Seeker we should just use ac induction to heat heavy metals so we don’t have to waste years and money creating plant heavy metal industry. And the smoke can be caught and be collected as dust till u have enough to create dust bricks combined with water
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages! facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/ www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
I hope that the main take-away from this pandemic is that we as humans are subject to nature, and that climate change deniers realize that we aren't invincible. Sustainability must be the goal for our world economy, the one that comes after our current economic depression. Godspeed, everyone, stay safe.
The single biggest effect the pandemic is having is in demonstrating that a big portion of humanity is able to change on a dime. And despite this sea-change life goes on. A secondary surprise is in how quickly our environment responds to pandemic changes. Air pollution in major cities is way down. Those opposed to action against climate change spoke often of how action would bring devastation to civilization. Those same believed that humanity's role in the environment was tiny if any role at all. The pandemic has shown that civilization is much more resilient than they imagined and our environment can respond dramatically to changes in human behaviour.
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages! facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/ www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
"The Malaysian part of Borneo" I see your power move to dodge angry comments from Malaysians in general and Sabahans in particular wrt to pronounciation of Sabah.
@Julian alternatively we end up with massive plantations of the plants over vast areas which cause the same shockingly bad effects on the environment that palm oil plantations have created. Honestly traditional mining so long as the land is properly restored afterwards is probably more environmentally friendly.
@Julian This is our actual project ! check our pages ;) ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages! facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/ www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages! facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/ www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
I'm a PhD student working with Brassica juncea and other wild relatives. I had no idea of this! You're such a source of inspiration, I'm going to share this with all my colleagues!
Years ago, I heard that Cannabis (hemp) was being being used in separate experiments to absorb heavy metals in Chernobyl and a mine in Colorado.. I haven't seen anything since. But if these experiments were successful, a fast growing plant like hemp could be extremely useful in phytomining. Right?
yes cannabis is a hyperaccumulator likes to take up heavy metals from the soil, so just a warning to all you smokers out there known where your stuff is coming from cheap fertilizers tend to have higher heavy metals, which make its way in to your bub.
Traditional mining pollutes, these techniques would be incredible to implement for example to recover the soils of the mines where for example they are used to remove the products to make the electric car, it seems fascinating to me that Seeker can investigate to give sustainable solutions in all its industrial process to make the electric car.
Conifers, particularly spruce trees, love iron. When I was a kid, my neighbor was a landscaper and use to tell me all sorts of trick for starting and caring for different plants. When he helped us remove a dead spruce from the property, we got the digging iron stuck in a wire cage. He told us that evergreens like a lot of iron so a lot of landscapers will leave the cage around the root ball and just cut up the burlap through the wire. Back in the old days they would collect bent and discarded nails from jobs on new construction properties and throw a handful down in the hole of any pine fir, spruce or holly they would plant.
This isn't exactly sustainable though because there's still only a finite amount of metal in the ground. We need to fund materials research so we can find viable alternatives to heavy metals.
@@justinmusic1296 Or genetically modify plants to have thick strong and long roots. I understand that it will not replace mining but still it can reduce our dependence on mining
There is really no reason to be concerned about the amount of minerals available, we have massive reserves of almost all types. Hell, Australia on its own has enough to supply the world with all but maybe one mineral for the rest of the century. We have also only scratched the surface of this planet so we would be unlikely to run out for many thousands of years, but we are already moving towards mining in space which in human terms is basically an endless resource so there won't ever really be a shortage. The only things that cause what get called shortages is wait times for new mines to open due to increased demand (like lithium which there is heaps of but production has taken a long time to catch up with demand).
If you read the articles in the desc you'd have come across this in particular to your point: "Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
You missed one big step in this story, how the metal is removed from th plants and what the final yeald is per ton of plants.Some have misconstrue my comment as being negative but that’s not my intention I am just asking for more information to be able to better understand the whole process.
Exactly, so clear hundreds of thousands of acres to cultivate these plants, thus doing more destruction than traditional mining methods (which are no where near as destructive as this video leads people to believe).
@@iaindowling8993 The harvested biomass is dried and burnt to generate a plant ash called bio-ore, this bio-ore boasts a higher metal content than a conventional ore, which means it needs less space for storage and transport. Also, ‘Bio-ores’ are virtually sulphur-free, and their smelting requires less energy than sulphidic ores. It offers the possibility of exploiting ores or mineralised soils that are uneconomic by conventional mining methods... If you want numbers: Phytomining using Iberis, could produce a net return of $ US 1200/ha with a biomass yield of 10 t/ha containing 0.08% Tl in dry matter. The break-even point (net yield of $ US 500/ha) would require 170 mg/kg (0.017%) Tl in dry matter. Unusual hyperaccumulation (>500 mg/kg dry mass) of thallium (Tl) in Iberis intermedia and Biscutella laevigata (Brassicaceae) from southern France. The Iberis contained up to 0.4% Tl (4000 mg/kg) in the whole-plant dry matter and the Biscutella over 1.5%. On many ultramafic soils, Berkheya coddii can yield over 20 t/ha with a Ni concentration of 1% in the dry matter... If you're unaware, that's a far higher t/ha overhead than mining. I'll point you to some research papers: www.researchgate.net/publication/223106506_Phytomining_A_Review www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652608000838
If harvesting metal from waste dumps isn't profitable/is barely profitable I feel like this is the sort of thing that won't catch on (at least not for decades). There seems to be a lot of lowering hanging fruit in recycling metals. Definitely an interesting video though, topics like these are what I love reporting on.
How is that this video doesn't have billions of views...😤 Such an interesting and revolutionary topic 👏👏👏👏 Let's hope the industry takes note of this new technology👌👌👌👌
My thoughts exactly. Unless its trees, the roots would not go very deep. Even trees have limited root depth. So probably not good for mining, but it could Maybe be useful for ground level pollution if it hasn't been there long enough to sink lower than the roots. Hmmm probably not though. Rain would wash it lower than the root depth pretty quickly, like just one significant rainfall.
