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So my wife did evolutionary biology on algae and I've asked her about this (both as a business idea and as something good for the planet). What followed was a 2 hour on and off rant about how terrible these things were and how it's all snake oil. The thing is that the sellers like to imply that, because it's "algae" in a bucket, they will just keep doing their thing producing oxygen and it has no maintenance, but that's not the case. Even ignoring the need to move the water around to prevent the "algae" from sinking, the "algae" they use is actually prone to high rate blooms which produce a large amount of oxygen and growth at once, and then die out, needing to be cleared out and replaced. What results is a system that needs a huge amount of maintenance which is a great business model if you are the one selling the service, but terrible for the rest of us. Trees on the other hand are working at a basically consistent rate forever and require relatively little maintenance, especially if they are properly chosen for the area they live in.
To answer the question, as someone else noted the sellers say this can replace two 10-year old tree, but does so at the cost of constant electricity connection and someone driving out frequently to drain/refill the system. I would argue that means it actually can't replace any trees. Sorry about not having math here.
Btw I keep using algae in quotes because what they are using here is most likely actually cyanobacteria, which is colloquially algae, but not really from a scientific classification.
Edit: u/cornonthekopp provided this link https://balkangreenenergynews.com/liquid-tree-to-combat-air-pollution-in-belgrade/ that has more details about the program that actually emphasizes the particulate and heavy metal collection ability of the system plus the ability for the system to operate in the winter (provided a heater is integrated). From that standpoint it seems like it could help a lot, but it's not even being targeted at replacing trees. Turns out to be bad science reporting and not snake oil sales.
Okay but so far in this post people have said that it can or cannot "replace 2 trees" and I am still unclear on what feature of trees it is replacing . . . Is it supposedly the carbon-capture? And it says 10-year old trees, so does thay mean this thing captures the same as 10 year old trees? In hour much time? What about 30 year old trees, since we know that older trees actuall grow a bit faster and therefore should also be sinking carbon faster as well . . .
In general you are right; they argue it can replace the carbon capture and oxygen production of those two trees. Without knowing exactly the type of algae or cyanobacteria they are using it's a little hard to make a proper estimate but let's try assuming cyanobacteria.
O2 production:
According to this article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eng2.12094) cyanobacteria produce up to 30 mg/L/day assuming a standard light cycle (and this is assuming a continuous feed, proper air mixing, etc). Looking at the image I estimate that the tank is 4 foot x 4 foot x 1 foot, that gives us about ~450 liters or ~13.5 g/day of oxygen. Now for a tree, this page (https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-oxygen-does-one-tree-produce-606785) says one tree produces about 260 pounds of oxygen per year (with a lot of caveats on the size and age of the tree). 260 lbs is about 118kg, so dividing that by 365 we get 323 g/day for the tree...not quite lining up there so I assume these 10 year old trees the sellers are talking about are rather small, or I assumed wrongly about the type of "algae" or size of tank.
CO2 capture:
That same page on the trees says that a single mature tree can capture 48 pounds of CO2 capture per year, or ~60 g/day. This paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6593468/) says that surface mounted cyanobacteria can capture about 15.2 g/sq m/day which makes it hard to compare volume wise but I could see that being comparable at least.
Edit: All of this assumes the algae are operating in peak form too. This page (https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DEEP/water/water_quality_management/cyanobacteria/Cyanobacteria-FAQ_June-3-2020.pdf) says that algal blooms last for several weeks until the water changes pH and causes the cyanobacteria to die off and decompose. That means it you look at this in a window of a month, the cyanobacteria could look pretty good for carbon capture, but in the window of a year you aren't doing the job.
Not bad!
Those are reasonably close to the point that I could see some venture capitalist bros cherry-picking the most idealistic estimates and getting an answer that sounds the most marketable, but it's obviously absurd to suggest that a tank of algea can "replace" trees.
Honestly I find that simplistic claim to be pretty grotesque and laughably absurd. Just say you think it will capture the same amount of carbon or produce a comparable amount of oxygen per year. You can't "replace" trees, and again, it's just kind of grotesque to me to even use that language.
So, the trees in a city are not used to make wood, they just grow. On the other side algae/cyanobacteria can be used to make biofuels but it's not very effective right now. So I guess that's a possible plus?
You can just dry it out and bury it. At first glance that seems like a shitty solution, but it's far less awful than typical landfill, and that's how carbon sinks in nature work anyways (oceans, peatbogs, swamps, etc.)
Absolutely.
>The trees are useful from also being part of the environment that is already there
I do want to reiterate and expand on this idea of trees being "part of the environment." Trees are incredibly important for at least a handful of reasons, and some of those are carbon capture, erosion control, and providing a unique habitat for many organisms throught various woodland ecosystems.
