Project BioReGen: Planting trees to recover a damaged ecosystem
The project BioReGen is a very interesting plan developed on abandoned industrial estate in the north-east of England (Durham County). Basically, the project recovers polluted land by planting specific crops - in this case, crops intended for biofuels. The process is called biorecovery (see also MSU's project).
University of Teeside's CLEMANCE (Clean Environment Management Centre) program achieves this recovery by planting specific trees such as willows, miscanthus, phalaris arundinacea and switchgrass. The trees are a good source for biomass (for small-scale power plants) and switchgrass can be used as a raw material to obtain biofuels.
The process has been very successful so far, but it's got an inconvenient truth: it takes years to depollute an area, because plants have their own growing cycle. And they've got plenty of terrain to work on: 1,155 Ha (2,850 Acres).
[Source: Agroinformación]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jesse McKinney 3:15PM (12/19/2007)
"The process is called biorecovery"
Actually, when used to clean up polluted ecosystems I believe it is called bioremediation. I don't know much about about it, but I find it facinating. They use specific plants to clean certain pollutants out of the ecosystem. Different plants will filter out certain heavy metals for instance. They have even done gold harvesting near depleted gold mines. they grow a crop, burn it and harvest the gold from the ashes. I think that they do somthing similar for superfund cleanup sites.
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CT-Jake 9:55AM (12/18/2007)
Have any studies been done to see if the contaminates end up in the biofuel and eventually out the exhaust pipes of vehicles?
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