Scientists in Belgrade came up with the idea of “planting” large tanks of water and algae in places where trees can’t grow. The tanks are 10-50x more efficient than a normal tree for the space it takes up and is in general highly sustainable, even creating excellent fertilizer in the process. You can skip about halfway through the video for the actual information about them.
Step back a little. Why are there places in cities where trees “can’t grow”? What’s the problem - water, land, sunlight? And why not fix whatever is keeping trees from growing, and then grow trees, instead of dropping in a tub of algae? And if these tanks are 50 times more “efficient” than a normal tree, how much more expensive is manufacturing and maintaining them than planting and watering a tree is?
This feels like carbon capture technology to me - a technological patch on a social and ecological problem, meant not to help the environment but to funnel tax money to venture capitalists and tech companies in the name of environmentalism.
Land.
50 trees take a lot of space. The idea is to put these boxes where trees can’t fit.
Note that these algae are not taking the room of 50 trees, that’s really not the way to look at it. We want more trees inside cities, and whether or not this happens is totally decorrelated to whether or not we see these algae boxes or advertisement in the bus stops.
how much more expensive is manufacturing and maintaining them than planting and watering a tree is?
I don’t think it is hard to imagine that a box of algae takes less maintenance than a tree inside a city. Typically you don’t plant a seed in a city to grow a tree. You grow very specific resistant species in a tree farm and then transplant them once they are tall enough in a city. This is a long and expensive progress. Trees require maintenance: they need to be trimmed, healed, they may have fallen leaves that need cleaning, they may need watering when it is too dry, they need removal if they are too damage.
I think a tree has probably a similar level of need than these boxes, so 50 trees will largely exceed that.
And why not fix whatever is keeping trees from growing, and then grow trees
I woild guess because that would require you to completely tear up the bitumen and anything underneath it like pipes and wires in order to make room for the roots. Trees are pretty big things y’know and it’s not just what’s above the surface that matters. You could put a tank like this in say, a train station platform that’s raised well above the ground or on a building
Also a tub of algae isn’t going to become a health hazard if it gets sick or infested and won’t take decades to establish itself
Hmm. These are valid concerns. I would personally rather have 50 trees instead of one of these. In any current cities do you know how to get 50 trees planted on a city block?
Remove space devoted to cars… like 1 side of the street… Which I guess isnt seen as an option yet.
Convert the streets to bike + walking paths, and have trees lining the center along all the streets. Use subway for longer distance, train stations for intercity.
Yes ideal would be to remove cars completely from cities and use bikes + grassy trams to get around. And have every street lined with trees. In places where that hasn’t been implemented yet, there may be a place for an algae tank.
And if these tanks are 50 times more “efficient” than a normal tree, how much more expensive is manufacturing and maintaining them than planting and watering a tree is?
That’s without mentioning the resources invested into building those oxigen farms. The fact that this is done on a rich country already tells a lot. Solar panels aren’t made with love and care, but minerals extracted from the earth.
Also, our problem isn’t lack of O2 or excessive CO2. Our problem is a series of ideas and decisions we make about how we treat the world we’re a part of. One of those ideas, is precisely efficiency above all other things. It’s the same idea that makes market speculators fall in love with “line goes up”. She even makes a point of saying how much more efficient than trees those are.
Sure, those are efficient in making the air safer for humans, but do they help with other local biodiversity? Do they help fixing the soil? Do they help the global ecosystem as a whole?
@stabby_cicada @MonkCanatella Lots of ideas for both algae and traditional trees in Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design by Nancy and John Todd, both of whom are still around.
Years of links to urban and advanced agriculture at http://cityag.blogspot.com
which is also a listservGood looking out with city ag. Adding to my RSS reader, thanks!_Going to have to check out that book sometime, just from the title alone it sounds right up my alley
@MonkCanatella
Review of A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design by Nancy Jack Todd
https://solarray.blogspot.com/2005/05/gaian-design-of-ecological-alchemy.htmlReview of Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship by John Todd
https://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/03/healing-earth-through-waters.htmlOther resources on geotherapy (not geoengineering please) at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2021/04/geotherapy-not-geoengineering-please.html
Carbon capture is something we need. Except for real. Which will probably involve algae tanks orders of magnitude larger than this, and then tossing harvested algae down a mineshaft, never to be seen again.
As for these tanks, nah. As public art, they’re not great, and their stated benefits are limited.
Algea alone is responsible for about 50% of all of earth’s oxygen. Trees and land plants make up the other half. Algea is incredibly efficient at oxygen production.
She cites a figure of 70%. Even better!
What I’d like to know is how much biomass these things produce after about 6 weeks you know since I’m I soil amendment nerd
At least enough for a little garden on the block!
Sure, it’s cool, but I can’t sit underneath it if I’m trying to get out of the sun. Maybe in the afternoon, but certainly not midday. Idk, trees are obviously suited to land but these are cool public art pieces, plus they’re sustainable and sinks CO2 (but who knows how clean construction is).
I’m sure it could be but into horizontal panels, for instance the roof of a bus stop. Also probably in tubes for larger partial-shade configurations (like a pergola).
That and obviously it should be in addition to trees rather than a replacement.
yes all the negativity in the thread is making the false supposition that you have to choose between an algae tank and trees. the choice is an algae tank or no algae tank.
That’s looking at it as a zero-sum thing. You’re not choosing between an algae tank and a utopian solarpunk city with no cars, tree lined streets, and bikes and grassy trams every where. You’re choosing between an algae tank and all its benefits, or no algae tank. I would choose the algae tank over nothing any day. Would I take it in place of a perfect solarpunk city where we all live in trees and get around with rope bridges? hell no.
Good point
