There is green manufacturing, and there is green manufacturing. An ordinary factory can be made more green, but it will never be as environmentally friendly as a real, growing green plant. Green plants have manufactured things for us since the dawn of our species. Green plants manufacture the oxygen we need to breathe and live, from the carbon dioxide they remove from the atmosphere. Indeed without plants, the oxygen in the air would dwindle away and humans (and other oxygen-breathing animals) could no longer survive on Earth. Plants also manufacture food, from grain to veggies to oils to mouth-watering fruits, nuts and spices; wood, from Douglas-fir for construction to beautiful furniture wood to light balsa wood to heavy ebony for piano keys; drugs, from traditional cures to modern pharmaceuticals to intoxicants like tobacco, opium, magic mint, and lactarium; and chemicals of endless variety. Green plants are manufacturing devices — they perform green manufacturing in every sense.
On the other hand, one often hears that such-and-such does not grow on trees. Money, for example, does not grow on trees. Yet numerous solid objects found in everyday life would be relatively simple to genetically engineer trees to produce. A chair for example merely needs a sapling (let’s call it a “front left leg”) to reach the height of a seat, then send out two horizontal branches at right angles. When they grow about two feet long, they send shoots straight down to the ground where they take root. They also send shoots out horizontally at right angles to their current direction, which meet to form the last corner of the seat, whereupon they send down the 4th leg. Similarly, extra branches can grow into a back, as well as arms and various bracing bars if desired. The banyan tree is an example of a plant whose branches send down shoots that turn into extra trunks already, so that part of the general concept is clearly feasible. The chair still needs a seat, which could grow from a network of tough, viny stems that give enough when sat upon to be comfortable. Or add a cushion if you like. Of course, you still have to pull it out of your garden, but that is no more trouble (probably less, actually) than a trip to the furniture store. The entire chair is one piece without fastened joints that could loosen with age or otherwise require maintenance, so it could be long-lasting and strong. How strong? That depends on how long you grow it…for stouter legs and other parts, a chair tree farm would just let the chair tree grow a couple years longer before harvesting to let the trunks and branches thicken.
Various other useful items could grow on trees in your yard or in tree farms, or the seeds might get loose and grow in vacant lots or in the wild. Tables might need a flat top to be added later. Ladders would be a natural. Railings (just turn a ladder on its side!). Marbles already grow on bushes (they’re called “marble seeds”) and plants could be engineered to grow many other small solid toy and light household items as well, from checkers and chess pieces to knobs and knick-knacks.
Here’s another kind of thing that “doesn’t grow on trees.” Gold and silver. But no doubt they could and hopefully they will. Roots are chemical factories. Solar powered chemical factories. They extract raw materials from dirt, using energy captured by leaves from sunlight to convert the raw materials into useful chemicals. Mother nature has caused plants to make chemicals useful to the plant, but humans are increasingly causing them to make chemicals useful to humans. For example resveratrol is a chemical found in red grapes, peanuts, Japanese knotweed and some other plants. Some experiments suggest it increases the life spans of certain animals (and thus, perhaps humans). It can be produced not only by the roots of entire peanut plants, but by the peanut plant root system alone without benefit of light, leaves, or stems — the trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.
References
“The trick is to keep the peanut root systems properly bathed in a clear nutrient solution in a glass laboratory flask.” F. Medina-Bolivar, J. Condori, A. M. Rimando, J. Hubstenberger, K. Shelton, S. F. O’Keefe, S. Bennett, and M. C. Dolan, Production and secretion of reveratrol in hairy root cultures of peanut, Phytochemistry, vol. 68, pp. 1992 – 2003, 2007.
Green manufacture (phytofacture?) of chairs and tables is OK, but a more holistic way of living with plants (viveverde?) is Permaculture (look it up), which has great benefits for both humans and the planet.
I think you could combine the permaculture idea and the manufacturing concept described here. Surely living plants that make more things we need are an ecologically better alternative than making them in dirty factories or sweatshops.
um… did you just claim that a genetically engineered plant would be able to literally convert raw materials from soil into silver and gold? Silver and gold are atoms, not chemicals. You can’t convert one type of atom into another type of atom without changing the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons in the atom. And you need advanced femtotechnology to do that. And as far as I know, I don’t think it’s possible to create that kind of femtotech by rearranging a plant’s genes.
Femtotechnology would be cool, yes, but as you point out it would be quite difficult to do biologically. The only way to do it nowadays is with particle accelerators and nuclear explosions. That would be asking a lot of a humble plant, however genetically modified it might be. However, metal ions in the soil could be picked up by the plant and stored in concentrated form. Silver ions are a better bet than gold, because gold is so inert that it is more likely to be present as small metal dust particles. So I think plants that collect silver from the soil are more likely than ones that collect gold. True, gold is more valuable…oh well!
John V. Karavitis I think that there is going to be an explosion of discussion on the ethics of “manufacturing life”, whether it’s natural or synthetic. I also think that more care needs to be taken, since one can never truly predict the outcome of any new designed organism. Now, for the example of having a tree create a chair, well, that’s “cute”, as a way of demonstrating one’s technical capability re engineering life, but I recall reading a science fiction story where trees were engineered to create whole houses. I think that the emphasis won’t be on such “physical” uses of “manufacturing plants”, rather, as one of the commenters suggested, manipulating plants to accumulate heavy metals, and even to produce proteins and drugs reliably and in great abundance. Imagine growing a plant that can produce a flu vaccine! However, ethical issues will only grow as more and more of this research shifts away from the Plant Kingdom and enters the Animal Kingdom. John V. Karavitis, John Karavitis, Karavitis
Animals would certainly appear to be another frontier in this area. Plants are better because they are easier to grow and use less resources per gram of biomass to grow. But some things will require animals — like growing replacement organs for medical transplantation.