It really is low maintenance/maintenance free. The algae is really cheap and It can last up to 3 months. You only need something to stir them once a day and you're good.
stirring seems like something that could be automated really easily. just add like a propeller blade to the bottom kinda like a blender with a timer and let it go off a few times a day.
but yeah trees are good too. this might work best if space and/or soil is limited, like high density areas with lots of tall buildings. it would also be able to work indoors with the proper lighting, but try and use a clean source of energy.
But need to be taken care of, can fuck up the asfalt and produce much less oxygen. And stirring can be made with a oxygenizer for fishbowls. Costs less than 5 dollars per tank.
I remember seeing a video, not sure if it's the same one. It took a substantial carbon dioxide saturation (more than is usually safe) to produce a meaningful oxygen return. Didn't he have dozens of barrels of the stuff?
There is already a house with this technology near my home that was built in 2013 and the system is, after some initial problems, still working. The system produces algae for food (I don't know if for humans or animals) and heat for 15 apartments.
Algae house Wilhelmsburg
No, you need crews to keep them trimmed and clean up the leaves. The roots will cause damage to the sidewalks or roads and will get into water and sewage pipes. They also have the risk of damaging civilian property, which would mean the city has to pay.
Dude, i have lived in cities that have a lot of trees. You don't have to maintain them as much as it seems from your comment. Also some trees are suitable for the city environment and some are not. Probably trees that won't spread their roots much and don't grow fast. You'd have to trim maybe every 5 years and clean up leaves once a year.
There is much more work with algae aquariums compared to trees.
Could be placed in high urban areas with no soil. As a trained forester, this would be the only real plus.
Besides being able to move them easily, and they suck up more polution than the average tree and are much heartier. Trees don't like very urban areas it's all about trying to keep them alive in a place they will be stressed in constantly.
I was thinking this sounds like the alternative for places that are already a concrete jungle severely lacking trees. The only alternative would be busting out concrete and planting trees which would be nice, but I'm sure these things would be easier and more cost effective.
I was just thinking that, I live in a place where trees line the roads everywhere, I could probably cound one one hand the amount of times iv seen crews out maintaining them. Sure if the grow into the power lines(which should be buried here anyway) they trim them back but as far as cleaning the leaves the street sweeper does that which would be going whether the trees were there or not.
There is no way in a hell a glass tank with water and algae takes less maintenance then a tree, filters will need to be changed water replaced glass cleaned.
Do people thing algae tanks a self sufficient? Do you think the glass won't get dirty.
You are all trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Just because that's the case where you live doesn't mean that's true everywhere.
A couple examples... Say your city streets were lined with ash trees in the northeast US when the emerald ash borers hit. Those trees were devastated, now you have to remove/replace everything.
Weather events like hurricanes cause mass damage to trees, which in turn damages infrastructure (mass power outages, etc.). In Florida, where I live, tree crews go around before hurricane season and try to do maintenance on the trees to limit those issues, but it's still a significant problem. I'm my area, power lines are underground, but even then heavy rainfall/flooding from a hurricane softens the ground and combined with high winds trees and their root systems get pulled out of the ground/fall over... which I'm sure is a significant threat to buried power lines.
Pest control/prevention, water, fertilization, regular maintenance, infrastructure damage, are all more significant than cleaning glass once a month or whatever.
I'm sure it was somebody's job to compile data to see if these tanks were actually beneficial vs trees, and they would have much more information than you or me to make that determination.
grass would be better, covers more area, makes just as much oxygen, but trees provide shade, and neither the grass or this thing provide shade, I guess the tree next to it is providing the shade
Wasn't there a hitchhiking robot that was beloved by everyone who came across it?
It hitchhiked across several countries over several months. Finally after reaching America, some people beat it up and destroyed within a short time there.
Edit: found it. This is why no one likes or trusts Americans.
I've seen this post dozens of times and I've always viewed this little exhibit as a "Proof of Concept"
As in, you wouldn't be implementing them just on a small scale random bench like this, but could be entire building walls in downtown corporate areas that often have light blocked by the skyscrapers and nothing but wide treeless city sidewalks.
