Flowers grown floating on polluted waterways can help clean up nutrient runoff
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But in winter they will die, so a part of this nutrients will be released again. Trees would be much better for that
Hopefully someday we can move beyond the desire for grass lawns, since that's where a lot of this waste is coming from.
Do you have a source for that?
As someone that is farm adjacent (not just physically) my intuition tells me that run off from lawns would be a rounding error compared to agricultural and horticultural run off.
I feel like I'm the only person here who read it.
> Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
That does not say that lawn run off out weights anything else. Did _you_ read the article?
So I'd be very shocked to see numbers that support lawns having more runoff than farms.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/america-land-use/
I used to work with precision ag and fish ecology depts at univ of Minnesota. In much of the Midwest, it is farm upon farm as far as the eye can see. Both these depts primary focus was on reduction or mitigation of nutrient runoff from farms.
But, in urban areas, it is absolutely correct that a good portion of the lakes have issues due to lawn runoff (summer) and salt runoff (winter). The local lake manager said that winter salt is the single most damaging contribution of people in our one instance. A lake in the next county over was devastated by phosphorous from lawn treatment. One next door was being savaged by carp.
Water is a precious resource and has multi vector threats. Where you live it may have a bunch of different problems, but for much of my state, and surrounding Midwest states where farms are widespread, farm runoff dominates simply because on a per acre sampling, farms dominate.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Lawn/lawn2.php
Looks like Visual Capitalist is just hosting maps from McHarg, https://mcharg.upenn.edu/
I don’t know if McHarg collects data that can be compared with NASA.
If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article but did find this:
“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.”
Irrigated. Most crops are not irrigated. From the article:
"This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc --could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all."
128,000 square kilometers is about 32 million acres. A lot for sure. One acre for about 10 people in the US.
But the total cultivated cropland (not counting tree farms) is about 650 million acres. 20 times the lawn total. Corn alone is 93 million acres.
Total [1]https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-room/efoia/electronic-reading-...
I should have linked to the research rather than NASA, where author Milesi was interviewed:
https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxvi/8-w27/milesi.pdf
>> All believable, but if we’re talking overall, NASA says satellite imagery shows the irrigated area for turf outweighing the next eight crops combined.
> If you have ever driven across the Midwest you know this is incorrect. I could not find that statement in the linked article
Link rot is kicking in.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160330015359/http://sciencelin...
So, the questions that remain:
1. Are lawns more or less likely to be treated with chemicals that harm waterways
2. Are lawns more or less likely to produce runoff of those treatments
3. Given answers to above is the net effect more or less than agriculture on our water.
I'm not seeing much that answers those questions specifically. It does appear there's regulations against phosphorous lawn fertilizer nowadays. But that's all I can find on a cursory search. I'm happy to believe they both are equally important nowadays.
On that last source: the design is to concentrate liquid manure, which as a point source is a liability, and spray it over an area. I believe this makes it a non-point-source for the purposes of carveouts in the clean water act.
Also, plenty of florists use paper wrappers, there's no particular reason to prefer plastic.
I would love to see any effort to filter out urban water pollution. And I commend any change in the narrative that undesirable populations of blue/green algae, zebra mussels, etc. are inexplicable inconveniences, instead of what they really are: opportunistic growths driven by human water pollution and a warming climate.
> Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes.
https://www.toddecological.com/about
- - - -
John Todd Living Machines Lecture
Ecological Treatment Of Sewage
Nov. 7, 2002, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
sponsored by Sustainable Pittsburgh
- - - -
John Todd, Living Machines
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute
> John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU
- - - -
John Todd - The Ecological Design Revolution
Bioneers
In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.
In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied"
John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells
> The five case studies presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate from an adjacent landfill. ...
https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalD...
Well, I can, it's not a massive expense compared to containing it.
Depending on who owns the nearby waterways, the farmers could be incentivised to float recollection furniture which benefits all.
> Can't believe farmers are wasting that volume of fertiliser.
I get what your hinting at (and your further comments add nuance) but its more pernicious than that. Water management on farms is hard, and has got harder. As soil becomes more sterile, it is less absorbent of water. This means that drainage needs to be more effective, as anything outside of the normal rainfall causes flooding.
But! fast drainage means runoff. That could mean expensive synthetic nitrogen, cow shit, or actual soil is being swept into the water system. As we've had more uneven rain cycles recently in the UK, and maintaining drains/ditches has got a lot less expensive, the effectiveness of farm drainage has increase significantly. This means flash flooding down stream and also more reliance on pumped water.
But, it also means soil degradation, which requires more shit to be put in, which then runs off.
There are ways to tackle this, but it requires investment from the academic world to prove it works for the varied UK farm lands, Subsidies changes from UK gov (which they've already royally fucked up) and cost benefit analysis made available to farmers. Water dwell time needs to increase significantly in most of the UK, not only to reduce flooding, but to also improve drought resistance. The side effect is that it reduces fertiliser runoff.
The downside is that it also kills off the mechanisms that make soil hang together, like fungi, fibrous roots, moss. That process creates a spongy interlinked mesh that separates soil from something like raw clay/sand. think carbon/glass fibre vs raw epoxy.
Anyway, those fibres of organic matter decay/get eaten by insects, worms and fungi. This "airates" the soil by leaving voids, making it much less dense. This provides much more surface area (and holes) for water to soak into.
does that make sense?