5 ms·

Flowers grown floating on polluted waterways can help clean up nutrient runoff

91 points by mikece 3y ago

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
6c696e7578 3y ago
Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser. Well, I can, it's not a massive expense compared to containing it. Depending on who owns the nearby waterways, the farmers could be incentivised to float recollection furniture which benefits all.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  warning: this is a UK based view, farming practices are different in other localities. > Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser. I get what your hinting at (and your further comments add nuance) but its more pernicious than that. Water management on farms is hard, and has got harder. As soil becomes more sterile, it is less absorbent of water. This means that drainage needs to be more effective, as anything outside of the normal rainfall causes flooding. But! fast drainage means runoff. That could mean expensive synthetic nitrogen, cow shit, or actual soil is being swept into the water system. As we've had more uneven rain cycles recently in the UK, and maintaining drains/ditches has got a lot less expensive, the effectiveness of farm drainage has increase significantly. This means flash flooding down stream and also more reliance on pumped water. But, it also means soil degradation, which requires more shit to be put in, which then runs off. There are ways to tackle this, but it requires investment from the academic world to prove it works for the varied UK farm lands, Subsidies changes from UK gov (which they've already royally fucked up) and cost benefit analysis made available to farmers. Water dwell time needs to increase significantly in most of the UK, not only to reduce flooding, but to also improve drought resistance. The side effect is that it reduces fertiliser runoff.
  - aitchnyu 3y ago
    Whats a sterile soil and why is it less absorbent?
    - KaiserPro 3y ago
      A sterile soil is something that has been weed-killed to make sure no other plants grow on it. Thats useful for growing sensitive crops like wheat/potatoes etc, as they tend to be dwarfs and can easily be out competed/shaded by other plants. Its also used when changing from one crop to another at the end of a season. This prevents crops being contaminated by previous rotation The downside is that it also kills off the mechanisms that make soil hang together, like fungi, fibrous roots, moss. That process creates a spongy interlinked mesh that separates soil from something like raw clay/sand. think carbon/glass fibre vs raw epoxy. Anyway, those fibres of organic matter decay/get eaten by insects, worms and fungi. This "airates" the soil by leaving voids, making it much less dense. This provides much more surface area (and holes) for water to soak into. does that make sense?
  - goda90 3y ago
    A lot of people have been experimenting with soil regenerative practices such as no-till, no-spray, cover crops, and rotational grazing. Not only does it retain more water, but you stop needing to add fertilizer and thus not have runoff anyway.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      There's also studies in replenishing soil microbes. I was involved in prelim discussions on producing a documentary on this that never moved past those initial talks. I was really hoping to work on that to see how effective they were.
broguinn 3y ago
Here in Austin, Texas, we're lucky to have Ladybird (Town) Lake downtown. For most of the year, algae blooms are so severe that it's not safe for people or dogs to swim in the lake. It drives me crazy that people consider this anything other than anthropogenic. I would love to see any effort to filter out urban water pollution. And I commend any change in the narrative that undesirable populations of blue/green algae, zebra mussels, etc. are inexplicable inconveniences, instead of what they really are: opportunistic growths driven by human water pollution and a warming climate.
carapace 3y ago
This was worked out ages ago by John Todd in his work on what he calls "Living Machines" > Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes. https://www.toddecological.com/about https://www.toddecological.com/about - - - - John Todd Living Machines Lecture Ecological Treatment Of Sewage Nov. 7, 2002, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA sponsored by Sustainable Pittsburgh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M - - - - John Todd, Living Machines Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute > John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU - - - - John Todd - The Ecological Design Revolution Bioneers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8
- broguinn 3y ago
  Very interesting - thank you for sharing his work. From my very cursory glance at Todd Ecological's homepage, their projects look scaled to individual residential and commercial wastewater filtration applications. I was hoping to see examples of filtration systems that would scale to entire regional watersheds, such as urban lakes. In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.
  - carapace 3y ago
    I would assume that these methods, based as they are on living ecosystems (which are all about scaling: every species is capable of exponential growth), that these scale well. In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied" John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells > The five case studies presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate from an adjacent landfill. ... https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalDesign_Todd-et-al_2003.pdf https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalD...
anon-sre-srm 3y ago
"Help" like planting a few trees ostensibly to "solve" climate change. And show me the evidence this is better than regulating and eliminating pollution at its sources.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  You figure out a way to block agricultural runoff at it's source without bankrupting the ag industry or quadrupling food prices let us know. Your next trick will be to figure out a way to pass meaningful legislation in the current climate of extreme political polarization, but one miracle at a time.
  - ttyprintk 3y ago
    We can be more optimistic than that. The clean water act aspired to make all waterways fishable and swimmable by 1983, with carveouts for non-point-source pollution like lawns and fields. Meat producing plants take advantage of that carveout in a particular way. But to achieve the swimmable and fishable goal, the EPA needs to be able to affect any upstream point source. The groups lobbying against this are well financed but they are fighting against existing law.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      And winning. Fun Fact: the eastern third of North Carolina is blanketed in a thin film of aerosolized pig shit.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  We can have both. Is a false dichotomy. Trees will sequester several types of pollutants from the soil, for sure.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Do you really need scientific evidence to justify planting trees and flowers? They're nice even if they did nothing.
- 3y ago
pvaldes 3y ago
As long as this runoff does not contain herbicides, I can't see why not would help to clean the water. Is called plant filter and is used on aquariums since decades. But in winter they will die, so a part of this nutrients will be released again. Trees would be much better for that
- justworkout 3y ago
  The first paragraph of the article is about doing this to harvest flowers for economic reasons, so a significant amount of the nutrients are being removed from the waterways and wrapped in plastic to be sold. (unfortunately, this experiment was also done on top of beds of floating plastic) Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    So it's more that the nitrogen etc is moved elsewhere. Distribution is probably for the best I suppose. Also, plenty of florists use paper wrappers, there's no particular reason to prefer plastic.
    - stephen_g 3y ago
      If you have your own compost system then it can help your own garden. Or alternatively hopefully your council has a green waste collection and it can go there.
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    > Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from. Do you have a source for that? As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
    - ttyprintk 3y ago