Yeah, you're right. It's only limited to the root absorption zone of the plant. This can be increased through symbiotic mycorhizal fungi interactions. She doesn't go into much of the drawbacks of Phytomining. Such as the nutrient levels of those soils. Metalliferous soils usually do poorly in sustaining plant growth so, extensive fertilization and irrigation is required. It is usually used for soils that have less than the required metal levels for conventional mining like serpentine soils. So it's more of an alternative for the mining of regions with relatively lower metal content or contamination sites from mining
Love this video and the excitement! It's so cool to see that we might be on the cusp of technologies and practices that could solve many of our current problems.
Another great Seeker Video, and interesting you've ditched the glasses Maren. Looks good :-) and as always your enthusiasm for your topic is great to see come through.
If the plants are extracting the metals, not creating them, what happens once you've depleted the soil? Seems like the same problem as any other farm except it makes no sense to spray the ground with nickel like you would fertilizer. Pretty cool though.
the USGS has been using bioremediation for decades the clean up the superfund cites. A friend of mine works at one in Sacramento, CA. I am surprised you didn't include any of the vast amounts of examples or studies and instead went with a few new ones as though this was just invented. most trees are amazing bio accumulators as well as many ancient grains like amaranth and cannabis. An amazing study with sunflowers was conducted in Chernobyl with unbelievable results for radiation accumulation.
Really cool .... i went to manhattan museum of science and saw some magnificent metal woods made of various rlements like aluminum, copper, cobalt silicone with various color of woods shown and displays for exhibition... thats is really cool metal farming science never ends
You are a great hope, whatever happens, if they try to get you discouraged as they do, you have the most beautiful hope, you have to have strength, there are corruptions, everywhere don't make that discourage you, you are the most beautiful hope on the planet.
I think this whole filming from home thing is really working out well for Maren. Her natural beauty and intelligence aren't being detracted by that gaudy background they were using before. When coronavirus is done, I'd happily keep this format.
Being a botany student.... It looks like a very cool and productive career opportunity..... Coz a lot of people think that there might me no future in botany....
this is a game changer for sure. we need more solutions like that that clean up our mess and let us reuse all of it, no waste anymore. any other plants that absorb specific elements? maybe this would be how we solve our garbage problem if we can find plants that soak up plastics, oil, and other elements that make up our trash and waste.
There's already a lot of research on various fungi and bacteria that eat a range of plastics and oils... I'm sure we'll genetically modify (as humans always do) the shit out of hyperaccumulating plants for similar purposes.
Being able to farming metals is cool and all but like how metal can be obtained from a said metal farm as hundreds of tonnes of metal can be extracted and refined and purified from one mine , and also how effective and efficient is the farming going to be , if that is supposed to be future of metal industry as the demand is very high and reach even higher ?
large-scale harvesting of plants with concentrations of metal is currently more costly than extracting metals from mines. In the future, as metal prices rise and the yields from mines deplete, this would change. The harvested biomass is dried and burnt to generate a plant ash called bio-ore, this bio-ore boasts a higher metal content than a conventional ore, which means it needs less space for storage and transport. Also, ‘Bio-ores’ are virtually sulphur-free, and their smelting requires less energy than sulphidic ores. Also, it's not meant as a replacement, only as a supplement, the articles in the desc clearly state that. To quote a particular part to your point: "Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
It sounds like an upgrade environmentally speaking. The follow up question is, would you deplete the soil, then the growing stops. Sounds like good innovation.
ok but how much metal per kilogram of plant can we extract, because honestly my instincts tell me is very little, like less than 0.005% which is roughly the percentage of iron in an adult male if my calculations are correct.
These hyperaccumulators for Nickel can be up to 25% dry weight in Nickel. Given, they're the extreme upper end of the spectrum, with most other hyperaccumulators being in the low single digit percents or below 1%, but these trees show that it is possible to concentrate these extremely toxic metals in insane amounts in living tissue, which means once we understand how they deal with it, we can engineer plants to become hyperaccumulators for specific kinds of metals, or to store different metals in different parts of the plant.
@@CMZneu well, that's what I was shown in my plant physiology lecture and a phytopathology lecture, too. And I'm sure there was a source citation on that slide, but I never really had the time to look it up myself. But as I said, that's the extreme outlier from the norm. Most accumulators don't do it in that amount. But, as seen in these plants, it's possible, so why shouldn't we be able to make other pants do it, too?
How economical is that going to be? How efficient would it be to extract all the metal you need to make one beam? Is there going to be a smaller environmental impact using whatever you need to extract the metal ? Don't you need some pretty caustic substances to separate the metal? I've done HVAC for six years and have been farm help most my life. I call mulch minus wood chips
Thanks for letting us know this. But we should remember that everything has it's advantages as well as disadvantages. Hence if we adopt this method then we are sure to find atleast some disadvantages.
When refining or getting the metal out of the plant does it produce waste? Is the refining process for the metal plants environmently devastating like normal metal refining?
This is so fascinating. I study plant and soil science/horticulture and I have never heard of agromining until recently. It seems to have alot of potential.
In Australia we test the leaves of gum trees in order to test for gold deposits in some areas. No clue why any tree would choose to absorb gold, but seems they do in small amounts.