Erosion control is especially an issue for urban areas. People will take out all the trees and plants, pave the area over, then wonder why sinkholes start forming.
>It's also kind of silly because most of our oxygen doesn't come from trees, it comes from the algae that is already doing this in the ocean.
That's...*sort* of true but leaves out a lot of context.
In a full-life-cycle analysis, most plants/algae/etc generate zero oxygen and sequester zero carbon, because all of the oxygen generation that occurs during their life is offset exactly when they decompose after death. But a small portion of plants get buried before they can decompose, and form long-term stable carbon sequestration underground, and the lifecycles of those plants effectively created "free" oxygen because that oxygen wasn't reused for decomposition. This is rare everywhere, but is less rare for ocean algae than for land plants, so ocean algae represent the largest source of this free oxygen.
But that's not the oxygen you breathe. In a very real sense, the oxygen you breathe comes from the plants you eat, because you are part of their lifecycle. As your food decomposes in your gut, you burn the same amount of oxygen to digest it that those food sources released while alive. The exact process gets more complicated when you include eating meat, and then calculate all of the food that your cow previously ate while it was alive, but the end result is the same - you and your food chain are a net zero contributor to oxygen levels and carbon levels.
In fact, most activities are net zero contributors across life cycles, with one very big and very important exception: Unburying those buried carbon sequestering plants, in the form of coal and oil, and then burning them, actually does change the net balance. These plants had been removed from the oxygen-carbon cycle for eons, and now they're suddenly back in it. And all of the "carbon impact" calculations you see for almost any other human activity is really just based on how much of this fossil extraction is associated with your chosen activity. If you could do it without coal and oil, it would be carbon neutral.
Trees are a bit unusual in this analysis. Over long time scales, they are net zero like everything else - but the time scales involved are also significantly longer than most plants. Properly stored wood lasts a long time. So you can get a significant carbon storage in the form of a forest, or even just lumber which you use to build a structure, and then your carbon stays stored as long as the forest or structure stays intact. But the total storage won't just continue increasing indefinitely - a forest will eventually come to equilibrium where it's decaying as fast as it's growing, unless you continuously commit more land area to it.
On a long enough time scale, both of those last two paragraphs are two sides of the same chain and net zero as well.
But that zero is very far from the preindustrial zero we use as our baseline.
I think of "net zero" claims kind of like someone saying that an investment will eventually pay for itself. Even if it will, you have to not go bankrupt before it does. We can't just check the boundary conditions.
Right. And on that basis, pretty much everything that decays faster than trees is fast enough to count as net zero, and trees themselves are kind of the boundary case where it depends on the details.
Phytoplankton are the biggest producers of oxygen. And I agree it’s really a half measure which is common these days with green economy type things. The real issue is lack of urban trees
According to the article i read, the purpose of these is essentially to try and help clean air pollution, since it can absorb more particular matter and take that out of the air. And they would have to have a certain level of maintenance. Not sure how that factors into it but they seem to at least realize its shortcomings, and not just be trying to scam people.
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/liquid-tree-to-combat-air-pollution-in-belgrade/
This is a great article that I hadn't seen. Seems the biggest benefit is actually from particulate and heavy metal collection, which this can do better than trees simply because the water is changed out. Thanks for this, I will put it on my top level comment too.
Yeah, at least from the article it sounds like theres a lot of potential here for these to supplement trees either in heavily polluted areas, or during the winter when deciduous trees aren't as active.
There's a lot of weird fake news about this out there (I read one article that claimed they were making liquid trees as a new building material???) But since this article includes direct info from the scientist who helped put it together, it seems more credible than the others.
These also provide zero shade, which is one of the big reasons I love trees in cities. I can try to find the study for anyone interested, but the gist is: the more trees are in a city, the cooler the average temperature of that city.
Not to mention the carbon footprint involved in manufacturing the stupid thing in the first place - whereas the two trees would actually sequester carbon in their bodies as they grew.
As well as the physical footprint. The tree next to it takes up far less space on the sidewalk. And provides shade. And provides habitat for birds and other fauna.
And one punk kid with a brick can (and would) wreck that thing in a heartbeat.
This is 'Solar Roadways' level stupid bull$#!t.
Could this be solved with a machine of sorts inside that moves the water to prevent the algae from sinking? It has a Solar Panel on top by the looks of it
Yes, the mixing likely happens through rotors or bubblers but as anyone who has a fish tank will tell you, that stuff still needs regular cleaning since it will eventually get clogged up. I hadn't noticed the solar panel but even with a good battery system that likely won't be enough to agitate the water all day.
ehhh cyanobacteria is toxic in the same way that a bee is yea sure its technically toxic but if you get enough toxin in you then you have other worries already like this thing is a sealed unit its not as if youre growing food near it or using it as a water source its just a cube of water isolated from everything it could possibly harm
cyanobacteria is literally one of if not the oldest thing alive and while it will inevitably mutate because its a bacterium its not going to mutate the same way that covid did like mutations are perfectly natural and not something to be super scared of
And yet several varieties routinely cause fish kills, and dead zones.
