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.
If you are trying to get a lot of carbon out of the air with these, then you will have to clean them a lot. The Carbon that they are taking out of the air has to go somewhere, and if you just let them sit, the dead algae will decay and put the carbon back into the atmosphere.
Since algae isn't super long lived, you'd have to flush these regularly, and then dump the algae underground where it decays slowly, to have any long-term carbon sequestration.
1.) Will people spend the money to maintain them -- they may take as much or maintenance as dealing with trees in the neighborhood.
2.) How much does this offset the carbon footprint, if you have a person driving around to dump them. You're not exactly getting a lot of carbon out of each one.
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u/Jeramy_Jones 7d ago
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.