You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
@@Jake12220 indeed, my first thought too , gold is almost completly inert . But gold can be in in trace amouts in seawater aswell .... I've once heard up too 1gr /M³ ?🤔 I already suspected , that plants like mangrove leaves contain a more concentrated seaminerals and trace elements . I don't actualy know , just a gold miners itch 😁? I cerntainly gonna check there site . I can't have enough gold facts , thrown at me ... Grtzz john
@@assaultflamingo2.068 wow , intresting . I don't know what lixivants are (i'm not natively Englisch speaking) , but gonna google it right away 👌👍🏻. If 1m³ of the dryrest contains more than 5 gr of gold ... You already crush average paydirt numbers ... Offcourse it weighs just a fraction . I dont know how many kg a m³ of the plants dry mass weighs ? But 50 kg/M³ , looks like an reasonable mass for plants dry weight . So easly getting the 5 gr/ m³... It all gonna depents how fast they dry to that mass , and how easy or hard it is too extract it ?? Nontheless very intresting ...would love to see a very gold nerdy channel 😊😉😁 Grtzz Johny geerts
*But there is a limitation is that it's roots can't go very deep in the earth but from mining we can extract metals more than 600 meters deep or more.* *But this is very useful for shallow depth and also where mining is not possible. That's amazing....*
If you read the articles you'd have noted this in particular to your point: "Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
I get what you are trying to say, but come on, trees are mostly made out of carbon, the stuff we exhale. I'm not going to feel bad for a thing mostly comprised of car farts, and human breath.
I'm hoping some mining companies are willing to take the gamble needed to start this up on a massive scale to help give the others more incentive to adopt the method.
So what about all the water it would take mine metal this way on a industrial scale? Also I assume the crops need to be changed to a different location when it draws all metal from the ground.
It's cool that it cleans the pollution from melting but Even if the process was 100% efficient the roots cannot go deep enough to supply current nor future demand so you would need more horizontal land instead of digging deep which sounds like a step backwards
Would love it there were plants on the ready people could plant around their house to absorb all the old lead in the ground and be able to cleanse the soil
I think the best ways is to genetically modified a plant so that it can produce metals. Like a plant which make metal fruits or something like that. If we are successful in making such a genetic modification we can avoid complex chemical extraction of metal.
Well Actually I think this is just too good to be true, I mean you can really get metals from plants, but I wonder actually how much energy is needed for doing the process. And actuary separating metals from plants can be troublesome if the concentration is low. Just like the organic peroxide plant, it takes so much effort to get the peroxide out from the plant.
It wouldn't be done for common metals, but for rarer and more expensive metals it'd probably start to make sense. Plus, as humans always do we'll genetically modify the shit out of them, making them more efficient, deeper growing roots, collect other materials etc... I think the biggest use for them would probably be for cleaning up the world, just like the fungi and some bacteria they're breeding that eat plastics and some oils.
The Nickel accumulators shown in this video can be up to 25% Nickel in dry weight. To extract those metals, you need to do the following: harvest the plant, dry it, burn it, dissolve the metals from the ash using strong acids, sediment the metals according to their chemistry (for example by introducing insoluble salts or using electrochemistry). Compared to the amount of energy needed for chemical treatment of ores and melting out and purifying those metals, it's rather tame.
So actually what's we get is probably those metal salts but not the metals. Photos and reactive metals you just need to refine it a little bit but for those reactive metals electrolysis is still absolutely needed
@@alvinkwok587 ores are also nothing but metal salts in the form of minerals. But with those hyperaccumulating plants, you can get a lot of metal with very little chemistry. Also, you don't need to use electrolysis, it's still doable to let those extracted salts dry and then use a highly reactive gas to expell the halogen from the salt, leaving the pure metal. That's also possible in solutions for metals that don't easily react with water, or I think there also some possibilities in organic solvents...
Wow finally we have some experiments in mining metals and absorbing heavy metals in the soil which are leached through plantation which has double effect absorbing metal from soil and polluting gases from air wonderful....
Turns out that all hyperaccumulators are on a spectrum of how much they can absorb, meaning they can be engineered to increase the absorbed amount and speeding up cleaning/farming.
Stuff degrades still, for the most part we would be displacing it. A large target for where this could be farmed is at our existing landfills and old mines.
Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops.
There already are... You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
Yeah, but what is the yield? What is the added cost? And in general soil has a finite amount of any nutrient, so how much of it can be extracted until it's depleted?
If you read the articles you'd have some idea then, but to answer a few for you though... The sap can hold upto 1/4 of the target substance... That'd be dry-weight, btw. There'd be R&D cost, but otherwise far less overheads than traditional mining. It's not meant to be a replacement, only a supplement. As for nutrients and depletion.... It wouldn't be too far from traditional farming practices, when between seasons you use Cover crops to prevent erosion and mineral leeching, fix soil nitrogen, increase living organic matter etc. Being able to farm the same land for decades. You're only taking out the materials you want, metals etc, and effectively return the rest, and even improve certain aspects of the soil.
Also to quote from the articles in relation to your questions... "Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
Phytomining using Iberis, could produce a net return of $ US 1200/ha with a biomass yield of 10 t/ha containing 0.08% Tl in dry matter. The break-even point (net yield of $ US 500/ha) would require 170 mg/kg (0.017%) Tl in dry matter. Unusual hyperaccumulation (>500 mg/kg dry mass) of thallium (Tl) in Iberis intermedia and Biscutella laevigata (Brassicaceae) from southern France. The Iberis contained up to 0.4% Tl (4000 mg/kg) in the whole-plant dry matter and the Biscutella over 1.5%. On many ultramafic soils, Berkheya coddii can yield over 20 t/ha with a Ni concentration of 1% in the dry matter... If you're unaware, that's a far higher t/ha overhead than mining.
Even if we did this, we'd still have to eventually dig up all the plants and soil and replant the plants at a deeper depth since the roots can only reach so far into the soil. It's not like the metal grows on plants, it still has to get leached out of somewhere. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that the wood from the plants is worth more than the tiny amount of metal. Just because this can be done, doesn't mean it can be done cost effectively at scale.
