Tuesday, 9 March 2021

Harvesting metal from plants that suck it out of the ground

Green sap being taken from a "hyperaccumulator" tree in Borneo, by Antony van der Ent

"Hyperaccumulator" plants grow in metal-rich soil—and suck a huge amount of metal out of the ground.

If you cut open the leaf of a hyperaccumulator plant, you get sap that's blue-green, because it's fully 25% nickel. That's an astonishingly high concentration; it's higher than the ore that goes into a nickel smelter. — Read the rest



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