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How do we clean up the waste we can’t see?

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.

Buried problems

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 infrasretucture. 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:

The nature-based innovation making an impact in water treatment

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.

Subterranean secrets that are getting rid of heavy metals

For decades toxic heavy metals have been the burden of waste management to contain with soil contamination often only becoming evident are serious consequences are already exposed. The challenge has been that once contamination has occurred remediation options are limited. Most of the time it’s about containment rather than being able to remediate to the point that soil becomes safe and usable once again. Once spoiled. Always ruined – not ideal when land is in short supply.

There’s a nature-based approach that could change that. Myco-remediation explores using fungal networks to remediate and rehabilitate contaminated soil. This includes soil that’s been exposed to industrial pollutants such as lead and arsenic, and well as pharmaceuticals, industrial oils and azo-dyes. Experiments showed that in some cases up to 98% degradation of industrial pollutants could be achieved. Filamentous fungi have also shown to be effective in remediating heavy metals, specifically copper and lead.

Multiple studies from various universities show strong potential for myco-remediation, with some researchers advancing to using myco-membranes to create more uniform testing conditions. The next challenge is creating protocols that can be scaled to address the vast volumes and types of remediation needed. There’s a single reason driving this…

We need healthy soil

Many of the issues waste management has to address is as a direct result of industrial extraction - assuming soil is just soil and that it merely takes up space in the ground. Now as our understanding of soil mechanisms expand, so does our responsibility to provide the conditions for soil to regenerate itself.