What does it do with the waste carbon? For example, we have the claim:
The facades of buildings and lampshades could be made to exhale fresh air with just a thin coating of the leaf material.
Every four pounds of CO2 you treat this way, converting to roughly three pounds of oxygen, leaves you with a pound of carbon that has to go somewhere. Plants use that excess carbon accumulation to build more plant. But your lampshade isn’t going to remain functional, if it builds up a few hundred pounds of carbon waste.
My suspicion is that the chloroplasts will simply switch off when they’ve accumulated enough waste products. So it appears to me to be a rather expensive way to absorb a small amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
I doubt there’s actually any CO2 absorption happening. It’s just a light driven H2O splitter, and yes, the chloroplasts will die pretty quickly if they’ve been removed from the cell.
And “Just coating the surface” -> they haven’t actually done the math to figure the appropriate surface area to balance one human. Hint: It will need the near-equivalent of a complete fake tree, (or fake forrest) with the 1000x (or more) surface area enlargement you get by having many, many leaves layered, etc.
What does it do with the waste carbon? For example, we have the claim:
Every four pounds of CO2 you treat this way, converting to roughly three pounds of oxygen, leaves you with a pound of carbon that has to go somewhere. Plants use that excess carbon accumulation to build more plant. But your lampshade isn’t going to remain functional, if it builds up a few hundred pounds of carbon waste.
My suspicion is that the chloroplasts will simply switch off when they’ve accumulated enough waste products. So it appears to me to be a rather expensive way to absorb a small amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
I doubt there’s actually any CO2 absorption happening. It’s just a light driven H2O splitter, and yes, the chloroplasts will die pretty quickly if they’ve been removed from the cell.
And “Just coating the surface” -> they haven’t actually done the math to figure the appropriate surface area to balance one human. Hint: It will need the near-equivalent of a complete fake tree, (or fake forrest) with the 1000x (or more) surface area enlargement you get by having many, many leaves layered, etc.