Agromining: Farming of Metal-Extracting Trees and Plants Could Replace Mining

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Agromining: Farming of metal-extracting trees and plants could replace mining:

University of Queensland plant specialist Dr Antony van der Ent calls it "agromining" but it's also known by the term "phytomining".

In his chemical analysis laboratory in suburban Brisbane he's doing tests on perhaps the most well-known hyperaccumulator of them all - the Macadamia tree.

Its leaves and sap - but not the nut - are rich in manganese.

[...] "We have found [hyperaccumulating plants] in Southeast Asia, as well as New Caledonia, and in Cuba and Brazil," Dr van der Ent says.

He estimated that of the 300,000 known plant species on Earth, only about 700 had hyperaccumulating properties.

Of those, about two-thirds fed exclusively on nickel, including three species in New Caledonia where the concentration of nickel in their sap was around 25 percent.

Cuttings from these woody plants can be dried and incinerated into ash. That ash is known as "bio-ore".

"It's extremely high-grade ore, which can then be processed using standard hydrometallurgical techniques," Dr van der Ent says.

[...] "Where you've had strip mining for nickel, which is a common practice in tropical regions, you could integrate the metal farming as part of the progress of rehabilitation," he says.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.