soil-chemistry
Soil chemistry is the study of the chemical properties and processes occurring in soil, including mineral composition, organic matter dynamics, and ion exchange. These chemical characteristics directly govern nutrient availability, pH, and the presence of beneficial or toxic compounds that plants encounter in their root environment. Understanding soil chemistry is fundamental to plant science because it determines how effectively plants can uptake essential minerals, how root systems develop, and how plants respond to environmental stressors.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-04-20
Researchers found that common plastics — including PET (used in bottles) and PLA (a compostable plastic) — do measurably break down when buried in soil, but how fast depends heavily on the soil's chemistry and which microbes live there. Alkaline, mineral-rich soils hosted microbial communities that degraded plastic surfaces the most, offering a path toward using soil biology to clean up plastic pollution.
PET plastic showed up to 38% reduction in surface carbonyl index after 300 days, while PLA showed up to 36%, confirming measurable biodegradation in real soil conditions
Plastic surface hydrophobicity dropped by 52% for PET and 26% for PLA, with alkaline, carbonate-rich, higher-conductivity soils driving the greatest transformation
Plastic exposure significantly restructured soil microbial communities, enriching known plastic-degrading bacteria (Bacillus, Burkholderia, Pseudomonas) around PET and broader metabolic specialists around PLA