Would be really nice to make the saplings plantable as trees. I'm stuck on a map w/ no trees and w/ the bob's mod pollution agros all the biter nests in a huge radius with no way to really combat it right now.

The first tree growing mods (The one I remember was named Tree Farm) used to do this, and everybody loved the idea of it. The problem was, to make trees grow, you needed to use scripts to keep track of every tree that was planted, and how long it existed, and periodically replace it with a tree of the next phase.
This VERY QUICKLY caused lag, which was noticable as the game pretty much paused for a moment every few seconds.

This mod was an answer to the "hate" of the tree-growing lag, to offer an alternative tree-growing method, which was just a recipe instead of a mass of laggy scripts.

Now, although what you suggest would be cool, it goes against the idea of this mod, and one of the rules of my mods as a whole... no entity monitoring scripts.

Ahh, thanks for the quick response. Another suggestion would be to make the green houses capture pollution. Not sure how you feel about this though.

Ahh, thanks for the quick response. Another suggestion would be to make the green houses capture pollution. Not sure how you feel about this though.

Although the effect is minor, they do actually generate negative pollution when in operation, this is the closest you can come to absorbing pollution.

What about planting them as just trees so there is no script that updates anything, just adding trees

It's best to use Bio_industries mod for this. You get a seed bomb that regenerates trees and is good for destroying biters.
Also Noxys trees helps with regenerating trees.