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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 20 2022, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the waste-not-want-not dept.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/340991-researchers-grew-bigger-vegetables-using-exhaled-co2-as-fertilizer

Scientists recently tested the effect of funneling carbon dioxide-rich exhaust toward a vegetable garden, and the results were (literally) huge.

A team of agricultural researchers at Boston University came up with the idea while brainstorming ways to make urban environments more sustainable. As cities become denser, humans require more resources, and climate change worsens, buildings will likely require modifications to serve multiple purposes and recycle resource byproducts. Busy lecture halls with indoor climate control systems, it turns out, are a perfect example of such modifications. The building's exhaust contains high levels of CO2, which plants convert to energy during photosynthesis.

Rather than releasing that CO2 into the environment uncontrolled, the researchers thought to direct their building's exhaust toward an experimental rooftop garden. The garden, nicknamed BIG GRO, contained beds of spinach and corn. While both are common edible plants, corn photosynthesizes in a way that requires less CO2 than spinach, allowing it to serve as a control while the spinach ideally revealed the system's advantages and disadvantages.

[...] The plants that had been exposed to the building's exhaust had grown up to four times larger than the plants placed next to a control fan. The spinach in particular had quadruple the biomass of its control; the corn, despite its own special brand of photosynthesis, had two to three times the biomass of its control. Though the corn's growth causes the team to think the extra CO2 wasn't the only reason their experiment succeeded, there's now concrete reason to believe rooftop farms like BIG GRO could benefit from buildings' otherwise wasted exhaust.


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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2022, @06:24PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 20 2022, @06:24PM (#1280700)

    No way am I eating something that some acne'd nerds breathed all over. I'd literally rather eat dog shit.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday November 20 2022, @11:18PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Sunday November 20 2022, @11:18PM (#1280727)

    I think a more realistic application is putting up germination greenhouses next to indoor poultry sheds and pump the exhausts through.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Mykl on Monday November 21 2022, @12:08AM

    by Mykl (1112) on Monday November 21 2022, @12:08AM (#1280735)

    Just curious - do you pee on your lemon tree?

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Monday November 21 2022, @05:59AM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2022, @05:59AM (#1280762) Journal

    You already eat food that has had animal faeces sprayed all over it - or do you think that manure is so much cleaner than "some acne'd nerds breath".

    You already breathe air that is much more polluted than the breath that you fear might come from "some acne'd nerd".

    I'd literally rather eat dog shit

    I don't believe you.

    I think that you were attempting humour. For me, it didn't hit the right spot to be considered as such.