Christopher Anderson has discovered a way to “use common crops to soak up contaminants in soil from gold-mining sites and return the areas to productive agriculture.” The harvested gold pays for cleaning up the site, and training the locals in agriculture.
The process, phyto-remediation, works as follows:
- Treat soil with chemicals to break down the gold into water-soluble particles.
- Plant crops, such as corn or canola, which can naturally absorb large quantities of metals.
- Harvest plants as they are dying — before they begin to break down and let the metals seep back into the soil — and extract the metals from them.
The process is very cheap, and 1kg of gold, and 500g of mercury, can be harvested per acre. In addition to harvesting gold and mercury, the process also harvests a profitable byproduct, “purple gold”. “Purple gold” is a nanoparticle of gold which is purple, not yellow, and melts at 1/10 the temperature of regular gold, making it extremely valuable.
The problem Anderson was seeking to resolve is that of small gold-mines, which are quickly exhausted and then abandoned, leaving toxic chemicals behind in the ground, making the nearby ground useless for farming, and dangerous for drinking water. This kind of problem, I might add, is caused by The State on two levels: (1) Regulations which prevent the private ownership of mines; (2) The State’s refusal to enforce the property rights of those who’s property is polluted by the polluters. So much for the idea that the free market is “bad for the environment”, and that “The State has to regulate it”. It seems that not only can the free market clean up its own messes, but it can also clean up messes made by The State.
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There is a third cause: property taxes. Property taxes present landowners with the prospect of a continual drain on one’s resources unless the land is put into some productive use. Sometimes, it is worthwhile to leave land fallow until an entrepreneurial opportunity becomes clear, or until capital is built up to put a plan into action, or just to hold it for consumption use as a natural reserve. I am reminded of a dentist who lives about 60 miles NE of Houston, who owns a property, “Chain-O-Lakes” (see http://www.colresort.com/ ). This large piece of property has been in his family for generations. He is now developing part of it for housing, besides the minimal amount of development he undertook to make it a nature resort.
Those who favor property taxes may not realize the pressure it puts upon landowners to develop land before it would be developed in a free economy. Property taxes also create the unhappy state where holding land in a relatively raw condition is quite rare.
I think the effort, and therefore the “cost” of producing the gold, as well as there not being all that much to be so produced, would not impact the price much. In the same way as going out to the asteroid belt and bringing back a mountain of gold would require such an expenditure that the gold would not actually be cheap. In the same way, it is possible to make gold in an atomic accelerator but the gold produced costs a million dollars per gram.
Curt-
Phytoremediation is one of those things that sounds great, but in reality has a fairly limited range of application. If Mr. Anderson has applied phytoremediation to a site that actually pays for itself, he will be one of the few to have done so. More power to him. Mostly it’s used on low-level metals sites by larger corporations and government entities that mainly want the publicity they get from “using plants to clean the environment.”
Think of years of raising and cutting crops to get a few kg of metal out of the near-surface soil and you will get a feel for the scale of this endeavor.
This is pretty exciting.
Except that perhaps investing in gold might not be so profitable given the cheep way to increases its supply that this will enable — at least untill all the contaminated stuff is cleaned up.
Tracy
My first visit to libertarian thought at the Von Misses Institute. Intend to stay on your course.
have switched parties to Libertarian. No guarantees there but more transparency there is obvious.
Been reading Lew Rockwell for some years. My education will then be apace my effort;instead of wheel spining, and fuming,learning I’ll be. My
continuing thanks to you all. trying to make better[best] decisions. Don McGowan
dear sir,
please infrom me .how to make gold metal at
home,we know some things about that you help us.
pls contact on mail maheshved2003@yahoo.com
Dear Sir.
We are gold dust mining company from west Africa Ghana at the moment we have in stock large quantity of gold dust for sale interested to buy can contact me for more info.
Thanks
Mr. Victor
Agree with Orestes that phytoremediation, while certainly useful for certain types of remediation at low levels (and possibly a very important methodology for mercury given the large amounts coming from coal-fired powerplants), it is likely to be cost-and-effort prohibitive now. However, given the right circumstances (and some advancements in bioengineering) it might be both beneficial and economic in more situations. A more common and economic method is to cover or stabilize the waste until it becomes economic to remediate or recover it. You cannot overlook the economics of this, since there are already some sites where the property values have driven total contaminant removals into economic territory (the Goldman-Sachs building in Jersey City comes to mind – I worked on that site).
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I met Chris personally…great guy..If you are interested in Gold and other precious metals from Unusual Sources, be sure and drop by our website to check out some really novel stuff. Lots of information and free reports on this and related subjects.
Gold is found in many common substances around the world, but relatively unknown to the public, and the new wave in mining is about to take off…
Interesting topics… but i may have a more simplistic idea about gold farming. Anybody wanna try my technique can e-mail me. My way maybe a litlle bit simpler than you think. Why dont you just use colloidals as ingredients. It’s already in the nanoforms
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Yeahh Your artical was great..
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