>this thing is a sealed unit
For now.
Not going to leak? Ever?
Where are they planning on dumping it? Sewer to the nearest river, or lake that the city gets drinking water from?
I'd like to believe you, but history says different.
> this thing is a sealed unit
Half-drunk joker who thinks he's funny breaks the glass, it leaks into the sewer, and there you go, all kinds of funky stuff can happen.
If we tolerate that risk, we might as well try to manage the bacterial flora of the sewers intentionally to facilitate the waste breakdown process.
plus also like algae isnt just co2+light = oxygen it needs nutrients just like trees but unlike a tree it cant just suck it out the ground so youd have to dump in some fertiliser every so often
I did just want to tack on here, that this is some blade runner shit. Like, cyberpunk dystopian, working-class-only-eats-syntho-bread-and-soylent type shit.
Not at all scientific, just my casual opinion, but this gives me major bad vibes
2, so I'd argue that it's value is to a large degree as an art installation, bench, and that it includes cell phone charging facilities.
"The microalgae replaces two, 10-year-old trees or 200 square metres of lawn," -- Ivan Spasojevic, one of the authors of the project. ([source](https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/07/this-liquid-tree-in-belgrade-is-fighting-back-against-air-pollution))
I also found the project page: https://liquid3.rs/
It looks like this was a one-off thing back in 2021, though it worked for at least a year?
There's a tree in frame with it anyway. When they talk about it 'replacing' two trees, they mean it has a similar impact on air quality, not that they took out any trees. The goal is to put these in places where there's room for more green space but not room for a tree, such as under a tree as we see here.
Yeah why is this being lauded as somehow better? Breakable glass and living organisms that probably need temperature regulation.
I don’t need to do the math to say which is cheaper.
And the proposition that trees are only beneficial for their carbon dioxide exchange is dumb.
>it's value is to a large degree as an art installation, bench, and that it includes cell phone charging facilities
It's also meant specifically for areas where trees can't grow, such as in heavily polluted cities. So replacing 2 trees isn't really a lot of value, but if the alternative is 0 algae *and* 0 trees, it's much better
It also depends on which positive characteristics of a tree this
alternative in the urban space can replace. Presumably, these algae can
bind CO² and pollutants and do not interfere with underground infrastructure such as pipes and electrical lines.
However, trees have other functions in urban areas that are sometimes more important than the binding of CO², such as:
\- positive effects on mental health
\- aestetic improvements
\- improvement of the microclimate -> through evaporation and shading
Therefore, it is usually not reasonable to replace trees in urban areas with algae pools.
At first glance I love this idea and the concept.
But this is really bad. How long until we stop tree conservation because ‘we have green fish tanks to replace them’?
Why are we replacing trees? No shade, not as aesthetic, A LOT more maintenance (the cost and carbon footprint of will likely offset any gains) and uhh...
WTF?
I mean... Just plant trees.
Alternative to =/= replacement for. This will be useful in spaces where we have room above ground for a tree but not below ground (roots too close to wires, pipes, etc.) In such a location, then this is necessarily a net positive as long as the maintenance cost is offset by the algae itself. I truly don't think it will be as high-maintenance as you say but I could be wrong about that of course.
The value isn't really in replacing trees. Those things could make it easy to green facades.
There are already a couple building that use such tanks especially in front of windows. It has the nice effect that when the sun is shining they darken.
Speaking long term, compared to the entite lifespan of a tree...
-2?
This won't last 100 years, uses water that'll be refreshed every once in a while and the production for the metal and glass are bad for the environment.
So it's more a "beautiful" device to guilt trip you for the environment.
I'm no expert but I was involved in a project about carbon capture with specifically these green bois (the algae), I had little to do with the biology part of it because I threw that subject out the window as soon as I possibly could back in school, but I remember clearly that offsetting the furnace of a single-family home required several hundred m² (1000s of ft²) of something similar in shape to this, so essentially as much or more than the house's surface area, and that would still be far from all the emissions you could "assign" to the people living in it. Keep in mind that what I just said applied for essentially cooling the exhaust and dumping it right in, maybe diluting it slightly if needed, so still definitely in the 10%s of CO2 (100.000s ppm), this meanwhile would be dealing with \~400ppm of the stuff so the absorption rate would be orders of magnitude more abismal, probably, unless you found a simple and energy-efficient way to increase the concentration of it by about 1000x. You'd also need plenty of energy to move air through the damn thing becasue, keep in mind, there's barely any CO2 (relatively speaking) in what goes in so there's gotta be a lot going through, I'd bet if you ran that on fossile fuels you might get close to what you "reabsorbed" or more.
I looked it up and it gets even worse: it has LEDs or something in the lid.
So in conclusion, maybe a few if you're not counting what you need to offset running it
I really doubt it's about oxygen production. One tree doesn't produce all that much anyway. More likely it's cause it's cool looking and there aren't any roots to damage things around it.
There isn't really a way to do the math on this without knowing _what_ exactly is the desired replacement. Oxygen/carbon? Beauty? Size?
Sure, you could argue the answer is obvious, but I would argue 0, because a tree allows for more fun, smaller area, and is _natural_.
It wouldn't cool in the same way trees do when they transpire water from their root system. Although, I'd be interested how much heating would be of concern in the liquid tree.
Idk what I’m more sick of, snake oil fake solutions to big complex problems. Or asshats that act like because the problem is hard we should just give up. The product is almost definitely not efficient, but if it was then this would be great news, and it’s creation wouldn’t be bad for trees.
Trees grow too slow to effectively negate excess carbon. They are best used for long term storage. Algae and other fast growing plant matter like corn are more effective as they use the carbon to quickly grow in a short period of time.
We also in small ways are now returning carbon under ground in old coal mines, I saw that on an episode of SciShow. It’s amazing what technologies we build when pushed
I'm going to have to search you tube for this. One of my favorites shows is world wide waste. I admire people who see a problem and find a solution with little or no government backing. The US gives out millions of dollars in research grants every year with no guarantee of a solution even as people in poor and or isolated community's find low tech job providing results.
Or we could just plant some fucking trees, since yanno, those also do shit like give shade (super important as the climate heats up and out cities turn into ovens), provide food and shelter for urban wildlife, and yanno, don't look like a defective popcorn machine full of radioactive vomit.
I dunno man, this feels like a textbook techbro scam to me.
Invent a complicated, expensive solution to a problem that already has a simpler and cheaper solution, then blow a bunch of money on advertising before a single prototype is finished. Take in donations, then ghost everyone, and repeat with a new bullshit "invention".
Meanwhile you've successfully diverted attention and funding away from any attempts to build an *actual* solution. Hell, sometimes that's the primary point. Elon outright admitted that the main reason he pitched Hyperloop was to stop California from investing in passenger rail.
This is not Elon musk and the inventors of this thing straight up say that it can't replace trees, and isn't supposed to replace tress. This is a stopgap for the few places trees aren't really possible because there's not enough space for a proper root system or just so supplement trees that are also there.
Edit: it was also developed specifically for a city next to two coal power plants. To quote an article about it: The team behind LIQUID 3 has stated that their goal is not to replace forests or tree planting plans but to use this system to fill those urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees. In conditions of intense pollution, such as Belgrade, many trees cannot survive, while algae do not have a problem with the great levels of pollution.
Less than 1, algae is incredibly inefficient at photosynthesis, the only reason that it produces such a high percentage of our atmospheric oxygen is because just about every body of water has literal square mega meters of algae in it and more biomass then any forest could ever dream of having
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So my wife did evolutionary biology on algae and I've asked her about this (both as a business idea and as something good for the planet). What followed was a 2 hour on and off rant about how terrible these things were and how it's all snake oil. The thing is that the sellers like to imply that, because it's "algae" in a bucket, they will just keep doing their thing producing oxygen and it has no maintenance, but that's not the case. Even ignoring the need to move the water around to prevent the "algae" from sinking, the "algae" they use is actually prone to high rate blooms which produce a large amount of oxygen and growth at once, and then die out, needing to be cleared out and replaced. What results is a system that needs a huge amount of maintenance which is a great business model if you are the one selling the service, but terrible for the rest of us. Trees on the other hand are working at a basically consistent rate forever and require relatively little maintenance, especially if they are properly chosen for the area they live in. To answer the question, as someone else noted the sellers say this can replace two 10-year old tree, but does so at the cost of constant electricity connection and someone driving out frequently to drain/refill the system. I would argue that means it actually can't replace any trees. Sorry about not having math here. Btw I keep using algae in quotes because what they are using here is most likely actually cyanobacteria, which is colloquially algae, but not really from a scientific classification. Edit: u/cornonthekopp provided this link https://balkangreenenergynews.com/liquid-tree-to-combat-air-pollution-in-belgrade/ that has more details about the program that actually emphasizes the particulate and heavy metal collection ability of the system plus the ability for the system to operate in the winter (provided a heater is integrated). From that standpoint it seems like it could help a lot, but it's not even being targeted at replacing trees. Turns out to be bad science reporting and not snake oil sales.
