Author: danwalls (Page 6 of 10)

“Soil in the City” is a comic about living and gardening safely with city soils that may contain lead residues from past uses of leaded gasoline and lead-based paint. The Our Soil team wrote the script and partnered with Kaitlyn Briscoe, Angela Duras, and Madeline Montero for the illustrations. Kaitlyn and Angela are currently undergraduates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Madeline is an alumni.

The Our Soil team also partnered with Aileen Javier of Troy, NY, to complete a Spanish translation of the comic, “El Suelo en la Ciudad.”

You can download the comic book in English here and in Spanish here.

Abby and Sebastián joined a panel discussion for the film screening of “Arica: A Toxic Waste Scandal” hosted by The Sanctuary for Independent Media. Arica, Chile, is one of the two cities where Our Soil/Nuestros Suelos will hold workshops with residents to test local soils for lead and arsenic this year. The people of Arica have a long history dealing with the health consequences of lead and arsenic contamination of city soils. One substantial contribution of lead and arsenic to soil in Arica is smelter waste exported from Sweden to Chile in 1984. The metallic waste contained extremely high concentrations of lead and arsenic, and local residents continue to face the contamination due to negligence of the Swedish and Chilean companies involved and both governments.

The documentary, created by Lars Edman and William Johansson Kalén, covers this history and the ongoing pursuit of justice by residents in Arica. You can find more information about the documentary here and about film screening at The Sanctuary’s website here.

Colorado State’s Master Gardener program has a guide for estimating soil texture in a variety of ways. One of those ways is a jar method on the last page of the guide. By mixing soil, water, and powdered dish detergent in the jar, then allowing it to sit for two days, and marking the settled level of material at one minute, two hours, and 48 hours, the sand, silt, and clay fractions of the soil can be calculated. Below is an image of the last page describing this jar method.

One of the bulletin boards in the hallway outside of the Ramírez-Andreotta laboratory at the University of Arizona had the following poster that describes how to use red cabbage for measuring pH:

It may be possible to use red cabbage to measure the pH of soils as well. To measure soil pH, soil must first be added to water. To measure soil pH with the red cabbage indicator, soil could simply be added to the indicator solution.

The blog post associated with the poster can be found here. That blog post references an earlier post about using the petals of poinsettia plants in a similar fashion, as they also contain anthocyanin pigments.

Dan left the Ramírez-Andreotta laboratory on January 22 to return to the northeast in preparation for the next stage of the project: collaborative workshops with Troy residents using the Community Soil Study Toolkit in order to identify and address any arsenic, copper, and lead that may be found.

But not before completing the necessary laboratory work to support the Community Soil Study Toolkit and one moonless night in December at the Chiricahua National Monument:

Today Dan visited the Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants (ALEC) at the University of Arizona where the Troy soil samples prepared in the Ramírez-Andreotta laboratory were sent for analysis using their inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS). The director of ALEC, Mary Kay Amistadi, walked Dan through the process of how the Troy soil samples were prepared and analyzed with the ICP-MS to measure the amount of arsenic, copper, and lead in the samples. A small quantity of soil (1 gram) is added to an acidic solution and placed in an industrial microwave to bring all of the metals in the soil into the solution. Then a pump moves the solution into the ICP-MS where it is vaporized and all of the components are measured by their atomic mass.

These laboratory measurements will be used to calibrate the arsenic, copper, and lead field tests of the Community Soil Study Toolkit. By calibrating the tests in the Toolkit, we can use the color responses that they produce to determine the quantities of arsenic, copper, and lead in a soil sample. The preparation of the soils for analysis with the ICP-MS is similar to the preparation in the field tests in the Community Soil Study Toolkit, with a few substitutions: (1) there is no industrial microwave in the field, so the soil is soaked in an acidic solution at room temperature for a longer period of time; and (2) there is no ICP-MS in the field, so a way of generating a color response that corresponds to the amount of arsenic, copper, and lead is substituted.

Below is a picture of the ICP-MS at ALEC: