A Floating Island Is Cleaning Up Brooklyn's Polluted Gowanus Canal | Hacker News Reader

A Floating Island Is Cleaning Up Brooklyn's Polluted Gowanus Canal

fastcoexist.com

38 pointsgeezsundries7 comments

I'm sure that people will learn a lot from doing this. But it's not going to make much difference in "cleaning up" the Canal.

The Gowanus Canal is on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List. The actual cleanup will cost $506 million and take until 2022. That's "the rest of the story". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowanus_Canal#Cleanup_efforts

Wow, that's a depressing read.

> The building of new sewer connections only compounded the problem by discharging raw sewage from neighborhoods even farther away into the Canal. By the turn of the century, the combination of industrial pollutants and runoff from storm water, fortified with the products of the new sewage system, rendered the waterway a repository of rank odors, euphemistically called by wise-cracking locals "Lavender Lake".

Such a shitty place, but so aptly named gowANUS cANAL.

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/13/these_photos_of_gow...

I don't understand. The plants are fed by a solar still, so they are not in contact with the water. What are they supposed to do that is useful?

Their roots are in contact with the water, or at least with soacked soil.

Looks like an expensive and inefficient version of placing aquatic plants there. Maybe there's no good aquatic plant adapted to there.

Often plants will take up the toxin through their roots and sequester it in their aerial tissues. In this case the tissue could be harvested (and then perhaps incinerated) and the pollution will be removed from the canal. If aquatic plants were used and they didn't fully degrade the pollutants, then the waterway would be still contaminated.

This seems very inefficient to me, or even if it is efficient somehow, at that scale it could not be making any real difference.

Must be better ways to spend $20,000

This was my immediate reaction. A few small plants aren't going to "clean up" a canal.

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