Hello! I’m wondering if I could call on the collective wisdom about approaches to dealing with yard waste in an urban area with lead contaminated soil. It’s one of the reasons I want to produce compost, as amending the soil helps bind lead and make it less bio-available. But my flower gardens at times have large chips of lead paint in them (old neighborhood with old houses) and I don’t want to add this to compost that I would put on my raised vegetable beds with clean soil.
My current setup is a tumbler (concrete yard, dense urban area) and a pile next to it of yard waste. I’ve been using the yard waste for browns and was considering making a ventilated trash can setup for yard waste and almost finished compost to finish up together.
This question is prompted because I recently had roofing material including nails, shingle, and old wood with lead paint all over it thrown all over my yard. I cleaned the heck out of it and ended up throwing out all my yard waste because it was full of this stuff, and I noticed that some plants I’d dug out and chucked in there had hunks of doing with visible pieces of lead paint in it. Made me really reconsider if I should be composting any of it! (Invasives go straight into the municipal trash)
I’ve considered have 2 compost streams (small space, seems too obsessive), only putting the compost on the flower bins and purchasing compost for veggies, not using yard waste at all, or throwing any large hunks of soil in the trash and just continuing with it all together.
Including some pics of my tumbler.
I would really appreciate any thoughts, opinions, data, etc. thank you!!
by hotgarbagebag
2 Comments
From what little I’ve read, in phytoremediation of soil, the plants are typically removed and disposed of rather than composted, though in a couple quick searches for “bioremediation of lead” and “phytoremediation of lead,” I found this study about a particular organism used for it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666016423002451. This study suggests some particular plants to grow that take up the lead: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10450253/.
I haven’t read either study, though; hopefully my quick findings are helpful. I know I’ve heard of sunflowers used for the purpose, but again, I haven’t actually researched that–just hopefully pointing you in a helpful direction. But even better, hopefully someone more knowledgeable will show up to tell you more. I know somebody here does soil bioremediation work, but I can’t remember their user name. Good luck!
Edit: you might also look at some of the past results here about remediation: https://www.reddit.com/r/composting/search?q=remediation&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all
That’s an interesting problem you have there. Have you had the soil tested for lead? Places that do agricultural soil testing sometimes have a heavy metals panel they will do. I suspected that I had lead in the soil near my garage, but the soil test came back clean, luckily for me. I think you’re on the right track removing as much of the evident contamination as possible. Were I in your place, I would have the soil tested, and if it is indeed contaminated to an unacceptable level, I’m afraid I would ship that soil off to a landfill and replace it with new topsoil, then amend that for gardening. I have used Waypoint Analytical for soil analyses for years with good results, including the heavy metals test.