91 points by mikece 3y ago

[dead]

Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser. Well, I can, it's not a massive expense compared to containing it. Depending on who owns the nearby waterways, the farmers could be incentivised to float recollection furniture which benefits all.

KaiserPro 3y ago
warning: this is a UK based view, farming practices are different in other localities. > Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser. I get what your hinting at (and your further comments add nuance) but its more pernicious than that. Water management on farms is hard, and has got harder. As soil becomes more sterile, it is less absorbent of water. This means that drainage needs to be more effective, as anything outside of the normal rainfall causes flooding. But! fast drainage means runoff. That could mean expensive synthetic nitrogen, cow shit, or actual soil is being swept into the water system. As we've had more uneven rain cycles recently in the UK, and maintaining drains/ditches has got a lot less expensive, the effectiveness of farm drainage has increase significantly. This means flash flooding down stream and also more reliance on pumped water. But, it also means soil degradation, which requires more shit to be put in, which then runs off. There are ways to tackle this, but it requires investment from the academic world to prove it works for the varied UK farm lands, Subsidies changes from UK gov (which they've already royally fucked up) and cost benefit analysis made available to farmers. Water dwell time needs to increase significantly in most of the UK, not only to reduce flooding, but to also improve drought resistance. The side effect is that it reduces fertiliser runoff.
- aitchnyu 3y ago
  Whats a sterile soil and why is it less absorbent?
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    A sterile soil is something that has been weed-killed to make sure no other plants grow on it. Thats useful for growing sensitive crops like wheat/potatoes etc, as they tend to be dwarfs and can easily be out competed/shaded by other plants. Its also used when changing from one crop to another at the end of a season. This prevents crops being contaminated by previous rotation The downside is that it also kills off the mechanisms that make soil hang together, like fungi, fibrous roots, moss. That process creates a spongy interlinked mesh that separates soil from something like raw clay/sand. think carbon/glass fibre vs raw epoxy. Anyway, those fibres of organic matter decay/get eaten by insects, worms and fungi. This "airates" the soil by leaving voids, making it much less dense. This provides much more surface area (and holes) for water to soak into. does that make sense?
- goda90 3y ago
  A lot of people have been experimenting with soil regenerative practices such as no-till, no-spray, cover crops, and rotational grazing. Not only does it retain more water, but you stop needing to add fertilizer and thus not have runoff anyway.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    There's also studies in replenishing soil microbes. I was involved in prelim discussions on producing a documentary on this that never moved past those initial talks. I was really hoping to work on that to see how effective they were.

