What does he want? Phytoremediation! When does he want it? Now!

For Lou Licht, cleaning up polluted land using plants is a no-brainer. He’s patented a process using poplar trees for phytoremediation. On Tuesday, the North Liberty entrepreneur was a keynote speaker at a “Bioeconomy” conference called “Keep it Small, Keep it All: Cultivating the Bioeconomy at the Local Scale.”Licht’s introductory address at the University of Iowa’s Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination conference was a rapid-fire run-down of his personal history including: a run-through of synectic brainstorming and problem-solving; an abbreviated history of his family’s farm in Lowden, Ia.; the backstory on his company, Ecolotree; and some application examples of Ecolotree’s phytoremediation methods using poplar trees grown in Iowa.

In phytoremediation, plants are used to clean up or heal land and soil that has been poisoned or contaminated by chemicals, oftentimes harmful liquids can leach out of the tainted areas into groundwater supplies.

Although he said he doesn’t like the term “phytoremediation,” Licht’s company Ecolotree has developed a patented method of poplar tree plantings to curb agricultural run-off, clean-up “brownfields” or polluted sites, and naturally process bio-solids (from waste-water treatment) and livestock manure. He is also proposing the tree-plantings to help control odor at animal confinement lots.

His poplar plantings have capped landfills, buffered wastewater treatment plants, and cleaned up soil contaminated by fuel spills, arsenic and other chemicals that can leach into groundwater.

Licht says the tolerant, fast-growing, thirsty trees have a “root zone reactor” that helps naturally process manure and other materials in soil.

After a few years, harvested wood can provide a renewable fuel source for heating buildings.

Licht wants to use phytoremediation to control agricultural run-off that he says contributes to hypoxic zones in the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico.

What’s his phytoremedy for the damaging chemical run-off from Iowa farms? Licht believes:

“A strategic 2% controls 80% of the pollutant discharged to streams … Perennial, non-tilled crops, planted to intercept sediment and sink the fertilizer & pesticides from tilled ag and manure, are a critical part of that strategy.”

He said the blowers, pumps, and other mechanical means of controlling bio-solids and other compounds can be turned off and trees will do much of the work.

“We’ve always had a bioeconomy in Iowa,” Licht told the crowd of more than 50 gathered in downtown Iowa City. He said Iowa’s main natural resource is “photosynthetic space where land and water and soil and plants come together and make a true renewable resource.”

Here is Lou Licht talking about some of the ideas from Tuesday’s conference:

Licht introduced Kent Madison, whose for-profit Madison Farms is a 27 square-mile plot of land near the Columbia River. He farms canola and talked about “Small Scale Biodiesel Development and Use.” Madison also maintains fields of alfalfa, corn, snap peas, potatoes, rye grass, wheat, and cattle pasture.

Madison, who farms with the mantra, “Somebody else’s waste is a resource,” uses over half of the city of Portland’s bio-solids from their waste-water treatment plant and spreads the sludge on his fields. But he doesn’t stop there– his brand of Oregon bio-diesel is used by the city’s water truck fleet.

So although the trucks travel 200 miles to dump bio-solids in his fields, he offsets transportation costs and turns a profit doing it. In 14 years, Madison has applied over 2 billion pounds of bio-solids to his farm and range lands.

In another deal, Madison sells some of his potatoes to a french-fry factory and then re-uses the factory’s processing water to irrigate his fields.

He recently put up 15 wind-towers that will generate over a megawatt apiece.

He keeps it local and green. That’s green as in the photosynthesis of plants, the ecological sense, but also in as in greenback dollars.

Also presenting at the Bioeconomy conference:

Roger Brown of Western Illinois University spoke on wind energy,

Linda Snetselaar of University of Iowa’s Department of Epidemiology and Rich Pirog from the Leopold CEnter for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University discussed local food production,

and Kamyar Enshayan, Director of the University of Northern Iowa’s Center for Energy and Environmental Education, talked about how to “Obey Thermodynamics, It’s the Law.”

For more information about the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination (CHEEC), visit their website: http://www.cheec.uio…