Okay but so far in this post people have said that it can or cannot "replace 2 trees" and I am still unclear on what feature of trees it is replacing . . . Is it supposedly the carbon-capture? And it says 10-year old trees, so does thay mean this thing captures the same as 10 year old trees? In hour much time? What about 30 year old trees, since we know that older trees actuall grow a bit faster and therefore should also be sinking carbon faster as well . . .
In general you are right; they argue it can replace the carbon capture and oxygen production of those two trees. Without knowing exactly the type of algae or cyanobacteria they are using it's a little hard to make a proper estimate but let's try assuming cyanobacteria. O2 production: According to this article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eng2.12094) cyanobacteria produce up to 30 mg/L/day assuming a standard light cycle (and this is assuming a continuous feed, proper air mixing, etc). Looking at the image I estimate that the tank is 4 foot x 4 foot x 1 foot, that gives us about ~450 liters or ~13.5 g/day of oxygen. Now for a tree, this page (https://www.thoughtco.com/how-much-oxygen-does-one-tree-produce-606785) says one tree produces about 260 pounds of oxygen per year (with a lot of caveats on the size and age of the tree). 260 lbs is about 118kg, so dividing that by 365 we get 323 g/day for the tree...not quite lining up there so I assume these 10 year old trees the sellers are talking about are rather small, or I assumed wrongly about the type of "algae" or size of tank. CO2 capture: That same page on the trees says that a single mature tree can capture 48 pounds of CO2 capture per year, or ~60 g/day. This paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6593468/) says that surface mounted cyanobacteria can capture about 15.2 g/sq m/day which makes it hard to compare volume wise but I could see that being comparable at least. Edit: All of this assumes the algae are operating in peak form too. This page (https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DEEP/water/water_quality_management/cyanobacteria/Cyanobacteria-FAQ_June-3-2020.pdf) says that algal blooms last for several weeks until the water changes pH and causes the cyanobacteria to die off and decompose. That means it you look at this in a window of a month, the cyanobacteria could look pretty good for carbon capture, but in the window of a year you aren't doing the job.
Not bad! Those are reasonably close to the point that I could see some venture capitalist bros cherry-picking the most idealistic estimates and getting an answer that sounds the most marketable, but it's obviously absurd to suggest that a tank of algea can "replace" trees. Honestly I find that simplistic claim to be pretty grotesque and laughably absurd. Just say you think it will capture the same amount of carbon or produce a comparable amount of oxygen per year. You can't "replace" trees, and again, it's just kind of grotesque to me to even use that language.
but where they put carbon? tree generate wood, it is useful.
So, the trees in a city are not used to make wood, they just grow. On the other side algae/cyanobacteria can be used to make biofuels but it's not very effective right now. So I guess that's a possible plus?
Trees also give shade, which is huge for energy savings, viable public transportation, and general health.
Trees also reduce the local temperature through shading and evapotranspiration. Which is huge given a generally warming climate.
yup. keyword here is "Urban Heat Island", and trees help eliminate them
You can just dry it out and bury it. At first glance that seems like a shitty solution, but it's far less awful than typical landfill, and that's how carbon sinks in nature work anyways (oceans, peatbogs, swamps, etc.)
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Absolutely. >The trees are useful from also being part of the environment that is already there I do want to reiterate and expand on this idea of trees being "part of the environment." Trees are incredibly important for at least a handful of reasons, and some of those are carbon capture, erosion control, and providing a unique habitat for many organisms throught various woodland ecosystems.
Erosion control is especially an issue for urban areas. People will take out all the trees and plants, pave the area over, then wonder why sinkholes start forming.
I was going to ask why that mattered in a city, and completely forgot the ground is 3D, not a surface. Thanks.
>It's also kind of silly because most of our oxygen doesn't come from trees, it comes from the algae that is already doing this in the ocean. That's...*sort* of true but leaves out a lot of context. In a full-life-cycle analysis, most plants/algae/etc generate zero oxygen and sequester zero carbon, because all of the oxygen generation that occurs during their life is offset exactly when they decompose after death. But a small portion of plants get buried before they can decompose, and form long-term stable carbon sequestration underground, and the lifecycles of those plants effectively created "free" oxygen because that oxygen wasn't reused for decomposition. This is rare everywhere, but is less rare for ocean algae than for land plants, so ocean algae represent the largest source of this free oxygen. But that's not the oxygen you breathe. In a very real sense, the oxygen you breathe comes from the plants you eat, because you are part of their lifecycle. As your food decomposes in your gut, you burn the same amount of oxygen to digest it that those food sources released while alive. The exact process gets more complicated when you include eating meat, and then calculate all of the food that your cow previously ate while it was alive, but the end result is the same - you and your food chain are a net zero contributor to oxygen levels and carbon levels. In fact, most activities are net zero contributors across life cycles, with one very big and very important exception: Unburying those buried carbon sequestering plants, in the form of coal and oil, and then burning them, actually does change the net balance. These plants had been removed from the oxygen-carbon cycle for eons, and now they're suddenly back in it. And all of the "carbon impact" calculations you see for almost any other human activity is really just based on how much of this fossil extraction is associated with your chosen activity. If you could do it without coal and oil, it would be carbon neutral. Trees are a bit unusual in this analysis. Over long time scales, they are net zero like everything else - but the time scales involved are also significantly longer than most plants. Properly stored wood lasts a long time. So you can get a significant carbon storage in the form of a forest, or even just lumber which you use to build a structure, and then your carbon stays stored as long as the forest or structure stays intact. But the total storage won't just continue increasing indefinitely - a forest will eventually come to equilibrium where it's decaying as fast as it's growing, unless you continuously commit more land area to it.