broguinn 3y ago

Here in Austin, Texas, we're lucky to have Ladybird (Town) Lake downtown. For most of the year, algae blooms are so severe that it's not safe for people or dogs to swim in the lake. It drives me crazy that people consider this anything other than anthropogenic. I would love to see any effort to filter out urban water pollution. And I commend any change in the narrative that undesirable populations of blue/green algae, zebra mussels, etc. are inexplicable inconveniences, instead of what they really are: opportunistic growths driven by human water pollution and a warming climate.

carapace 3y ago

This was worked out ages ago by John Todd in his work on what he calls "Living Machines" > Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes. https://www.toddecological.com/about https://www.toddecological.com/about - - - - John Todd Living Machines Lecture Ecological Treatment Of Sewage Nov. 7, 2002, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA sponsored by Sustainable Pittsburgh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M - - - - John Todd, Living Machines Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute > John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU - - - - John Todd - The Ecological Design Revolution Bioneers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8

broguinn 3y ago
Very interesting - thank you for sharing his work. From my very cursory glance at Todd Ecological's homepage, their projects look scaled to individual residential and commercial wastewater filtration applications. I was hoping to see examples of filtration systems that would scale to entire regional watersheds, such as urban lakes. In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.
- carapace 3y ago
  I would assume that these methods, based as they are on living ecosystems (which are all about scaling: every species is capable of exponential growth), that these scale well. In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied" John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells > The five case studies presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate from an adjacent landfill. ... https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalDesign_Todd-et-al_2003.pdf https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalD...

anon-sre-srm 3y ago

"Help" like planting a few trees ostensibly to "solve" climate change. And show me the evidence this is better than regulating and eliminating pollution at its sources.

forgetfreeman 3y ago
You figure out a way to block agricultural runoff at it's source without bankrupting the ag industry or quadrupling food prices let us know. Your next trick will be to figure out a way to pass meaningful legislation in the current climate of extreme political polarization, but one miracle at a time.
- ttyprintk 3y ago
  We can be more optimistic than that. The clean water act aspired to make all waterways fishable and swimmable by 1983, with carveouts for non-point-source pollution like lawns and fields. Meat producing plants take advantage of that carveout in a particular way. But to achieve the swimmable and fishable goal, the EPA needs to be able to affect any upstream point source. The groups lobbying against this are well financed but they are fighting against existing law.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    And winning. Fun Fact: the eastern third of North Carolina is blanketed in a thin film of aerosolized pig shit.
pvaldes 3y ago
We can have both. Is a false dichotomy. Trees will sequester several types of pollutants from the soil, for sure.
lupusreal 3y ago
Do you really need scientific evidence to justify planting trees and flowers? They're nice even if they did nothing.
3y ago

pvaldes 3y ago

As long as this runoff does not contain herbicides, I can't see why not would help to clean the water. Is called plant filter and is used on aquariums since decades. But in winter they will die, so a part of this nutrients will be released again. Trees would be much better for that

justworkout 3y ago
The first paragraph of the article is about doing this to harvest flowers for economic reasons, so a significant amount of the nutrients are being removed from the waterways and wrapped in plastic to be sold. (unfortunately, this experiment was also done on top of beds of floating plastic) Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  So it's more that the nitrogen etc is moved elsewhere. Distribution is probably for the best I suppose. Also, plenty of florists use paper wrappers, there's no particular reason to prefer plastic.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    If you have your own compost system then it can help your own garden. Or alternatively hopefully your council has a green waste collection and it can go there.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  > Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from. Do you have a source for that? As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
  - ttyprintk 3y ago