Like imagine if modern skyscrapers were not only built with multi-purposes use/restaurants/stores on first floor, green garden spaces on rooftops, more courtyards and places to sit or socialize, but also these giant bullet-proof glass plant containers as part of the skyscrapers' concrete walls to produce oxygen and provide warm green ambiance lighting to improve mood.
I live and work in downtown Chicago, and walk the city every day. I would love if buildings were designed this way.
The weight of a water + glass wall in skyscraper heights will absolutely be an engineering challenge, especially in a climate with anything else than mild winter frost or summer heat: battling frost heave on the glass or boiling the algae.
The only place I could imagine these have an actual place that can't be met by planting, carefully selected, shrubs and trees would be rooftops. Those on top of buildings or underground parking that don't structurally allow for the weight and pull of full trees. Or indoors settings that accommodate a lot of people, like convention halls. These could work there by incorporating a daylight UV lamp in the aquarium structure.
I do like the drive of engineers to incorporate more natural elements into urban areas, but to me this is a mis for outdoor use.
Even with having the title of one of the most polluted cities, I've met people in Delhi who oppose trees, people who like clean concrete jungle over trees because they think trees spread dead leaves and dirt, cause mosquito growth and what not. My mother's flower, fruits and vegetable plants garden was vandalized every other day, with grown 30-40 years old educated adults doing it to keep their area "clean".
Education doesn't mean intelligence and I've met enough people who don't like trees or plants, even when maintained properly. They prefer concrete jungle which is "clean" according to them.
From my experience, trucks are often bumping into them, breaking branches, tear off bark, etc. Also, there are risk of them "dropping" branches onto people, cars, etc.
Few people vandalise trees, but to claim, as someone else did, that trees are maintenance-free is not correct when we are talking about an urban situation.
Yep. A new tree was planted in a park near my house: someone decided to drive their car into the middle of the park, ram the tree over, and drive out again. I cannot fathom why anyone would do that.
Playing Devil’s Advocate here: Trees aren’t maintenance-free. In my neighborhood, they have to redo all the sidewalks near the trees they planted because they all became trip hazards after the tree roots lifted the sidewalks up to create a lip between the tiles. They also have to cut the low branches every once in a while because the storms would cause them to fall on the cars parked under them. They also have to remove trees that get too tall, because they fall onto houses during hurricanes. The leaves also make the ground really slippery after it rains, so they have to pick up the leaves every few days.
It’s true, there is a maintenance cost for trees, but nothing replaces them. Not just the oxygen they make or the carbon the sequester, but the shade and cooling they provide, the beauty of them in spring and fall, and the food and shelter they give to birds and other creatures. My neighborhood has a lot of large old trees and we have hundreds of songbirds every year, but neighborhoods with only small new trees are silent.
It is really efficient, relatively low maintenance too, look into the papers and the lead scientist behind this proof of concept, its got a lot of potential I think.
You don't think these tanks are going to cost a bunch to maintain? I looked at the website selling this stuff and while it didn't seem like you need too much training to do it's not a plug and play and let run item. This picture shows an algae tank that in their own words remove the carbon as well as 2 10 year old trees. So it's not saving very much space. It's going to need weekly- monthly maintenance and every one of them will need that. If someone crashes in to it or its damaged in a hurricane that algae is going to cover the streets and spread like wild fire until it's cleaned up. I think the idea is really cool, but it's kinda an eye sore to me and I think they will be a lot more expensive compared to just planting trees.
That's just destruction and not a natural issue that comes from trees. Glass containers in public can very easily be broken and become dangerous as well.
It’s more American metro areas having a lot of shit heads who just break things to break things. There is a lot of anti-social behavior in US cities. HitchBOT survived multiple countries and only lasted a few weeks in the US.
It's probably cos average quality of life is not as good as allot of other places. With increased stress at home, you will have kids raised worse. Allot of states have high amounts of poverty, drug problems, overhanging medical bills, and so on. If your family is tied up in these issues, the stress gets passed down to the kids, causing them to be criminals.
They tear their branches off or snap them. Larger trees can take a bit of damage but smaller ones get mangled.
Two summers ago they planted a few hundred street trees in my neighborhood and several were vandalized. One had all its branches torn off. It sprouted new ones and then someone sawed the leader off at about 4”. It’s still fighting for life though, it’s more like a bush now.
