The world has been looking for ways to address greenhouse warming. Some researchers have already come up with methods to help the world cope with it. Here, another new solution may be in the horizon, one that can take hold all over the world.
Wastes thrown do emit carbon gases that add to the global warming problems. People need to be more mindful of what they throw out. What if they are able to create wastes that don’t harm the atmosphere? This is exactly what the new solution may be.
What if you were given the option of being able to throw out your lawn and garden waste while being an staunch defender against global warming? This is what the new soil amendment technology can do for people in all four corners of the globe. This may just be the ultimate solution to global warming.
This potentially new method is considered revolutionary because it makes fertilizer creation environmentally friendly. This has the ability to completely remove greenhouse gas emissions. The innovation has also received a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and this was to be incorporated into 7 major cities’ landscaping programs.
This is what they refer to as “biochar.” The process has just been modernized in Sweden. What they do is put grass trimmings, hedge clippings, tree branches, or any other kind of yard waste, and put them all into an enclosed space. This is what they call “pyrolyzing,” and it is done so that they are able to avoid the rapid oxidation of CO2 altogether.
The waste is converted into a charcoal-like substance. The best part about it is that it’s carbon negative. It also comes with the ability to remove more CO2 than it produces. The researchers also found this to be a more effective soil nutrition solution when compared to what’s being used now. Traditional soil amendments such as the nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer should be replaced with this.
Just recently, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that they were awarding grants of $400,000 to seven major cities in Scandinavia and the U.S. The money goes to the implementation of the winning-project of the charity’s 2014 Mayor’s Challenge: The Stockholm Biochar Project.
They will give each city some implementation and technical support. This will come from Bloomberg itself and the goal is to develop city-wide biochar projects as well as encourage the people around to fight against the ongoing problems of climate change. The efforts are expected to produce 3,750 tons of biochar. This will simply come from all from lawn and garden waste from city parks, median strips, and other green spaces. To do this, they would need to sequester around 10,000 tons of CO2 each year. This is equal to taking a total of 6,250 cars off the streets.
In the past, municipal lawn and garden waste would be sent to landfills through trucks. In there, the waste will decompose and release all the carbon that is circulated back into the environment. With it are other gasses that come from the bacteria present in the waste. On the other hand, the biochar plant will throw every branch and twig wasted into the simple yet effective furnace. This is where the carbon produced will be trapped forever, or at least close to it.
Success for Stockholm
The biochar technique is revolutionary, and this began in Stockholm. They opened the first five biochar plants in 2017. This was when the city started distributing this new fertilizer/soil amendment to the people for no cost. It’s free because the citizens were asked to simply bring whatever yard waste they have in exchange for it.
“If you buy something from the store you want to do it correct from the beginning, but if you get something for free you can sort of play around with it, and see how it works in your garden,” Mattias Gustafsson, biochar expert, consultant, and original member of the Stockholm Biochar Project, said when he spoke to WaL.
“Biochar, if you look at it under a microscope, it looks a bit like a sponge, so that will absorb and absorb nutrients and water, so if you put that in the soil it’s like a nutrient-loaded battery,” explained Gustafsson. “Let’s say you’re sowing potatoes: you dig a ditch where you have the potatoes and you put some biochar in there, then you put the potatoes, then you cover it with soil”.
A thorough scientific research has been made on this matter and findings show that when compared to traditional soil amendments and fertilizer, biochar has the ability to increase yields by as much as 100 percent. That is, especially when combined with animal waste such as cow urine or manure. A meta-analysis of meta-analyses that looked into the benefits of biochar in agriculture saw that when mixed with other forms of fertilizer, biochar can up the crop yield by an impressive amount. This is especially true for acidic soils that are present in the tropics.
Root length, mass, and number of tips went up by a good amount for crops that were grown and harvested with biochar. This may impact carbon-capturing forest farms when used. The microbial content found in the soil also went up by using this technology.
Extensive research was done on this at the Ithaka Institute in Nepal. The findings showed that cow urine-enriched biochar blended with compost resulted on average in a whopping 123 percent more crop yield. They compared the results with the traditional organic farming practices that also made use of cow urine-enriched compost. It also had a 100 percent greater crop yield as opposed to the use of nitrogen-potassium-phosphorus fertilizer.
Carbon Capture in the Weekend
The best part about biochar is its scalability, ease-of-use, and remarkable lowering in the emissions from fertilizer production. This is considered as a breakout moment in the crop department. Right now, some governments have been constantly pledging to provide scientists with billions of dollars just so they can develop innovative methods that help stop climate change. Biochar simply asks for an extra step when one does his or her bi-weekly yardwork tasks.
“It’s unique because you put the biochar into an area with the absence of oxygen, and we get a very stable form so it can stay in the soil for hundreds up to thousands of years,” says Gustafsson. “We have more cities in Sweden that are following the Stockholm Biochar Project model and more are on the way, but we are trying to get more industries interested in using and producing biochar”.
In 2019, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies, Minneapolis was “blown away” by how this solution was. In fact, they were so happy with it that ever since, they’ve been bringing truckloads of biochar into town from a biochar plant in Missouri.
“It was a lot simpler than I imagined it to be,” said Robin Hutcheson, the Minneapolis’ public works director then. “I think I had imagined biochar as something that was chemical and complicated and difficult to produce and difficult to use. What I learned is that it is actually simple to produce and able to be used in a variety of settings”.
Minneapolis has, in fact, been looking into the many ways of using biochar. They have provided the local Native American Tribal governments with it in order to give the agriculture a boost. Since then, they have seen a growth of around 30 percent. They’ve also considered including it with roadway reconstruction projects in order to increase rainwater collection, which is its other benefit because the biochar is like a sponge. They also want to open their first ever biochar plant because they were extremely happy with how Stockholm turned the heat from the production process into energy that supplied their power grid.
Now, the steps in biochar production is in its final stages. They’re now working on its transition from a government program into a market industry. Right now, Sweden citizens can buy biochar from any garden store. This also may be made available through e-commerce. Several vendors on Amazon in a number of countries will start making biochar available and will ship it in various countries. While the price may be steep for soil amendment, the amount needed for sowing is actually quite low. Thus, there will be a relatively quick return in investment for this.
“I think it’s a really important point for cities to reach out to the public as well,” adds Gustafsson. “Thank you for bringing your sticks and branches to our biochar machine, please put the biochar in your garden.”
Gustafsson is optimistic that the biochar will be much like a weekend-woodchipper rental. This means that anyone can rent a mobile-biochar plant they can use for the end-of-season hedge trimming. “We had the idea of a small machine going around making biochar that people can rent, so definitely a thing that could be possible, someone just has to make the economics around it,” he said.
What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news!
True Activist / Report a typo