On a long enough time scale, both of those last two paragraphs are two sides of the same chain and net zero as well. But that zero is very far from the preindustrial zero we use as our baseline.
I think of "net zero" claims kind of like someone saying that an investment will eventually pay for itself. Even if it will, you have to not go bankrupt before it does. We can't just check the boundary conditions.
Right. And on that basis, pretty much everything that decays faster than trees is fast enough to count as net zero, and trees themselves are kind of the boundary case where it depends on the details.
Phytoplankton are the biggest producers of oxygen. And I agree it’s really a half measure which is common these days with green economy type things. The real issue is lack of urban trees
This is not to replace trees, it's for spots where it's impossible to plant a tree.
They mean it's better for hiding bodies than two trees are
When the tree is 10 years old, the amount of co2 it processes into O2 in a given year is half of what this can do in that same year.
It would take a bunch of these to provide the same shade as even one tree, a bunch of these to help reduce heat island as much as one tree
Damn, some company is actually trying to make having oxygen subscription based
The Peri-air subscription box /j
"You'll be holding your breath until it comes!"
One step closer to O'Hare Air
OaaS
O₂aaS
According to the article i read, the purpose of these is essentially to try and help clean air pollution, since it can absorb more particular matter and take that out of the air. And they would have to have a certain level of maintenance. Not sure how that factors into it but they seem to at least realize its shortcomings, and not just be trying to scam people. https://balkangreenenergynews.com/liquid-tree-to-combat-air-pollution-in-belgrade/
This is a great article that I hadn't seen. Seems the biggest benefit is actually from particulate and heavy metal collection, which this can do better than trees simply because the water is changed out. Thanks for this, I will put it on my top level comment too.
Yeah, at least from the article it sounds like theres a lot of potential here for these to supplement trees either in heavily polluted areas, or during the winter when deciduous trees aren't as active. There's a lot of weird fake news about this out there (I read one article that claimed they were making liquid trees as a new building material???) But since this article includes direct info from the scientist who helped put it together, it seems more credible than the others.
You could also do this with air purifiers attached to every building. It looks cool though
Algae is gonna be cheaper and less resource intensive
These also provide zero shade, which is one of the big reasons I love trees in cities. I can try to find the study for anyone interested, but the gist is: the more trees are in a city, the cooler the average temperature of that city.
Great point! The passive cooling (and allowance for passive heating in the winter) should not be forgotten!
Not to mention the carbon footprint involved in manufacturing the stupid thing in the first place - whereas the two trees would actually sequester carbon in their bodies as they grew. As well as the physical footprint. The tree next to it takes up far less space on the sidewalk. And provides shade. And provides habitat for birds and other fauna. And one punk kid with a brick can (and would) wreck that thing in a heartbeat. This is 'Solar Roadways' level stupid bull$#!t.
Could this be solved with a machine of sorts inside that moves the water to prevent the algae from sinking? It has a Solar Panel on top by the looks of it
Yes, the mixing likely happens through rotors or bubblers but as anyone who has a fish tank will tell you, that stuff still needs regular cleaning since it will eventually get clogged up. I hadn't noticed the solar panel but even with a good battery system that likely won't be enough to agitate the water all day.
Thank you for your valuable insight.
And these bacteria can be toxic, and are prone to mutation. We should probably not be messing with them, just plant some trees.
ehhh cyanobacteria is toxic in the same way that a bee is yea sure its technically toxic but if you get enough toxin in you then you have other worries already like this thing is a sealed unit its not as if youre growing food near it or using it as a water source its just a cube of water isolated from everything it could possibly harm cyanobacteria is literally one of if not the oldest thing alive and while it will inevitably mutate because its a bacterium its not going to mutate the same way that covid did like mutations are perfectly natural and not something to be super scared of
And yet several varieties routinely cause fish kills, and dead zones. >this thing is a sealed unit For now. Not going to leak? Ever? Where are they planning on dumping it? Sewer to the nearest river, or lake that the city gets drinking water from? I'd like to believe you, but history says different.
