Imagine cleaning dirty water with a plant\u2026 without needing big, heavy tanks of water. That\u2019s the idea behind IMPRESS\u2019 latest research paper published by Iv\u00e1n Loaiza and Marcel A.K. Jansen from University College of Cork in the International Journal of Phytoremediation. In short, It tests \u201cfog-o-ponic\u201d duckweed farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the paper is about<\/strong> Why fog-o-ponics?<\/strong> How they tested it (and when)<\/strong> What they found<\/strong> What this could mean next<\/strong> Read the full<\/strong> publication <\/strong>\u2935\ufe0f<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The researchers looked at duckweed (Lemna minor L.<\/em>), a fast-growing floating plant already famous for soaking up excess nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from wastewater. What\u2019s the catch? Most indoor duckweed systems still rely on trays full of water, and stacked \u201cmulti-tier\u201d versions get engineering-heavy because every layer has a column of water weighing it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fog-o-ponics bears similarities to aeroponics, yet it utilises a nutrient mist instead of roots sitting in liquid. They placed duckweed colonies on a nylon mesh \u201chammock,\u201d and a nutrient solution was turned into a fog using an ultrasonic mister. If it works, thin plant layers can be stacked with far less weight, potentially making compact, year-round, indoor \u201cliving filters\u201d that fit circular-economy goals, to treat waste streams and turn nutrients into biomass. In the process a three-layer prototype (with 2 cm spacing) was built to explore how stacked cultivation might perform at different heights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Short trials were run to see how light levels and fogging schedules affected growth and longer trials up to 21 days checked if plants stayed healthy over time. As the fog itself can block light, with a potential ten-fold reduction report, light intensity was tuned to avoid starving the plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Duckweed didn\u2019t just survive, it grew about as well as in traditional liquid culture. Best performance hit a relative growth rate of ~0.24 per day at 50 \u00b5mol m\u207b\u00b2 s\u207b\u00b9 light, with photosynthesis health indicators comparable to \u201cnormal\u201d growth. Continuous misting beat on-off cycles, suggest steady fog helps keep nutrients available. Crucially, the plants removed lots of nutrients, with the paper reporting total nitrogen removal of around 500 mg per square meter per day, noting substantial N and P uptake into plant tissue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If scaled up, fog-o-ponic duckweed could become a high-capacity, multi-stacked wastewater polishing step for farms, food processing, or indoor treatment facilities, turning \u201cpollution\u201d into harvestable biomass, for fertilizer, feed ingredients, or bio-products. The paper also flags questions, like maintaining fog delivery and lighting efficiently at industrial scale, but it\u2019s a promising proof-of-concept for lighter, denser phytoremediation reactors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n