Taylor Yard is a former railyard near downtown Los Angeles that the city has pledged to turn into a public park. But before that can happen, its soil needs to be cleared of a wide array of heavy metals and toxic chemicals, including lead, cadmium, diesel, benzene, and more.
One University of California researcher is leading a project to accomplish that using "solar-powered vacuum cleaners."
Or, in other words, plants.
Danielle Stevenson, who works in the environmental toxicology department, is leading a mostly volunteer team in planting native shrubs and bushes at the site, the Guardian reported. Those plants then suck up toxins and contaminants in the soil in a process known as "bioremediation."
Bioremediation has several planet-friendly benefits over the more common method of dealing with toxic waste sites, which is called "dig-and-haul." The dig-and-haul is exactly like it sounds: Polluted soil is simply dug up, hauled away, and dumped somewhere else.
The advantage of bioremediation is that, unlike dig-and-haul, it actually addresses the pollution instead of just transferring it somewhere else, and it's cheaper. But it is not without its drawbacks. Dig-and-haul is much faster and is able to remove contaminants deeper in the soil than bioremediation can.
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Still, surrounding communities — in particular, tribal communities — have been clear that they prefer the bioremediation approach.
"[The California department of toxic substances control] methods have always been very destructive when it comes to cultural resources as well as natural resources," said Matthew Teutimez, chair of the California EPA's tribal advisory committee, referring to the state's decision to employ dig-and-haul at a contaminated site in the San Fernando Valley. "We have a whole different concept for how to manage and heal our land, and those concepts are not being integrated."
Teutimez went on to explain that Stevenson's project at Taylor Yard is especially important because it has supplied the state with hard evidence of bioremediation's efficacy.
"They won't make any changes unless there's data involved, and that's the big component where [Stevenson] comes in," he said. "Her data now can be used to make the point that tribes have been saying for years, that the Earth is able to heal itself."
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