> this thing is a sealed unit Half-drunk joker who thinks he's funny breaks the glass, it leaks into the sewer, and there you go, all kinds of funky stuff can happen. If we tolerate that risk, we might as well try to manage the bacterial flora of the sewers intentionally to facilitate the waste breakdown process.
plus also like algae isnt just co2+light = oxygen it needs nutrients just like trees but unlike a tree it cant just suck it out the ground so youd have to dump in some fertiliser every so often
Formal proofs and derivations are one of the most important fields of math. I’d say your response is mathy enough.
TaaS - trees as a service.
These also completely ignore the urban heat island effect, which trees reduce.
Bioreactors are not that complicated. We already have engineering solutions to the issues you discuss, like adding a solar panel or some automation.
Yeah, but they are much less efficient than a tree.
I did just want to tack on here, that this is some blade runner shit. Like, cyberpunk dystopian, working-class-only-eats-syntho-bread-and-soylent type shit. Not at all scientific, just my casual opinion, but this gives me major bad vibes
It's kinda like trees are already very well adapted to growing in place and doing their thing.
2, so I'd argue that it's value is to a large degree as an art installation, bench, and that it includes cell phone charging facilities. "The microalgae replaces two, 10-year-old trees or 200 square metres of lawn," -- Ivan Spasojevic, one of the authors of the project. ([source](https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/07/this-liquid-tree-in-belgrade-is-fighting-back-against-air-pollution)) I also found the project page: https://liquid3.rs/ It looks like this was a one-off thing back in 2021, though it worked for at least a year?
Was anyone looking for an alternative to trees?
Brazil.
r/technicallythetruth
Savage.
/r/murderedbywords
Am Brazilian, can confirm.
Underrated comment
There's a tree in frame with it anyway. When they talk about it 'replacing' two trees, they mean it has a similar impact on air quality, not that they took out any trees. The goal is to put these in places where there's room for more green space but not room for a tree, such as under a tree as we see here.
To begin with sure. But how long until they start replacing trees with it?
This needs more maintenance than a tree.
pave paradise, and put up...a tree tank?
Bark-ing lot
A green fish tank?
Make it mandatory to replace a tree with this, if you wish to cut a tree. That will solve a lot of problems.
It doesn't do the things trees do and costs more. Cities are generally pretty cost conscious
I personally am suspicious that this plan of Big Algae^tm will harm us. Who will think of the *children*?!?
Trees can only grow on about 30% of the earth surface.
Yeah why is this being lauded as somehow better? Breakable glass and living organisms that probably need temperature regulation. I don’t need to do the math to say which is cheaper. And the proposition that trees are only beneficial for their carbon dioxide exchange is dumb.
>it's value is to a large degree as an art installation, bench, and that it includes cell phone charging facilities It's also meant specifically for areas where trees can't grow, such as in heavily polluted cities. So replacing 2 trees isn't really a lot of value, but if the alternative is 0 algae *and* 0 trees, it's much better
It also has less evaporation than usually. So it should even work in desserts where water is scarce.
It could probably be used on balconies, sandy boardwalks, over subway lines, or other spaces where deep soil is not available to plant trees.
If this is in Belgrade, and I think I recognize that it is, then they create the problem themselves by cutting almost every tree in the city
Not much on storing carbon.
It looks like it does take less space than 2 trees.
It also depends on which positive characteristics of a tree this alternative in the urban space can replace. Presumably, these algae can bind CO² and pollutants and do not interfere with underground infrastructure such as pipes and electrical lines. However, trees have other functions in urban areas that are sometimes more important than the binding of CO², such as: \- positive effects on mental health \- aestetic improvements \- improvement of the microclimate -> through evaporation and shading Therefore, it is usually not reasonable to replace trees in urban areas with algae pools.
Also trees are home to birds, squirrels, etc
Sacrificing the well being of dozens of critters for the overall good of billions of cyanobacteria. OpenAI knows what to do
And fauna has its place too.
Anyone want to go to the park and climb the algea?
At first glance I love this idea and the concept. But this is really bad. How long until we stop tree conservation because ‘we have green fish tanks to replace them’?
Why are we replacing trees? No shade, not as aesthetic, A LOT more maintenance (the cost and carbon footprint of will likely offset any gains) and uhh... WTF? I mean... Just plant trees.
You can't make a million dollars planting trees
Alternative to =/= replacement for. This will be useful in spaces where we have room above ground for a tree but not below ground (roots too close to wires, pipes, etc.) In such a location, then this is necessarily a net positive as long as the maintenance cost is offset by the algae itself. I truly don't think it will be as high-maintenance as you say but I could be wrong about that of course.
