Toyota Develops New Flower Species To Reduce Pollution 211
teko_teko writes "Toyota has created two flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The flowers, derivatives of the cherry sage plant and the gardenia, were specially developed for the grounds of Toyota's Prius plant in Toyota City, Japan. The sage derivative's leaves have unique characteristics that absorb harmful gases, while the gardenia's leaves create water vapour in the air, reducing the surface temperature of the factory surrounds and, therefore, reducing the energy needed for cooling, in turn producing less carbon dioxide."
Bad reporting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad reporting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bad reporting (Score:5, Informative)
October 6, 2005
Toyota Develops Shrub that Greatly Improves Air Quality
--New Cherry Sage Better Cleanses Air, Reduces "Urban Heat Island Effect"--
http://www2.toyota.co.jp/en/news/05/1006.html [toyota.co.jp]
"TMC started selling its Gardenia plant, known as the "Wald", which has a very high atmospheric-cleansing ability, in October 2003."
The grass mentioned in TFA linked by /. is a breed of "zoysia grass" known as "TM9"
I read about it on page 40 of Toyota's 2009 sustainability report [toyota.co.jp] (8MB PDF) and it has been on sale since 2006.
Nothing in this story is new except for the positive PR that Toyota is getting.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
"Because water vapor is a greenhouse gas and because warm air can hold more water vapor than cooler air, the primary positive feedback involves water vapor. This positive feedback does not result in runaway global warming because it is offset by other processes that induce negative feedbacks, which stabilizes average global temperatures. The primary negative feedback is the effect of temperature on emission of infrared radiation: as the temperature of a body increases, the emitted radiation increases with the fourth power of its absolute temperature."
Re:What could possibly go wrong...? (Score:2, Informative)
Feed me, Seymour... :-/
Actually, if the plant eats pets, it'll save the environment!
Re:Availability (Score:5, Informative)
Ignoring naysayers for now, and assuming this plant is the benefit the article claims: What about me?
Does Toyota plan to release these plants for sale at my local garden store?
Not at your local garden store, but they are for sale through "Toyota Roof Garden Corporation".
AFAICT their sales are entirely out of Japan, so good luck with ordering.
http://www.toyota-roofgarden.co.jp/ [toyota-roofgarden.co.jp]
Re:FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot sucked in again? (Score:5, Informative)
Plants cannot metabolize nitrogen directly.
You are correct. However, the article talks about nitrogen oxides, not molecular nitrogen. The nitrogen in nitrogen oxides is already "fixed" and can be absorbed by many different kinds of plants [wiley.com].
Why do you think you put nitrogen fertilizers to plants, if the atmosphere is > 70% nitrogen?
As you probably know, we'd all be dead if the atmosphere were ~70% nitrogen oxides.
Re:Bad reporting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Plants eventually die (Score:4, Informative)
Today, there is very little chance of this happening, especially at a plant in Japan. In all likelihood these flowers will decompose when they die and release all their nitrogen oxides back to the environment.
Re:Water Vapor? (Score:3, Informative)
The amount of water vapor is also more or less constant. If you try to put more vapor in the atmosphere, it will just rain out somewhere else.
Re:Plants eventually die (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Plants eventually die (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't the nitrates in the soil act as a fertilizer for plants, as opposed to leaving it floating in the air for humans to breathe in?
Both. Some bacteria make ammonium from nitrogen, which keeps it in the soil. Others dump it in the air as N(2) and N(2)O. Local conditions limit how much gets mineralized into ammonium naturally. If there's enough oxygen around, other bacteria make it into nitrates, which then feed more plants. I reckon if they're planted sparsely, removed regularly (and composted properly), or rotated with nitrate-hungry plants, quite a lot would stay in the dirt. So, yeah, fertilizer and stuff, although some nitrogen is gonna float away no matter what.
Re:Plants eventually die (Score:3, Informative)
Unless Toyota intends to bury the plants every year then they are not doing anything to help sequester carbon.
Nor are they trying to. So that works out pretty well.
(The plan is to reduce carbon emissions by keeping the area near the plant nice and cool.)
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I am a bit confused. Plants do perspire and release water vapour but they also usually release heat (they have a metabolism and show on infrared).