To quote from the articles themselves: "Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel. In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
But there has to be some downside or harmful impact of doing this on a large scale I think related to soil fertility and maintenance(although it may be less than mining metal directly)
What to do when u pick up all metals in surface with the roots, and what about the creatures relies on these elements? Seems not long term sustainable to me
This could be useful for only the recycling industry. It sounds like a passive way to separate otherwise unsalvageable metal wastes like in electronics and batteries. Ground'em up, mix them with fertilizer soil in healthy proportions for the crops and let the plants do all the work. Otherwise for the bulk production it would be very inefficient because of how much surface area it would take.
I completely approve of this method for cleaning up degraded areas, but in general, the process can't be called 100 % sustainable. Don't get me wrong, it is still muuch better than open mines, but as the tree grows, it absorbs the metal. Later on, in natural environment, that same tree would die and decompose on site; the matter returning back to soil and closing the cycle. If, however we just take the plants away all the time, wouldn't the soil get depleted? I don't quite understand the sustainability of any kind of forestry for that matter. It is generally accepted that if we take plants away from fields, we have to use fertilizers to substitute the lost nutrients. But in forestry and this phytomining it is sustainable? Try getting a plant to "produce" metal on a depleted soil ... Buuut still an amazing research :D
Brassica juncea. You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
I doubt there's enough metal in the top layer, say a few meters, of earth to compete with excavating and conventional mining. But could be incredibly useful at decontaminating earth that has heavy metals.
Excuse me if I'm skeptical since we throw away tons electronics full of heavy metals everyday and we don't even recycle our used plastics because it's too expensive........ And the population keeps growing.
Cannabis is good hyperacumulator👌. That is why you should never consume a plant from contaminated soil because it can accumulate really high amounts of heavy metals
Hi Seekers, thanks for watching! For more on what our amazing planet is capable of, check out our playlist here: bit.ly/sk-earth
Seeker we should just use ac induction to heat heavy metals so we don’t have to waste years and money creating plant heavy metal industry. And the smoke can be caught and be collected as dust till u have enough to create dust bricks combined with water
please get some chemist to review your stuff. alot of this is wrong and you used alot of wrong word too.
Stop fake smiles. It's annoying. I think seeker should find someone else to present. There are better people in this channel.
Since you asked, yes, plant's have bodies. A body is just the physical matter that makes up an organism.
What about plastic? Suck me plastic out
So, someday people will work at a metal refining... plant plant?
Underrated
Robots will. People will be used as the robots' cell phone batteries.
@Master Therion Super awesome comment!
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages!
facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/
www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
Metal farm
I’m happy to see that this timeline also has phytomining in development.
So... I guess there is no need for you to jump to the next timeline?
3DShe shhhhh
@@3DShe: If any other timelines are the ones where trump never entered into politics, I'd gladly take one of those instead.
John, is that you? Are you back again?
Mikko Kalavainen I am not Mr. Titor
I hope that the main take-away from this pandemic is that we as humans are subject to nature, and that climate change deniers realize that we aren't invincible. Sustainability must be the goal for our world economy, the one that comes after our current economic depression. Godspeed, everyone, stay safe.
Agreed!
More science less humane
True ,our Governments all need to be completely dissolved and replaced with a scientific approach.
Take care. ..
@@YogeshKumar-js7tx yoooooo.
The single biggest effect the pandemic is having is in demonstrating that a big portion of humanity is able to change on a dime. And despite this sea-change life goes on.
A secondary surprise is in how quickly our environment responds to pandemic changes. Air pollution in major cities is way down.
Those opposed to action against climate change spoke often of how action would bring devastation to civilization. Those same believed that humanity's role in the environment was tiny if any role at all. The pandemic has shown that civilization is much more resilient than they imagined and our environment can respond dramatically to changes in human behaviour.
A bit more research and we will fight the ender dragon
_But first we need to fight_ *wither*
Not before we are able to farm diamond plants
@@kinfongyeung5400 Isn't that already a thing?
@@YuNvrKno
No?
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages!
facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/
www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
Attack on titan has a bamboo metal plant that they use to create the 3D gear.
Maybe they use this kind of plant as their reference. Brilliant authors
Show sucks.
@@Un_Pour_Tous how dare you, well that's your opinion so it's okay
@@Un_Pour_Tous now that's an unpopular opinion. I've even heard of anyone who didn't like Shingeki no Kyojin.
@@Un_Pour_Tous then what show do you even like? AOT is brilliantly written and is a modern classic
"The Malaysian part of Borneo"
I see your power move to dodge angry comments from Malaysians in general and Sabahans in particular wrt to pronounciation of Sabah.
Lol but still I feel patriotic that my country is in this video.
*angry sarawak noises
Sarawak exists too...
Sabah is a part of Philippines
In marcos time anyways
@@maharlika9809 lol STFU no it wasn't, it hasn't been part of the Philippines since the 19th century.
Cool! No more dwarfs-mining-too-deep-and-awakening-the-Balrog scenarios.
I`m so sick and tired of when such things happen.
nanotechnology you can now farming titanium metal leaf
@@nw3473 uncultured 😔
I randomly thought about this a few years ago. Then I thought it was a dumb imaginary idea that wouldn’t work. Then I saw this video
You're gonna go far, my dude
Same
Trust yourself more..
I hate to say it but... the enthusiasm from Maren is "infectious" :-D
-
Her videos are really the best of Seeker
She is cute and naughty.
Level 0.1 devil.
Apple - we need 10tonnes of zinc for our new iPhone
Zinc Farmer - We will have it ready for the iPhoneXX
Organic MacBook pro's, loved by vegans and hipsters 😄.
@Julian ok no
@Julian alternatively we end up with massive plantations of the plants over vast areas which cause the same shockingly bad effects on the environment that palm oil plantations have created.
Honestly traditional mining so long as the land is properly restored afterwards is probably more environmentally friendly.
@Julian This is our actual project ! check our pages ;)
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages!
facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/
www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
Imagine what happens when a sheep accidentally eats that plant...
iron sheep.
