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.
> 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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadLooks like an expensive and inefficient version of placing aquatic plants there. Maybe there's no good aquatic plant adapted to there.
Must be better ways to spend $20,000
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
> 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...