It is a bit complicated. ;-)
It's true that plants give off IR radiation. But they also release water vapor, and the evaporation process is endothermic. This cools the plant tissues slightly, and conductance cools the air at the leaf surfaces. There's a lot of energy conversion and transfer going on around a functioning leaf. The "bottom line" of it all is that the air among masses of plant life is usually a few degrees cooler than the outside air, unless the air is cold, when the plants may somewhat warm the air. You can feel this when you walk into a clump of trees, even if you're still in the sunlight. Much of this effect is due to inefficiencies in the plants' techniques for controlling their own internal temperature.
It is interesting that plants can be giving off IR while being cooler than their surroundings. Part of the explanation is that the photosynthetic process involves a lot of frequency shifting. Photons are absorbed at one frequency, electrons bounce the absorbed energy around a bit, and another photon is radiated at a lower energy level. Most of this is significant to the plant's metabolism, but there are inefficiences. Thus, chlorophyll absorbs best in the green/blue part of the spectrum; a quick google found a graph at http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Chlorophyll [statemaster.com]. Note the complexity of the graph, with a lower peak in the red. To increase its absorbency, chloroplasts surround the chlorophyll with frequency-shifting molecules that absorb photons at other frequencies and reradiate the energy as photons that the chlorophyll prefers. But chlorophyll molecules don't intercept all these green/blue(/red) photons, explaining why leaves are greener than the incoming light. The whole process is impressively complex, and we're not very close to fully understanding it all. But much of the accidental reradiation is at low-energy frequencies, in the IR part of the spectrum.
Some interesting research reports a few years ago involved some tiny temperature sensors that could measure the temperature inside leaves. They reported that a wide variety of plants tested, over a wide range of atmospheric conditions, the internal leaf temperatures were close to 21 Celsius. This is somewhat cooler than our body temperature, and generally different from the air. The "higher" plants seem to have evolved some impressive temperature regulation methods, presumably because chemistry is simpler and cheaper if you can control the temperature. So at cooler temperatures, leaves tend to absorb lots of photons that they don't need for photosynthesis, but which function solely to warm the leaf to its operating temperature. The leakage from this process mostly loses low-energy photons, i.e., infrared. At higher temperatures, leaves can both radiate more energetic photons, and also release water vapor, which cools the tissues rapidly. In this case, most of the inefficiency is in heat absorbed from the surrounding warmer air, which is the main reason that clumps of plants are cool. But it's not really that the water was vaporized to cool the air. It was vaporized to cool the internal leaf tissues, and the air cooling is due to poor insulation at the leaf surface. The plants are trying to keep themselves at operating temperature, and cooling of surrounding warmer air is an inefficiency in this process.
Anyway, it's complex. And it's impressive how much control can be done by critters that have no muscles or nervous system and are stuck spending their whole life in one spot. It's almost entirely complex chemistry, including some very sophisticated control of photons and passing energy via electrons along chains of carbon atoms. Understanding what's known of it takes years of study. But you can find a lot of summaries by googling for someth
Re:Shameless drivel (Score:3, Informative)
It is a load of shameless and deceptive nonsense; and does make it better that it is wrapped up in florid language, if you will excuse the pun, hur, hur. "Create a new species"? Even highly educated plant breeders haven't been able to do that, but a car manufacturer manages to do it with a gesture and a lorry-load of hype?
I'm not so sure that 'species' is so well defined a concept when it comes to plants and hybrids that everyone agrees on what is and isn't a new species. However, I distinctly suspect that 'hybrid' got turned in to 'species' somewhere between the grower's mouth and journalist's article. Science journalists in particular seem to love writing complete bollocks that sometimes even flatly contradicts their only source.
For a plant species to work well as carbon-capturer,
No-one has said anything about them capturing carbon. They were chosen to capture and degrade other pollutants. Plants /do/ degrade pollutants like formaldehyde and some people buy particular pot plants specifically to reduce volatile organic compounds in their indoor air. (Though you're probably better off buying a proper filter). It sounds like Toyota's gardener has heard of the idea and though 'hmm, maybe I could do that, too' and then made the mistake of allowing their PR department to catch on.
Re:Plants eventually die (Score:3, Informative)
he's purporting that, oil deposits, in the form and structure they are in at this stage, could not be over 10,000 years old. He is saying, that, if the oil deposits where really millions of years old, that there layout, format, and structure within the ground would be fundamentally different
(at least, thats the impression i got from his statement).