
A Floating Island Is Cleaning Up Brooklyn's Polluted Gowanus Canal - geezsundries
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3051524/this-floating-island-is-cleaning-up-brooklyns-insanely-polluted-gowanus-canal
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PhantomGremlin
I'm sure that people will learn a lot from doing this. But it's not going to
make much difference in "cleaning up" the Canal.

The Gowanus Canal is on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List. The
actual cleanup will cost $506 million and take until 2022. That's "the rest of
the story".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowanus_Canal#Cleanup_efforts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gowanus_Canal#Cleanup_efforts)

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DonHopkins
Wow, that's a depressing read.

> The building of new sewer connections only compounded the problem by
> discharging raw sewage from neighborhoods even farther away into the Canal.
> By the turn of the century, the combination of industrial pollutants and
> runoff from storm water, fortified with the products of the new sewage
> system, rendered the waterway a repository of rank odors, euphemistically
> called by wise-cracking locals "Lavender Lake".

Such a shitty place, but so aptly named gowANUS cANAL.

[http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/13/these_photos_of_gow...](http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/13/these_photos_of_gowanus_canal_sludge_are_weirdly_beautiful.php)

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cjensen
I don't understand. The plants are fed by a solar still, so they are not in
contact with the water. What are they supposed to do that is useful?

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marcosdumay
Their roots are in contact with the water, or at least with soacked soil.

Looks like an expensive and inefficient version of placing aquatic plants
there. Maybe there's no good aquatic plant adapted to there.

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hesparrow
Often plants will take up the toxin through their roots and sequester it in
their aerial tissues. In this case the tissue could be harvested (and then
perhaps incinerated) and the pollution will be removed from the canal. If
aquatic plants were used and they didn't fully degrade the pollutants, then
the waterway would be still contaminated.

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gggggggg
This seems very inefficient to me, or even if it is efficient somehow, at that
scale it could not be making any real difference.

Must be better ways to spend $20,000

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mattbasta
This was my immediate reaction. A few small plants aren't going to "clean up"
a canal.

