Forest Accumulator
Ten years ago, this would have been a speculative design project by Sascha Pohflepp: “hyper-accumulating” plants are being used to concentrate, and thus “mine,” valuable metals from soil.
“With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms—about 700 are known—flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die,” the New York Times reported last week. “Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a sap that oozes a neon blue-green. This ‘juice’ is actually one-quarter nickel, far more concentrated than the ore feeding the world’s nickel smelters.”
A while back, I went on a road-trip with Edible Geography to visit some maple syrup farms north of where we lived at the time, in New York City. The woods all around us were tubed together in a huge, tree-spanning network—“forest hydraulics,” as Edible Geography phrased it at the time—as the trees’ valuable liquid slowly flowed toward a pumping station in the center of the forest.
It was part labyrinth, part spiderweb, a kind of semi-automated tree-machine at odds with the image of nature with which most maple syrup is sold.
[Images: Photos by BLDGBLOG.]
Imagining a similar landscape, but one designed as a kind of botanical mine—a forest accumulator, metallurgical druidry—is incredible........MUCH MORE
Here's another example from 2013, LiveScience:
There's Gold in Them Thar Plants
Scientists have figured out a way to grow and harvest gold from crop plants.
Money doesn't grow on trees — but gold might. An international team of scientists has found a way to grow and harvest gold from crop plants.
Called phytomining, the technique of finding gold uses plants to extract particles of the precious metal from soil. Some plants have the natural ability to take up through their roots and concentrate metals such as nickel, cadmium and zinc in their leaves and shoots. For years, scientists have explored the use of such plants, dubbed hyperaccumulators, for pollution removal.
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But there are no known gold hyperaccumulators, because gold doesn't easily dissolve in water so plants have no natural way of taking the particles in through their roots.
"Under certain chemical conditions, gold solubility can be forced," said Chris Anderson, an environmental geochemist and gold phytomining expert at Massey University in New Zealand....
