There isn't a lot of lignin in leaves.
Lignin is the tough stuff that holds the plant up.
The non-degradable plants would be the wheat and rice crops mostly (or exclusively -- we decide as a matter of policy).
What is left after harvest can be plowed back into the soil. The non-lignin parts would degrade, leaving the lignin skeleton to hold moisture and nutrients, improving the soil. Currently, one of the best soil improvers is biochar, used to make terra preta. A non-degradable lignin would have similar properties.
Quite a bit of the soil is already made of non-biodegradable materials like quartz, feldspar, mica, and other minerals. If your bits of plastic bag were shredded finely enough (into sand grains) they would indeed be a decent way to sequester carbon in the soil. Unfortunately, they weren't made from carbon in the air, so it is not a solution to the climate crisis. But lignin is made from carbon in the air.
If we had policies that made it cost effective for farmers to char the crop remains and return it to the soil, then bioengineering would not be part of any solutions. But I thought it would be an interesting topic for this group to think about. Are there genes out there in the wild that already produce carbon containing molecules that do not biodegrade? The beauty of lignin is that it is already needed by the plant, so no extra metabolic cost is wasted by the plant, and crop productivity should not suffer.
On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 9:37 AM, David Murphy <murphy.david@gmail.com> wrote:
imagine if all the leaves from trees were about as biodegradable as bits of plastic bag.
it would probably mess up a lot of other things along the way. Imagine the buildup of non-biodegradable dead vegetable matter clogging up rivers, suffocating soil and simply clumping on the ground blocking out the light from the plants bellow like some kind of permanent snow.
Don't forget the increased problems with fires from all the piles of dead plant matter.--On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Simon Quellen Field <sfield@scitoys.com> wrote:
--Here's an idea I have not yet explored quantitatively, but I thought I'd pass along for comments.In the Carboniferous era, plants had evolved lignin, but microbes had not yet evolved to degrade it. It took a hundred million years or so for that to happen. In that time, carbon got locked up in plant material which eventually got buried and formed our current coal supplies. As carbon got sequestered, and trees evolved, carbon dioxide levels fell, and oxygen levels rose.If we could engineer the lignin in our crops so that it was not degradable, we could lock up a lot of carbon as a by-product of our current activities.
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