Short answer: the bank won’t give your shiny new tree-planting business a loan as easily as it will to a “liquid tank tree replacement” one.
Long answer:
- Trees take time to grow
- Trees need to be planted
- Trees make shade
- Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
- Trees don’t need electricity
- Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
- Trees don’t look cool
While algae are more efficient at turning CO2 into oxygen in theory, in practice algae don’t have a good climate in such a tank (no oxygen without ventilation, i.e. constant electricity and they get cooked through the glass).
All in all, more of a gimmick than anything.
Roots limit where they can grow without messing up infrastructure.
Yeah this is a big problem I see often. You have underground utilities? Tree planting becomes a huge thing. And in a lot of these walkable areas, places you’d want trees, folks tend to also prefer not to have the wires overhead with telephone poles everywhere, and so they’ve been backed into a corner.
I did just sit through a presentation by my local environmental commission where they addressed the issue. The solution seems to be trees bred for the specific environment: deciduous provides shade but doesn’t drop a lot of leaves; can grow tall but the root ball grows in a certain way so as not to interrupt sidewalks and utilities; hearty and resilient. I can’t recall the trees, but they were described as essentially not naturally occuring.
Ginkos are very common. They’re ancient trees, and almost went extinct, but they’re tolerant of the rather extreme conditions of an urban environment and very pollution resistant
Trees don’t look cool
You take that back!
was about to furiously reply with the same retort… but yeah. I LOVE green spaces
- Trees take time to grow
Sure, of course not removing literally all of them in the first place is preferable but hindsight is 20/20 I guess. And good things come to those who wait.
- Trees need to be planted
True, planting a tree seems a bit easier than installing a weird tank though, despite time to grow.
- Trees make shade
Good.
- Animals like birds and insects like bees and mosquitos like to live next to them
Good.
- Trees don’t need electricity
Good.
- Trees take in heat radiated from the pavement
Good.
- Trees don’t look cool
Bullshit.
Aren’t like half of those bullet points positives? Also in addition to what you said once you got a tree you got a tree, those tanks need constant maintenence and cycling which I doubt anyone is going to bother with for more than a year after installing them.
The comment you replying to was trying to not so subtly point out this is a business plot and little else. Nobody is going to pay a subscription fee to have a tree in front of their business, but they might cough up money for a third party to maintain a tank of algae out front if it was sold right
deleted by creator
