>Mark - very interesting side issue - urban and peri urban agriculture. >Should food be grown in cities with high levels of air pollution that >precipitates onto the plants....or perhaps we should think also in >terms of growing fuel instead (mustard, sunflowers, etc.) in these >urban and periurban spaces, and grow th food where the air is already >cleaner. Over time, the urban area itself could perhaps grown more >renewable oil fuel, use the presscake as fertilizer, clean up sites >with mustard (phytoremediation), use mustard presscake pellets as >natural pesticide...and use the biofuels to also burn in the diesels of >course, cleaning up the air. Sorry about the run on sentence! > >Ed
This is certainly a valid concern. First, the more green (leaf-area) a city has, the cleaner the air - plants definitely have this effect. So grow more plants, green every available space, and particularly with roof gardens (they save huge amounts of energy). That also makes for a much more pleasant city, and it can easily be made to have a knock-on effect (ie to more pedestrianization - yuk, what a word!). I've talked a bit before about urban planting schemes focusing on biofuel plants rather than pretties, with the utility fleets the prime market - I think this has a lot of potential. As far as air-pollution and city food are concerned, first (also said before), an enormous amount of food is produced worldwide in city farms, often in very polluted cities. It's mostly organically grown, using city wastes (composted, or fed to a pig or chickens and the manure composted), and it has a radical effect on waste disposal problems, which might not be manageable in some or many cities without the city farms (and yet city farmers are often harassed by city hall, rather than aided and abetted). So, for a start, these people are eating organically raised food from healthy soil (healthy soil life, that is, the "soil food web"); it will have good mineral content and good protein synthesis, which the alternative, chemically-grown "industrial" food, will probably not have (if they can even afford to buy it). It follows that their nutritional status will enable them to resist pollution better. Two immediate types of pollution (as well as all the other types): in the city food, soil and plant pollution derived from the polluted air; in the industrial-food alternative, pesticide pollution, which is rather more severe than generally acknowledged, especially in 3rd World countries, but that's so in all countries (see recent studies in the UK, for instance). I'd go for the city food - the food is better, it will help my resistance, and the pollution may be less severe. There's another factor. A series of tests was conducted in Britain in the 80s with composting, comparing lead pollution of plants grown in heavily composted plots and in control plots without compost, both in fairly secluded urban areas and in areas that were heavily exposed to nearby traffic pollution. The experiment wasn't finalized for various reasons, but the results were interesting just the same - the heavily composted plots seemed to allow both the soil-life and the plants to "buffer" the pollution, the indications were that it resulted in significantly less pollutants in the plants. That makes sense, for a number of reasons. That was in the bad old days of lead. We're still in the bad old days of far too many other things, some of them maybe worse than lead. Still, I'd say that city food is only a no-no in the very worst areas. Please note, though, that "compost" means thermophilic aerobic compost, not a smelly mess of putrified garbage. It's properly made, it gets hot (60 deg C plus - 140 deg F) and stays that way for a couple of weeks, it's been turned so that all of it has been through the heat. Either that, or vermicompost (with red worms). If you want to know how it's done, start here: http://journeytoforever.org/compost.html Composting Last, with glycerine, or rather glycerine/soap/catalyst, if you mix it with enough "browns" (dry stuff) to get the moisture content and aeration right, and don't use too much, so your compost gets hot and works as it should, the pH won't matter much, it will adjust and the finished compost should emerge at pH 6.5 or so. Best Keith >On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 10:29 AM, girl mark wrote: > > > a lot of people I know who do this are actually non-gardeners (I would > > poison myself if I ate what I could grow with the air pollution at my > > house!), so the composting is just a disposal method, or a way for > > keeping > > food scraps (and glycerine that you would add to such a pile) out of > > the > > landfill. I've seen a few of biodieselers who had a 'dedicated' > > glycerine > > compost pile- it doesn't take much space. Neutralizing seems like a > > good > > idea, I almost wrote something to that effect in that post. By the > > time you > > do the neutralizing the glycerine, though, it seems like such a useful > > product it's a shame to waste it. > > Mark > > > > At 10:17 AM 1/21/2003 -0800, you wrote: > > > >> On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, at 10:03 AM, girl mark wrote: > >> > >>> you can also compost the glycerine if you don't happen to have a hay > >>> field :) > >>> Composting: I mix it with wood chips or straw, make sure it is > >>> somewhat wet > >>> with water, and make sure I turn the compost pile frequently. Just > >>> regular > >>> composting technique. > >>> Mark > >>> > >>> > >> > >> Doesn't the compost end up awfully alkaline? I've composted it also, > >> but not > >> until it's been neutralized with acid. Problem with THAT is it also > >> releases > >> FFAs, which makes quite a chunky mess you then have to deal with. If > >> the > >> alkalinity doesn't bother the worms and bacteria, I suppose you could > >> neutralize it AFTER it becomes compost.... -K Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
