Landfills, overflowing bins, and waste crime scenes look and smell awful. The contamination and health risks are obvious, and yet it's still often a challenge to keep ahead of the mess. This begs the question: What about the contamination and risks we can't see? The ones hidden beneath the soil or seeping into it?
While there are regulations in place that outline how hazardous materials should be contained, treated, transported, and stored, this also requires teams of specialists to monitor waste disposal and ensure operations remain safe and compliant. What happens when there's less diligence?
Such as the company that quietly labels its waste as something less hazardous to avoid paying higher disposal fees. The filter that's broken and doesn't get replaced because maintenance is overlooked, letting contaminated water flow back into streams. Then there's the debate agricultural and farming residues and road run-off. The inevitable contamination that no-one wants to take responsibility for.
Waste crime, while obvious, is only part of the problem. As efforts are mobilised to address the dumping that's not controlled or compliant, the more critical issue is the accumulative effect of contaminated and degraded soil. It's about much more than chemistry.
Research highlights that there's a lot unseen life in the soil. Microbes, mycorrhizal networks, bugs and worms are just one part of it. There are massive subterranean ecosystems that form a vital role in supporting plant growth above the ground and mitigating flood risk. When they have optimal conditions, they function perfectly.
However, most of the UK's soil is so badly degraded that soil ecosystems are barely functioning. They're unable to act as sponges, filters or mineral sources for everything above the ground. Instead, the ground is hard packed and unproductive and becomes a freeway for flood waters the minute it starts to rain. Contamination only exacerbates the negative impact.
A growing awareness of the importance of healthy soil is turning a spotlight on nature-based solutions for soil and water remediation efforts. For waste management this provides an opportunity to expand knowledge and partner with environmental expertise, working with nature to remedy contamination.
A key factor driving this is cost, with ecosystems now being acknowledged as critical infrastructure. Most human interventions to date have proven to be expensive and unsustainable in the long term. By contrast, a healthy functioning, nature-based solution can be regenerative. Once established it shouldn't require constant inputs and interventions.
Perhaps what makes the most compelling case for nature-based solutions is that in some pilots, they're solving waste issues thought to be impossible by actually returning soil to a healthy state again. This alone should create the urgency to scale these solutions to become mainstream interventions. Here are two examples of what this could look like:
Waste management is well versed in processing plastic waste in its many forms, however microplastics remain a challenge. Specifically, because they're adding an additional form of contamination to soil and water sources. While filters and chemicals treat contaminants, they have almost zero impact on microplastics.
At the University of Missouri, a research team has taken an interesting approach to solving the microplastic problem. They've genetically engineered a strain of algae with the capability of filtering out microplastics. The algae produce a substance called limonene that binds with microplastics forming clumps. This enables them to be large enough to be filtered out.
The algae serve a dual purpose, also processing the waste water and absorbing contaminants. For waste water systems this has the potential to reduce chemicals used in the treatment process and produce a higher quality output. A key element is that the approach doesn't require new infrastructure. Researchers suggest the algae could be added to existing waste water infrastructure.