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Chinese scientists reveal glowing plants that could light cities
(www.euronews.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Even if it wasn't more energy efficient, you'd also get fresh air from the plants as a bonus, and an ecosystem developing around them. Plants also help manage heat in cities which is another bonus. Having more nature in the city may have a positive effect on mental health. Finally, you'd be massively saving on materials that go into making stuff like LED bulbs that could now be used elsewhere. If you could make the plants glow bright enough, imagine how many billions of LEDs you'd be saving in a country the size of China.
Imagine all the fertilizer and labor spent on the plants. I agree that more green space would benefit any city but I don't think a monoculture of plants engineered for maximum bioluminescence would make a healthy base for it. Public lighting and public greening are two separate problems and trying to solve both at once means not doing as good a job at either.
Using fertilizer and labor sounds better than mining and refining stuff like rare earths to me. You could probably even process waste from sewage into fertilizer creating a somewhat closed system this way. On the balance, this seems like a preferable trade off all around if you're going to need to produce light somehow. There's also no reason why this would need to be a monoculture, and they actually talk about engineering a variety of plants in the article.
I don't really see how you can make the assertion that these are two separate problems that can't be elegantly solved in this way. We'll only know whether that's the case once it's actually tried.
I think we're picturing a very different level of brightness achievable per plant. Replacing one street light would require a very large amount of glowing vegetation. Just the maintenance would be prohibitive. A city would need more gardeners than all other civil servants combined. And nevermind whether the fertilizer is produced from sewage or petrochemicals the runoff would be an enormous pollutant in its own right. Also it would be least effective in winter when the need for artificial light is greatest.
I mean you wouldn't necessarily need the same level of light, nor would you have to replace all the street lights with this. There's no reason these two things can't coexist. And sure, it wouldn't work in winter, but that's only a problem for specific regions. Large parts of China don't have cold winters.