Soil Health
This page discusses soil-related issues, including soil health and the use of soil amendments to revitalize soils in order to make them suitable for sustaining plant life or development.
Why is soil health important?
All components of an ecosystem are dependent on viable and healthy soils for the system to function properly. Increased acidity, the presence of heavy metals and other contaminants, and high concentrations of salts can render a soil infertile by inhibiting plant growth, limiting microbial activity, and altering its physical properties. Therefore, it is critical to revitalize soil health in order to restore a degraded ecosystem. In many cases, adding soil amendments such as compost, manure, or lime can revitalize soil by adjusting pH, addressing chemical imbalances, and improving soil texture and structure.
What are soil amendments?
Soil amendments are materials added to soils in order to revitalize and make them suitable for sustaining plant life or development. Superfund sites, large and small mining sites, landfills, industrial sites such as refineries, smelters, foundries, and milling and plating facilities, and other sites with contaminated or disturbed soils exhibit a variety of problems that often can be addressed effectively and directly through the use of soil amendments. When applied properly, soil amendments reduce exposure to contaminants by eliminating exposure pathways or immobilizing contaminants to limit their bioavailability. By adding appropriate amendments, metals are chemically precipitated and/or sequestered by complexation and sorption mechanisms within the contaminated substrate. Metal availability to plants is minimized, and metal leaching into groundwater can be reduced. Metals and arsenic that remain in soil solution usually are demobilized via chemical reactions at plant root surfaces.
The addition of amendments restores soil quality by balancing pH, adding organic matter, increasing water-holding capacity, re-establishing microbial communities, and alleviating compaction. As such, the use of soil amendments enables site remediation, revegetation and revitalization, and reuse. Furthermore, soil amendments may also encourage active plant growth, which can further increase the stability of a degraded site. Plants stabilize the landscape from erosion, greatly reducing surface water runoff and sediment loss to receiving streams, and also reduce erosion caused by wind.
Some commonly used amendments include:
- Municipal biosolids and digestates – nutrient-rich organic byproducts of wastewater treatment
- Yard and wood waste: lawn clippings, raked leaves, tree trimmings, etc.
- pH-neutralizing chemicals such as sugar beet lime and other lime products
- Paper mill sludges
- Coal and wood ash
- Animal manure and litter
- Compost
- Traditional fertilizers
Amendments such as these are advantageous because they are a cost-effective and low-energy restoration practice.
Soil amendments have a wide range of uses, and can be used in various situations ranging from time-critical contaminant removal actions to ecological revitalization projects. Practitioners can use soil amendments, to “jump-start” ecological revitalization at significant cost savings compared to traditional alternatives. In addition to eliminating exposure pathways and/or immobilizing metals and other contaminants, recycling these residuals (industrial byproducts), instead of disposing of them, results in significant ecological benefits for the hydrosphere and atmosphere.
Composting is used frequently to significantly reduce pathogens in organic waste streams, since the process generates temperatures hot enough to achieve this reduction. Compost availability and composition varies widely, but in general, compost is generated in much smaller volumes nationally than manures or biosolids.
For more information on compost and how to create your own composting pile, please visit the EPA Composting and Organic Materials Management Pages:
http://www.epa.gov/compost/
http://www.epa.gov/organicmaterials/
EPA provides the public with educational information, based on the best science, about the safe recycling and disposal of biosolids. To access this information, please visit the EPA Biosolids web page:
http://www.epa.gov/owm/mtb/biosolids
Further Information and Resources:
- For information on soil amendments, please visit:
The Use of Soil Amendments for Remediation, Revitalization, and Reuse. (Download 1.74MB PDF)
http://www.clu-in.org/542r07013 - For additional information on ecological restoration and soil health, please visit:
U.S. EPA. 2006. Jump-Starting Ecological Restoration - Soil Health
http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/ecorestoration4_092106/ - Soil Remediation, Revitalization, and Reuse: Technical Performance Measures:
http://www.clu-in.org/products/tpm - Soil Amendments for Remediation, Revitalization, and Reuse Tools: Fact Sheet (Published 2007)
This fact sheet describes two tools developed by U.S. EPA in cooperation with 18 federal and local government, academic, and private sector experts. These tools---a white paper titled "The Use of Soil Amendments for Remediation, Revitalization, and Reuse" and an Internet website and search engine titled "Soil Remediation, Revitalization, and Reuse: Technical Performance Measures"---are designed to encourage and assist site cleanup managers to use soil amendments for remediation, revitalization, and reuse of their sites resulted from this collaboration.
Download (2.26MB PDF)
http://www.clu-in.org/download/remed/540R07013.pdf
Page Last Modified: July 2, 2008