Steel wool :)
@@massimookissed1023 try to sheer that. need diamond scissors. oh well, i played to much minecraft xD
@@massimookissed1023 Copper meat
When killed drops an iron ingot and steel wool
ECONICK aims at producing high value metals from native and rare plants using this technology : Nickel, Zinc, Cobalt, Selenium, Rare Earth Elements. Check our Facebook and Linkedin pages!
facebook.com/Econick-104656321016260/
www.linkedin.com/company/econick/
I love how excited she gets when talking about recycling, wish my parents did the same when I get good grades
Damn my man, well.. good job! Keep doing you :D
oof
I'm a PhD student working with Brassica juncea and other wild relatives. I had no idea of this! You're such a source of inspiration, I'm going to share this with all my colleagues!
Years ago, I heard that Cannabis (hemp) was being being used in separate experiments to absorb heavy metals in Chernobyl and a mine in Colorado.. I haven't seen anything since. But if these experiments were successful, a fast growing plant like hemp could be extremely useful in phytomining. Right?
That was just a way for the government to get rid of hippies.
@@SirJamez0 xD
I think if you crossbred them with the otherplants you would get something amazing
yes cannabis is a hyperaccumulator likes to take up heavy metals from the soil, so just a warning to all you smokers out there known where your stuff is coming from cheap fertilizers tend to have higher heavy metals, which make its way in to your bub.
This makes it dangerous to consume in most instances, smoking heavy metals? No thanks
Traditional mining pollutes, these techniques would be incredible to implement for example to recover the soils of the mines where for example they are used to remove the products to make the electric car, it seems fascinating to me that Seeker can investigate to give sustainable solutions in all its industrial process to make the electric car.
Conifers, particularly spruce trees, love iron. When I was a kid, my neighbor was a landscaper and use to tell me all sorts of trick for starting and caring for different plants. When he helped us remove a dead spruce from the property, we got the digging iron stuck in a wire cage. He told us that evergreens like a lot of iron so a lot of landscapers will leave the cage around the root ball and just cut up the burlap through the wire. Back in the old days they would collect bent and discarded nails from jobs on new construction properties and throw a handful down in the hole of any pine fir, spruce or holly they would plant.
Im sorry but the rainbow bookshelf in the background really distracted me. I love the way it looks.
This isn't exactly sustainable though because there's still only a finite amount of metal in the ground. We need to fund materials research so we can find viable alternatives to heavy metals.
just dig the planet lol
its really big
@@justinmusic1296 Or genetically modify plants to have thick strong and long roots.
I understand that it will not replace mining but still it can reduce our dependence on mining
There is really no reason to be concerned about the amount of minerals available, we have massive reserves of almost all types. Hell, Australia on its own has enough to supply the world with all but maybe one mineral for the rest of the century.
We have also only scratched the surface of this planet so we would be unlikely to run out for many thousands of years, but we are already moving towards mining in space which in human terms is basically an endless resource so there won't ever really be a shortage. The only things that cause what get called shortages is wait times for new mines to open due to increased demand (like lithium which there is heaps of but production has taken a long time to catch up with demand).
If you read the articles in the desc you'd have come across this in particular to your point:
"Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
@@assaultflamingo2.068 Yes
Also it may evolve to have deeper roots as the concentration of metals decrease. But yes it'll take a lot of time.
You missed one big step in this story, how the metal is removed from th plants and what the final yeald is per ton of plants.Some have misconstrue my comment as being negative but that’s not my intention I am just asking for more information to be able to better understand the whole process.
Exactly, so clear hundreds of thousands of acres to cultivate these plants, thus doing more destruction than traditional mining methods (which are no where near as destructive as this video leads people to believe).
Jim A I can’t say this is good or bad I’m saying that we need more information to be able to understand what this method of harvesting metal means.
@@iaindowling8993 The harvested biomass is dried and burnt to generate a plant ash called bio-ore, this bio-ore boasts a higher metal content than a conventional ore, which means it needs less space for storage and transport.
Also, ‘Bio-ores’ are virtually sulphur-free, and their smelting requires less energy than sulphidic ores.
It offers the possibility of exploiting ores or mineralised soils that are uneconomic by conventional
mining methods... If you want numbers:
Phytomining using Iberis, could produce a net return of $ US 1200/ha with a biomass yield of 10 t/ha containing 0.08% Tl in dry matter. The break-even point (net yield of $ US 500/ha) would require 170 mg/kg (0.017%) Tl in dry matter.
Unusual hyperaccumulation (>500 mg/kg dry mass) of thallium (Tl) in Iberis intermedia and Biscutella laevigata (Brassicaceae) from southern France. The Iberis contained up to 0.4% Tl (4000 mg/kg) in the whole-plant dry matter and the Biscutella over 1.5%.
On many ultramafic soils, Berkheya coddii can yield over 20 t/ha with a Ni concentration of 1% in the dry matter... If you're unaware, that's a far higher t/ha overhead than mining.
I'll point you to some research papers:
www.researchgate.net/publication/223106506_Phytomining_A_Review
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652608000838
AssaultFlamingo 2.0 thank you for all the information you managed to fill in the missing information
@@iaindowling8993 No worries mate, I already had some previous knowledge on the topic, happy to share.
If harvesting metal from waste dumps isn't profitable/is barely profitable I feel like this is the sort of thing that won't catch on (at least not for decades). There seems to be a lot of lowering hanging fruit in recycling metals. Definitely an interesting video though, topics like these are what I love reporting on.
How is that this video doesn't have billions of views...😤
Such an interesting and revolutionary topic 👏👏👏👏 Let's hope the industry takes note of this new technology👌👌👌👌
Some people cry when animals or small children are either hurt or saved, but I also cry about this. This would be wonderful!
Isn't this method limited to metal on the very surface? (Relative to the depth of some mines)
My thoughts exactly. Unless its trees, the roots would not go very deep. Even trees have limited root depth. So probably not good for mining, but it could Maybe be useful for ground level pollution if it hasn't been there long enough to sink lower than the roots. Hmmm probably not though. Rain would wash it lower than the root depth pretty quickly, like just one significant rainfall.
