Read the full article by Emma Bryce (Anthropocene)
“A growing problem of modern industrial agriculture is the accumulation of ‘forever chemicals’ like PFAS in the soil. But now, researchers have developed a three-part plan involving hemp plants to draw it out of the soil—one that they say will cost a fraction of regular toxic clean up, and remove CO2 while they’re at it.
For decades, groups of persistent synthetic chemicals like PFAS have been used to make a range of products including food-contact materials, so accumulating in our bodies, and then our waste—which often becomes fertilizer. This has created a situation where swathes of farmland is now straining under a toxic load. Some farms in US states like Maine have even been forced to shut down because their soils exceeded safe limits for crop production and consumption.
The new study proposes that the solution to this industrial threat is plants, rock dust and biochar. The research, led out of Yale University, developed a pollution remediation model based on available data from farms in Maine and looked at two types of PFAS: PFOS and PFOAS. They first considered what would happen if they applied basalt rock dust to the soil, a common approach for sequestering carbon dioxide—but which also changes the pH in ways that makes chemicals more mobile in the soil.”…