...
A lot of things do this (Score:4, Informative)
But then we (homo sap. sap.)are good at this: we can accumulate lead in our bones from drinking water or contaminated air, and I believe that mercury too can get collected by the body (gets resorbed in the lower intestine, I think.)
Could this be a legal form of... (Score:2, Funny)
Bioremediation (Score:5, Informative)
There are a couple of things that really come out in the article is this - "First, he treats the contaminated soil with chemicals that break the gold down into water-soluble particles. Then he introduces the crops"
Gold and mercury in the soil is a pretty nasty amalgam - and gold being otherwise so *noble* - so I'm wondering how he's mobilizing it -
The article says the plants had purple leaves - "The plants he harvested had purple leaves because they contained gold nanoparticles" - again not totally breaking news - but he must be using something that can break the gold down *that* small (when there is a lot of gold in mercury, you can literally strain the gold out essentially with a filter like a cheesecloth - that is the technique that is being used by most miners of this sort in the first place.
Then they literally *cook* the amalgam covered pice of gold in a frying pan (though it could be done with nitric acid - or other things to remove the mercury from the surface)
In the process, a lot of mercury ends up spilled - and the residue from the *cook* is dense and fuming - and ends up not far away (like in the soil, the streams, or the miner's brain before too long) - Gold too small to picked up in the straining - In fact any microscale gold has been the subject of pretty intense interest because it is much more abundant than the occasional nugget -
Cyanide leaching is a very common process in areas where there is a lot of sunlight, since the cyanide can break down in holding pools - I highly doubt he would be using any cyanide - even if it could be shown to break down - it would most likely do very poorly on the plant side. Some halide [stanford.edu] - Bromides? Let's hope not. AuCl ion? - That's the most likely - or probably the most hoped for. There really aren't that many things that can dissolve gold - But there are actually quite a few ways to do what is being suggested with plants - here's one using geraniums [newscientist.com].
And for our next project.... (Score:3, Funny)
Self Powering (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no need to move this stuff far, just crack the oil locally for the ethyl and methyl ester fatty acids after you've removed the heavy metals and you could power a diesel power plant which could probably power the whole project and the local village.
Not that new (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing the article does not mention is how many harvests it takes to remove metals and the final concentration left in soil. Neither does it mention the processes effectiveness at removing other harmful metals frequently associated with gold deposits (silver, arsenic, lead, etc.). Metals like mercury and lead have human health and environmental impacts in very low concentrations. I'm not sure I would return this land to farming use without adequate analysis of post-remedial soils, but forestry may well be viable.
Mel Chin did this with "Revival Field" (Score:5, Informative)
Last term at the University of Oregon, we had the conceptual artist Mel Chin [pbs.org] give a lecture on one of his projects entitled "Revival Field". [pbs.org]
It's quite similar to what Chris Anderson is doing in Chile and Brazil. Funded by a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Revival Field was the first experiment in the United States to use plants to absorb toxic metals from the soil. This launched the nation's burgeoning phytoremediation industry, which one business analyst predicts will be a $400 million dollar business by 2005.
I had a plant in college (Score:3, Funny)
What!? (Score:2, Funny)
My Dad is going to get such a punching...
I always wondered... (Score:3, Funny)
They've been doing this in China... (Score:4, Insightful)
Eucalyptus? (Score:2)
And higher up the food chain? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no zoologist/biologist/ environmental impact assessor or environmental engineer but I do know that the concentration of the heavy metals and the likes increases up the food chain, i.e., the herbivores feeding on these plants would suffer from a higher heavy metal concentration which would not even be half as bad as that suffered by the carnivores/omnivores (think local human population) feeding on them...
Now, I'm sure that this person is very knowledgeable and will have tried to make sure that animals aren't able to feed on them, but as any engineer, I'm trained to be skeptical. It strikes me as difficult a thing to ensure, specially in such remote areas as the article mentions (Amazon... might also be of use in somewhere like Zambia/Congo, South-East Asia, Madagascar, etc.).
Furthermore, fast growing imports (shrubs, etc. which I presume would be of use here) could well outgrow the localised regions of the mines and start competing with the indiginous flora. Tropical forests take a long time to rejuvenate and tropical trees have very slow growth rates, which puts them at a sever disadvantage when having to compete against fast growing imports for space and sun...This phenomenon is to be blamed for the disappearance of the local ecosystem from such small tropical islands (e.g. Mauritius, Indian Ocean is one victim that I'm aware of) and so it is something that has to be borne in mind when you want to implement such a scheme.
I hope all of these are/will be factored in whenever such a scheme is to be implemented/ someone tries to "help" Nature recover.
Tiberium! (Score:5, Interesting)
For those of you non-gamer geeks, the basic premise for money production in the game was that there was this plant, tiberium, which would leech minerals from the ground, and you would collect it up, and you'd get a source of funding that you could use to produce troops, tanks, buildings, whatever to take out your opponents.
Of couse, the problem was, that regular troopers were harmed if they went into a tiberium field. [However, they only took damage for moving, in the original game]. Later sequels [eagames.com] introduced a mutant army, who healed if they were in a tiberium field.
Red Alert had crystal fields, which just wasn't the same [they didn't regenerate for one], and C&C Generals uses supply depots -- no concept of tiberium at all. [The best thing about tiberium was that it grew over time, as opposed to being a fixed resource]
Umm... (Score:2)
Brazil nuts, and extracting waste pharmaceuticals (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder if plants can be used to extract waste pharmaceuticals out of the ground, too, such as destruxol [nih.gov] and THC.
Bio gold (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA (Score:2)
Re:It would be great.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It would be great.. (Score:2)
Good point - and if you just happened to be selling to one large corporation that was looking to buy out the whole village - recover these valuable nanoparticles - and then turn it over to another division - or corporation - for agri-business...
The process really doesn't make a lot of sense to speak about in the scale of a tiny plot - Most people just *live with* the threat - even if they have been told about it - rather than move.
Re:Same risks as GM crops (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A victory for children (Score:3, Funny)
Well, if they use the resulting crops to feed the starving children in Africa, the problem should pretty much go away...
(Note - this post for entertainment purposes only. I do not support feeding poisonous foodstuffs to starving African children. However, I do see this as a good way of getting rid of some of those damn holier-than-thou vegetarians)