Yeah, you're right. It's only limited to the root absorption zone of the plant. This can be increased through symbiotic mycorhizal fungi interactions. She doesn't go into much of the drawbacks of Phytomining. Such as the nutrient levels of those soils. Metalliferous soils usually do poorly in sustaining plant growth so, extensive fertilization and irrigation is required. It is usually used for soils that have less than the required metal levels for conventional mining like serpentine soils. So it's more of an alternative for the mining of regions with relatively lower metal content or contamination sites from mining
Bamboo are great silica accumulators. For those crystal nerds out there. ;)
I don't know why but this just makes me so happy! to just imagine humans farming metal...
Você é linda, o seu falar e o seu olhar é uma brisa para os meus olhos. Você é uma escultura do universo.
Love this video and the excitement! It's so cool to see that we might be on the cusp of technologies and practices that could solve many of our current problems.
Seeker: College level science presented by a kindergarten teacher.
spot on
Would love just a high school teacher
This explains why weeding in the garden is so difficult. Damn metal plants.
Good. We need this to help with pollution levels . Wide scale adoption is necessary
Another great Seeker Video, and interesting you've ditched the glasses Maren. Looks good :-) and as always your enthusiasm for your topic is great to see come through.
If the plants are extracting the metals, not creating them, what happens once you've depleted the soil? Seems like the same problem as any other farm except it makes no sense to spray the ground with nickel like you would fertilizer. Pretty cool though.
Professor Dan again, another wonderful Seeker video. Truly awe-inspiring and inspirational!!
This makes me really happy. Thank you so much for sharing! I never would’ve known!
the USGS has been using bioremediation for decades the clean up the superfund cites. A friend of mine works at one in Sacramento, CA. I am surprised you didn't include any of the vast amounts of examples or studies and instead went with a few new ones as though this was just invented. most trees are amazing bio accumulators as well as many ancient grains like amaranth and cannabis. An amazing study with sunflowers was conducted in Chernobyl with unbelievable results for radiation accumulation.
Thanks again Seeker for knowledge and hope ♥️
Really cool .... i went to manhattan museum of science and saw some magnificent metal woods made of various rlements like aluminum, copper, cobalt silicone with various color of woods shown and displays for exhibition... thats is really cool metal farming science never ends
Bloodworms have copper fangs and Shoebill birds have Iron beaks
You are a great hope, whatever happens, if they try to get you discouraged as they do, you have the most beautiful hope, you have to have strength, there are corruptions, everywhere don't make that discourage you, you are the most beautiful hope on the planet.
This bookshelf background is more preferable than SEEKER'S normal green screen one.
I think this whole filming from home thing is really working out well for Maren. Her natural beauty and intelligence aren't being detracted by that gaudy background they were using before. When coronavirus is done, I'd happily keep this format.
Being a botany student.... It looks like a very cool and productive career opportunity..... Coz a lot of people think that there might me no future in botany....
Good luck with research, good video, fingers crossed I hope they succeed
0:16 "Not in the form you might be picturing them, like in a can" Why did I imagine a can filled with metal nuggets?
this is a game changer for sure. we need more solutions like that that clean up our mess and let us reuse all of it, no waste anymore. any other plants that absorb specific elements? maybe this would be how we solve our garbage problem if we can find plants that soak up plastics, oil, and other elements that make up our trash and waste.
There's already a lot of research on various fungi and bacteria that eat a range of plastics and oils... I'm sure we'll genetically modify (as humans always do) the shit out of hyperaccumulating plants for similar purposes.
Being able to farming metals is cool and all but like how metal can be obtained from a said metal farm as hundreds of tonnes of metal can be extracted and refined and purified from one mine , and also how effective and efficient is the farming going to be , if that is supposed to be future of metal industry as the demand is very high and reach even higher ?
large-scale harvesting of plants with concentrations of metal is currently more costly than extracting metals from mines. In the future, as metal prices rise and the yields from mines deplete, this would change.
The harvested biomass is dried and burnt to generate a plant ash called bio-ore, this bio-ore boasts a higher metal content than a conventional ore, which means it needs less space for storage and transport.
Also, ‘Bio-ores’ are virtually sulphur-free, and their smelting requires less energy than sulphidic ores.
Also, it's not meant as a replacement, only as a supplement, the articles in the desc clearly state that.
To quote a particular part to your point:
"Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
I didn't bekieve in asmr but I swear this woman's voice is modulated to a pleasure center in my brain.
This is super cool. I hope this becomes the norm in the future.
It sounds like an upgrade environmentally speaking. The follow up question is, would you deplete the soil, then the growing stops. Sounds like good innovation.
ok but how much metal per kilogram of plant can we extract, because honestly my instincts tell me is very little, like less than 0.005% which is roughly the percentage of iron in an adult male if my calculations are correct.
Hmm, that may be right, but there are used for all that biomass too.
These hyperaccumulators for Nickel can be up to 25% dry weight in Nickel.
Given, they're the extreme upper end of the spectrum, with most other hyperaccumulators being in the low single digit percents or below 1%, but these trees show that it is possible to concentrate these extremely toxic metals in insane amounts in living tissue, which means once we understand how they deal with it, we can engineer plants to become hyperaccumulators for specific kinds of metals, or to store different metals in different parts of the plant.
@@midnight8341 wow 25% dry weight! if that's true it sounds extremely promising.
@@CMZneu well, that's what I was shown in my plant physiology lecture and a phytopathology lecture, too. And I'm sure there was a source citation on that slide, but I never really had the time to look it up myself.
But as I said, that's the extreme outlier from the norm. Most accumulators don't do it in that amount. But, as seen in these plants, it's possible, so why shouldn't we be able to make other pants do it, too?
