Thanks for sharing, I’ve been a bit dubious about the hysteria about PFAS when there’s plenty enough Victorian era shit that still goes on.
In a non-confidential manner, would you mind elaborating on the pollutants you think have bigger health concerns? I had my rental’s soil tested at Macquarie uni recently, and came up high for lead and with a decent amount of most other heavy metals in the dripline, but within the threshold that’s allegedly safe - I’ve tossed my garlic crop and mulched the crap out of it to be sure.
In terms of metals, mulching won’t do anything, but then pretty much all soil in Australia has levels of heavy metals in it. There’s plenty of mercury in volcanic soils that is classified as naturally occuring. The only way to remediate metals in soil is to mix it in with huge amounts of soil. What concentrations were present in your rental?
What’s worth mentioning is that, just because it’s in the soil, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll be absorbed by plants. You’d have to look at biological pathways etc and then concentration that gets absorbed in general
In terms of contaminants, i’m talking about PFAS but from other sources. You’re more likely to get more PFAS from food packaging, mascara and even waterproof clothing, then you would from drinking Sydney’s water.
One thing that really annoyed me, was a plumber selling a reverse osmosis filter for your tap. The thing will 100% remove anything in the water, but the problem is that it remove EVERYTHING from water, including all minerals and anything good so you’re left with pure H2O. The problem with that is you lose all the minerals and nutrients that are naturally present within the water,
The ones closest to guidelines were Cr at 57mg/kg and Pb 268mg/kg. A friend said they were at 700 for lead in one inner Sydney spot where a drive way ran off too, so I know it’s not crazy high, but I don’t wanna mess around with the soil with root veggies. Mulch was to try and prevent the puppies from digging into the soil, which has been moderately successful, in that now they dig in the nice parts of the lawn away from the dripline
268mg/kg isn’t the lowest result. Max for ENM is 100mg/kg for lead. Your chromium is fine, especially as it’s not Cr VI. One thing about doing a site classification is density of testing. Metals testing is really difficult to get right and there can be an absolutely huge variance in between labs and even in between samples internally from the same jar. The problem is that it’s not exactly soluble, so it doesn’t spread out throughout the soil in a uniform fashion that organics generally would. One sample at a high conc. isn’t much to be worried about, it’s once they all start to sit on the higher level.
Pretty sure he’s talking about the years of Damage Control training that we did in the Navy where fire fighting foam was sprayed around like it was asbestos in the 1970’s.
I’m no tech manufacturing expert so not sure how significant this is going to prove yet, but it seems as though it won’t help the picture for global inflation if supply of microchips and solar panels gets restricted right now…
