Growing plants to clean forever chemicals from farmland works
Thompson JT, Dobson M, Suhrhoff TJ, Kanzaki Y, Kent C
Phytoremediation
If your local farmers market sources from land that once received biosolid fertilizer, this approach could restore that soil to safe use within your lifetime instead of leaving it contaminated for decades.
Millions of acres of farmland got contaminated with PFAS, the 'forever chemicals' that don't break down, because fertilizer made from treated sewage sludge was spread on fields for years. Researchers found that planting certain crops on that land, then burning what they harvest into charcoal-like biochar, pulls the chemicals out of the soil and destroys them, while the leftover biochar keeps any remaining contamination from washing into groundwater. Adjusting the soil's pH with rock powder speeds the whole cleanup up by more than ten years compared to leaving it alone.
Key Findings
Alkaline rock amendment to manage soil pH accelerated PFOS removal, cutting remediation timelines by more than a decade under typical contamination levels
Pyrolyzing harvested plant biomass destroys PFAS and yields biochar that, when reapplied, substantially cuts leaching into groundwater
Scaled across roughly one million hectares of PFAS-impacted US cropland, the method could remove about 11 Mt CO2 per year (4-6% of the US 2050 carbon removal target) at a median cost of $1,460 per hectare per year, far below current remediation technologies
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists have designed a low-cost way to clean toxic 'forever chemicals' out of farmland by growing plants that pull the contamination from soil, then burning that biomass into biochar that locks the pollution away and pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the process.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Integrated thermal and phytoremediation of agricultural soils impacted by PFAS.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent synthetic compounds that have contaminated millions of hectares of agricultural land through decades of biosolids application. Conventional...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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