There's a couple of articles in the description, if you didn't notice them. They'll give you a fair idea of their compositions.
Very cool, Maren !!
I'm gonna grow me some gold : )
How economical is that going to be? How efficient would it be to extract all the metal you need to make one beam? Is there going to be a smaller environmental impact using whatever you need to extract the metal ? Don't you need some pretty caustic substances to separate the metal? I've done HVAC for six years and have been farm help most my life. I call mulch minus wood chips
Thanks for letting us know this.
But we should remember that everything has it's advantages as well as disadvantages.
Hence if we adopt this method then we are sure to find atleast some disadvantages.
When refining or getting the metal out of the plant does it produce waste? Is the refining process for the metal plants environmently devastating like normal metal refining?
0:00 I see Oogie-Boogie finally accepted himself, came out of the closet, and went full drag FABULOUS!
This is so fascinating. I study plant and soil science/horticulture and I have never heard of agromining until recently. It seems to have alot of potential.
I want the plant that oozes *G O L D* !!!
😉👌
In Australia we test the leaves of gum trees in order to test for gold deposits in some areas. No clue why any tree would choose to absorb gold, but seems they do in small amounts.
You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
I can say that our company is actually working on Gold!
Have a nice day and do not forget to check ouf pages!
@@Jake12220 indeed, my first thought too , gold is almost completly inert .
But gold can be in in trace amouts in seawater aswell ....
I've once heard up too 1gr /M³ ?🤔
I already suspected , that plants like mangrove leaves contain a more concentrated seaminerals and trace elements .
I don't actualy know , just a gold miners itch 😁?
I cerntainly gonna check there site .
I can't have enough gold facts , thrown at me ...
Grtzz john
@@assaultflamingo2.068 wow , intresting .
I don't know what lixivants are (i'm not natively Englisch speaking) , but gonna google it right away 👌👍🏻.
If 1m³ of the dryrest contains more than 5 gr of gold ...
You already crush average paydirt numbers ...
Offcourse it weighs just a fraction .
I dont know how many kg a m³ of the plants dry mass weighs ?
But 50 kg/M³ , looks like an reasonable mass for plants dry weight .
So easly getting the 5 gr/ m³...
It all gonna depents how fast they dry to that mass , and how easy or hard it is too extract it ??
Nontheless very intresting ...would love to see a very gold nerdy channel 😊😉😁
Grtzz Johny geerts
*But there is a limitation is that it's roots can't go very deep in the earth but from mining we can extract metals more than 600 meters deep or more.*
*But this is very useful for shallow depth and also where mining is not possible. That's amazing....*
If you read the articles you'd have noted this in particular to your point:
"Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
Imagine if the plants were humans and you're cutting its arms off because you want the iron in its blood
I get what you are trying to say, but come on, trees are mostly made out of carbon, the stuff we exhale. I'm not going to feel bad for a thing mostly comprised of car farts, and human breath.
Yup........to make this year's latest iPhone. 🤔
very cool .. grown rebar forms for buildings could someday be possible ..
I'm hoping some mining companies are willing to take the gamble needed to start this up on a massive scale to help give the others more incentive to adopt the method.
You skipped over the eucalyptus trees in Australia that absorb gold...
“I don’t know, do plants have bodies?”
-Hell IDK, you’re the science lady, you tell me🤷🏽♂️
So what about all the water it would take mine metal this way on a industrial scale? Also I assume the crops need to be changed to a different location when it draws all metal from the ground.
It's cool that it cleans the pollution from melting but Even if the process was 100% efficient the roots cannot go deep enough to supply current nor future demand so you would need more horizontal land instead of digging deep which sounds like a step backwards
Would love it there were plants on the ready people could plant around their house to absorb all the old lead in the ground and be able to cleanse the soil
Try sunflowers, they hyper accumulate heavy metals. Commonly used to clear up old industrial sites and radiation.
@@Jake12220 thanks for the tip!
I think the best ways is to genetically modified a plant so that it can produce metals. Like a plant which make metal fruits or something like that. If we are successful in making such a genetic modification we can avoid complex chemical extraction of metal.
Well Actually I think this is just too good to be true, I mean you can really get metals from plants, but I wonder actually how much energy is needed for doing the process. And actuary separating metals from plants can be troublesome if the concentration is low. Just like the organic peroxide plant, it takes so much effort to get the peroxide out from the plant.
It wouldn't be done for common metals, but for rarer and more expensive metals it'd probably start to make sense. Plus, as humans always do we'll genetically modify the shit out of them, making them more efficient, deeper growing roots, collect other materials etc... I think the biggest use for them would probably be for cleaning up the world, just like the fungi and some bacteria they're breeding that eat plastics and some oils.
The Nickel accumulators shown in this video can be up to 25% Nickel in dry weight.
To extract those metals, you need to do the following: harvest the plant, dry it, burn it, dissolve the metals from the ash using strong acids, sediment the metals according to their chemistry (for example by introducing insoluble salts or using electrochemistry). Compared to the amount of energy needed for chemical treatment of ores and melting out and purifying those metals, it's rather tame.
So actually what's we get is probably those metal salts but not the metals. Photos and reactive metals you just need to refine it a little bit but for those reactive metals electrolysis is still absolutely needed
@@alvinkwok587 ores are also nothing but metal salts in the form of minerals. But with those hyperaccumulating plants, you can get a lot of metal with very little chemistry.
Also, you don't need to use electrolysis, it's still doable to let those extracted salts dry and then use a highly reactive gas to expell the halogen from the salt, leaving the pure metal. That's also possible in solutions for metals that don't easily react with water, or I think there also some possibilities in organic solvents...
Can it scale? What's the ratio we're we getting from plants? Is it economically viable?
I want this to be done in a larger scale
Wow finally we have some experiments in mining metals and absorbing heavy metals in the soil which are leached through plantation which has double effect absorbing metal from soil and polluting gases from air wonderful....