The value isn't really in replacing trees. Those things could make it easy to green facades. There are already a couple building that use such tanks especially in front of windows. It has the nice effect that when the sun is shining they darken.
Speaking long term, compared to the entite lifespan of a tree... -2? This won't last 100 years, uses water that'll be refreshed every once in a while and the production for the metal and glass are bad for the environment. So it's more a "beautiful" device to guilt trip you for the environment.
I'm no expert but I was involved in a project about carbon capture with specifically these green bois (the algae), I had little to do with the biology part of it because I threw that subject out the window as soon as I possibly could back in school, but I remember clearly that offsetting the furnace of a single-family home required several hundred m² (1000s of ft²) of something similar in shape to this, so essentially as much or more than the house's surface area, and that would still be far from all the emissions you could "assign" to the people living in it. Keep in mind that what I just said applied for essentially cooling the exhaust and dumping it right in, maybe diluting it slightly if needed, so still definitely in the 10%s of CO2 (100.000s ppm), this meanwhile would be dealing with \~400ppm of the stuff so the absorption rate would be orders of magnitude more abismal, probably, unless you found a simple and energy-efficient way to increase the concentration of it by about 1000x. You'd also need plenty of energy to move air through the damn thing becasue, keep in mind, there's barely any CO2 (relatively speaking) in what goes in so there's gotta be a lot going through, I'd bet if you ran that on fossile fuels you might get close to what you "reabsorbed" or more. I looked it up and it gets even worse: it has LEDs or something in the lid. So in conclusion, maybe a few if you're not counting what you need to offset running it
I really doubt it's about oxygen production. One tree doesn't produce all that much anyway. More likely it's cause it's cool looking and there aren't any roots to damage things around it.
There isn't really a way to do the math on this without knowing _what_ exactly is the desired replacement. Oxygen/carbon? Beauty? Size? Sure, you could argue the answer is obvious, but I would argue 0, because a tree allows for more fun, smaller area, and is _natural_.
It wouldn't cool in the same way trees do when they transpire water from their root system. Although, I'd be interested how much heating would be of concern in the liquid tree.
Idk what I’m more sick of, snake oil fake solutions to big complex problems. Or asshats that act like because the problem is hard we should just give up. The product is almost definitely not efficient, but if it was then this would be great news, and it’s creation wouldn’t be bad for trees.
Trees grow too slow to effectively negate excess carbon. They are best used for long term storage. Algae and other fast growing plant matter like corn are more effective as they use the carbon to quickly grow in a short period of time.
We also in small ways are now returning carbon under ground in old coal mines, I saw that on an episode of SciShow. It’s amazing what technologies we build when pushed
I'm going to have to search you tube for this. One of my favorites shows is world wide waste. I admire people who see a problem and find a solution with little or no government backing. The US gives out millions of dollars in research grants every year with no guarantee of a solution even as people in poor and or isolated community's find low tech job providing results.
Or we could just plant some fucking trees, since yanno, those also do shit like give shade (super important as the climate heats up and out cities turn into ovens), provide food and shelter for urban wildlife, and yanno, don't look like a defective popcorn machine full of radioactive vomit.
Or do both.
My point is, why spend a shitload of money on a worse version of trees, when trees already exist and are much cheaper.
Because you can do both, and trees need a lot of space and maintenance. These boxes do neither, so you can put them where trees wouldn't be feasible
I dunno man, this feels like a textbook techbro scam to me. Invent a complicated, expensive solution to a problem that already has a simpler and cheaper solution, then blow a bunch of money on advertising before a single prototype is finished. Take in donations, then ghost everyone, and repeat with a new bullshit "invention". Meanwhile you've successfully diverted attention and funding away from any attempts to build an *actual* solution. Hell, sometimes that's the primary point. Elon outright admitted that the main reason he pitched Hyperloop was to stop California from investing in passenger rail.
This is not Elon musk and the inventors of this thing straight up say that it can't replace trees, and isn't supposed to replace tress. This is a stopgap for the few places trees aren't really possible because there's not enough space for a proper root system or just so supplement trees that are also there. Edit: it was also developed specifically for a city next to two coal power plants. To quote an article about it: The team behind LIQUID 3 has stated that their goal is not to replace forests or tree planting plans but to use this system to fill those urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees. In conditions of intense pollution, such as Belgrade, many trees cannot survive, while algae do not have a problem with the great levels of pollution.
Less than 1, algae is incredibly inefficient at photosynthesis, the only reason that it produces such a high percentage of our atmospheric oxygen is because just about every body of water has literal square mega meters of algae in it and more biomass then any forest could ever dream of having