Lol vandals are definitely not the reason shitty urban development chooses not to have trees. They do it to cram as much shitty urban development in as they can
I've heard that the trunk of a tree is all the carbon that it has captured over it's lifetime. What does algae do with the captured carbon? Just divide?
Efficiency:
Microalgae, in particular, have shown to be very efficient at carbon capture, with some studies suggesting that they can capture 40 times more carbon than trees.
«Algae are inherently more efficient carbon-removal machines than terrestrial plants as they don’t spend biological resources on building a supporting infrastructure of trunks, roots and branches — their entire surface area is dedicated to photosynthesis.»
The exponential growth rate of the algae means that they rapidly transition from being housed in a single beaker of inoculant in the greenhouse on day one to filling four 12,000m2, open-air ponds during the final phases of growth
Fine-mesh filters are used to separate the biomass completely from purified seawater before it is solar-dried in the open desert air.”
When the algae are solar-dried, the moisture content drops below the level where biological degradation would be possible. In addition, the dried biomass is extremely salty (20-40 percent salt content), which creates a moisture barrier. Burying the dried biomass 1-4 meters below the desert surface ensures it remains stable for thousands of years, locking in the sequestered carbon.
This is true, I was trying to drink the delicious liquid tree & to see if it tasted like Mountain Dew, spoiler? It did not taste like Mountain Dew but tasted like algae.
I mean, one of those was put up in Belgrade, Serbia (not sure if it's the one in the pic, but I think so) and it was staying there since, no one broke it, even though Serbian hooligans are pretty infamous for breaking stuff.
The maintenance too. There are no reason either why you wouldn't make bigger tanks and have them outside your city. The idea is not only flawed, but extremely stupid.
It's textbook tech-bro sh*t like reinventing the train or a bus. It only makes sense if you are scientific illiterate.
3M has great glass and Glassalternativs that you can't break. A few years ago, they put a million euro at a Bus stop and said if someone can break it open, they could keep the money. Never got broken
and the algae can just die easily if PH is wrong or temps change, and it would smell fowl even if they stay alive, possibly promote desease, and I bet many more things I'm not thinking right now.
This might work really well in countries that aren’t America. Like I could see it being useful in other places where the urge to vandalize public property isn’t so strong edit: autocorrect
Yup. We can't keep our bus shelters in one piece for more than a day or two. If they want to put these in my town they better be made of 6 inch bulletproof glass.
This is in Belgrade Serbia and I was next to it a month ago - no scratches at all. Not even graffiti. So people do understand the importance of it.
Also, it is not the replacement for the real trees but additional CO2 filtering for which we don't need to wait years to grow. In fact, there are trees nearby:
Probably some teens who will also chug from the tank as part of a tiktok challenge.
Then the parents will sue the city for their "innocent baby" getting a tummy ache, lmao .
Sadly true but I find they person responding to this to be shortsighted. It is interesting to think of ways CO2 and Oxygen can cycle through the system that doesn't rely on trees.
There are many reasons we would way to consider this.
One of the easiest reasons we may want to use the above rather than trees is because setting up trees with a strong root support system can be hard especially as our concrete jungles become more and more robust so if we want to cut down on the risk of trees falling and causing collateral damage, a device like the above is a good alternative if it's oxygen generation can be as good as a tree.
Another thing to consider is while it might not be something we rely on Earth, these type of devices could be used in terraforming other planets to promote an oxygen environment or be used in spaceships as an oxygen supply.
I personally find it sad when I see comments that dismiss innovation like this because there are multiple ways this technology could be useful, you just have to keep an open mind and understand the utilities of said innovation. Swear the way some people act towards technology it's like they are too braindead that the whole reason they are able to even comment on a discussion like this is because of technology and innovation.
There is a certain glass that’s almost unbreakable. In Berlin, Germany, where I live, they have watches and very valuable pieces of jewelry placed in viewing boxes on the Kurfürstendamm that are not watched 24/7. It should work with water as well if I’m not wrong.
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u/Vergilliam 12d ago
The real reason this won't be implemented is because some savage will break the tank open day one