Turns out that all hyperaccumulators are on a spectrum of how much they can absorb, meaning they can be engineered to increase the absorbed amount and speeding up cleaning/farming.
Yeah, you could upregulate those genes but there will always be a physiological ceiling
@@ij6708 i guess you mean limit.
Yes exactly ;)
This is a renewable resource, right? How is the soil replenished with metal?
Stuff degrades still, for the most part we would be displacing it. A large target for where this could be farmed is at our existing landfills and old mines.
Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops.
Love the video but all your videos and the best. Keep it up.
Find a hyperaccumulator for gold and that'd be literal cash crop.
There already are... You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
Could u farm it like how people farm maple, with tubes and pumps hooked up to the trees or is it all hand farming?
Yeah, but what is the yield? What is the added cost? And in general soil has a finite amount of any nutrient, so how much of it can be extracted until it's depleted?
If you read the articles you'd have some idea then, but to answer a few for you though...
The sap can hold upto 1/4 of the target substance... That'd be dry-weight, btw.
There'd be R&D cost, but otherwise far less overheads than traditional mining.
It's not meant to be a replacement, only a supplement.
As for nutrients and depletion.... It wouldn't be too far from traditional farming practices, when between seasons you use Cover crops to prevent erosion and mineral leeching, fix soil nitrogen, increase living organic matter etc. Being able to farm the same land for decades.
You're only taking out the materials you want, metals etc, and effectively return the rest, and even improve certain aspects of the soil.
Also to quote from the articles in relation to your questions...
"Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
What is the yield though? That would be a major factor.
but what is the resulting concentration of metal in relation to raw plant mass and how does it compare to mined/smelting methods?
Phytomining using Iberis, could produce a net return of $ US 1200/ha with a biomass yield of 10 t/ha containing 0.08% Tl in dry matter. The break-even point (net yield of $ US 500/ha) would require 170 mg/kg (0.017%) Tl in dry matter.
Unusual hyperaccumulation (>500 mg/kg dry mass) of thallium (Tl) in Iberis intermedia and Biscutella laevigata (Brassicaceae) from southern France. The Iberis contained up to 0.4% Tl (4000 mg/kg) in the whole-plant dry matter and the Biscutella over 1.5%.
On many ultramafic soils, Berkheya coddii can yield over 20 t/ha with a Ni concentration of 1% in the dry matter... If you're unaware, that's a far higher t/ha overhead than mining.
Even if we did this, we'd still have to eventually dig up all the plants and soil and replant the plants at a deeper depth since the roots can only reach so far into the soil. It's not like the metal grows on plants, it still has to get leached out of somewhere. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that the wood from the plants is worth more than the tiny amount of metal. Just because this can be done, doesn't mean it can be done cost effectively at scale.
To quote from the articles themselves:
"Currently, the most common way to extract nickel for electronics requires intense energy - often derived from coal and diesel - and creates heaps of acidic waste. A typical smelter costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires increasingly scarce ore that is at least 1.2 percent rich with nickel.
In contrast, plants on a small nickel farm could be harvested every six months on land where the nickel concentration is only 0.1 percent. After two decades, the roots would struggle to find enough nickel, but the land would have been sucked dry of its toxic metals, and fertile enough to support more common crops."
But there has to be some downside or harmful impact of doing this on a large scale I think related to soil fertility and maintenance(although it may be less than mining metal directly)
This made my day !😀
What to do when u pick up all metals in surface with the roots, and what about the creatures relies on these elements? Seems not long term sustainable to me
Nice cello ya got there 🙌🏾🎶
yeah but how much acreage is it gonna take to produce 1 oz. of nickle and will the energy used in the process be less than just mining and refining ?
AFK iron farms on version 12.20.20 is finally here
What’s that plant behind you it looks cool
Wow. That is so cool! We could potentially not have to mine for metals anymore!
This could be useful for only the recycling industry. It sounds like a passive way to separate otherwise unsalvageable metal wastes like in electronics and batteries. Ground'em up, mix them with fertilizer soil in healthy proportions for the crops and let the plants do all the work. Otherwise for the bulk production it would be very inefficient because of how much surface area it would take.
We are actually working on industrial wastes, check our homepage!
Whoa, great video!
I completely approve of this method for cleaning up degraded areas, but in general, the process can't be called 100 % sustainable. Don't get me wrong, it is still muuch better than open mines, but as the tree grows, it absorbs the metal. Later on, in natural environment, that same tree would die and decompose on site; the matter returning back to soil and closing the cycle. If, however we just take the plants away all the time, wouldn't the soil get depleted? I don't quite understand the sustainability of any kind of forestry for that matter. It is generally accepted that if we take plants away from fields, we have to use fertilizers to substitute the lost nutrients. But in forestry and this phytomining it is sustainable? Try getting a plant to "produce" metal on a depleted soil ... Buuut still an amazing research :D
I'm in. Which species can accumulate gold?
Brassica juncea.
You can make some plants hyperaccumulate gold by adding lixivants to the substrate. Such lixivants have induced Brassica juncea to accumulate gold to concentrations of over 100 mg/kg gold on a dry matter basis.
We are working on Gold!
I absolutely love this!
no man's sky didnt lie you can have plants that make metal!!
I doubt there's enough metal in the top layer, say a few meters, of earth to compete with excavating and conventional mining. But could be incredibly useful at decontaminating earth that has heavy metals.
Can someone explain to me the reason for sorting books by colour, I don't get it.
Esthetics.
Easy to find what you are looking for.
Excuse me if I'm skeptical since we throw away tons electronics full of heavy metals everyday and we don't even recycle our used plastics because it's too expensive........ And the population keeps growing.
That is so ingenious. Like honestly how did we not think if this 100 years ago. 😂
Cannabis is good hyperacumulator👌. That is why you should never consume a plant from contaminated soil because it can accumulate really high amounts of heavy metals