Thar's Metals In Them Thar Plants!

[Fred Chambers]

Hi Permapeople, et al,

Recently, I heard about people farming cabbage on tailings from gold 
mines.  After processing the plants, their yield is something like 2kg per ha.

Here's something along those lines...
Fred

	
STORY LEAD:
"There's Metals in Them Thar Plants!"
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ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Don Comis, (301) 504-1625, dcomis at asrr.arsusda.gov
June 22, 2000
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Miners might have been better off farming plants rather than digging pits
for high-grade ores.

U.S. Department of Agriculture agronomist Rufus L. Chaney and colleagues in
USDA's Agricultural Research Service, at the University of Maryland, and in
England have patented a way to use plants to "phyto-mine" nickel, cobalt
and other metals.

Phyto-mining, or biomining, is the use of plants to extract valuable
heavy-metal minerals from soils.

One of the plants being used is alpine pennycress, a wild perennial herb
found on zinc- and nickel- rich soils in many countries. It--or a
high-yielding commercial crop like canola that had pennycress genes
incorporated into it--would be harvested and burned. Then the phyto-miners
would process these ashes and recover the valuable metals for sale. Ashes
of pennycress grown on a high-zinc soil in Pennsylvania yielded 30 to 40
percent zinc, the equivalent of high-grade ore. Electricity generated by
the burning could partially offset costs.

Ironically, early prospectors in Europe used weeds such as alpine
pennycress as indicator plants to find metal ore. These plants thrive on
soils with high heavy-metal content, taking up metals through their roots
and storing them in their leaves to protect themselves from chewing insects
and plant diseases.

USDA has signed a cooperative research and development agreement with
Viridian Resources, LLC, a technology company based in Houston, Texas. It
involves Chaney and colleagues associated with the patent as well as a
scientist at Oregon State University. An article about the research appears
in the June issue of Agricultural Research magazine. View it on the World
Wide Web at:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/jun00/soil0600.htm
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Scientific contact: Rufus L. Chaney, ARS Environmental Chemistry
Laboratory, Beltsville, Md., phone (301) 504-8324, fax (301) 504-5048,
rchaney at asrr.arsusda.gov.
___________________________________________

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