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February 29, 2020 07:34 pm

Some Clever Farmers are Harvesting Metals From Plants

The New York Times reports:Some of Earth's plants have fallen in love with metal. 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 plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world's most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial substitute to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants...? On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets. Now, as the team scales up to the world's largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a sizable portion of insatiable consumer demand for base metals and rare minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world's coconuts and coffee... [T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive... Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system." Long-time Slashdot reader necro81 adds "This process, called phytomining, cannot supplant the scale of traditional mining, but could make a dent in the world's demand for nickel, cobalt, and zinc. "Small-holding farmers could earn more from phytomining than from coaxing food crops from metal-laden soils. Using these plants could also help clean brownfields left over from prior industrial use."

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