Soil Matters - What is CL:AIRE doing
)
"Soil Matters - What is CL:AIRE doing" is the title of Jonathan's seminar session at Contamination & Land Remediation Expo at the NEC on 13 September 2023 and it’s true, realisation is slowly dawning that although we have policies and legislation for air, land and water, soil matters have been left behind. Now nationally, in Europe and further afield, there is an increasing amount awareness of the importance of soil. We are realising it really does matter, not just in its own right as an amazing living biosphere, but because so much more of our society and economy depends on it. We get an amazing amount of our medicines, particularly antibiotics, from soil research.
Soil is also recognised as being vital to landscape-scale rainfall management. Healthy soils allow greater infiltration and soil moisture capacity and that benefits natural flood management and crop growth at the same time. Healthy soils also take carbon out of the atmosphere, so effective soil management assists everyone in moving to reducing greenhouse gas loadings in our atmosphere. This is not just in the agricultural sector, but also in the development and recreational landscaping space too.
Soil is also recognised as being vital to landscape-scale rainfall management. Healthy soils allow greater infiltration and soil moisture capacity and that benefits natural flood management and crop growth at the same time. Healthy soils also take carbon out of the atmosphere, so effective soil management assists everyone in moving to reducing greenhouse gas loadings in our atmosphere. This is not just in the agricultural sector, but also in the development and recreational landscaping space too.
CL:AIRE is at the forefront, working with others in the soil community to assess soil health whilst developing approaches to address emerging contaminants like PFAS in soils.
On the development side, soils have received a lot more focus in the last two years. The Society for the Environment Soil and Stones Report (2021) and “Ten Principles of Good Soils and Stones Management” (2023) set the challenge for a more cross-sectoral approach, seeing soils as resources and not as wastes to be sent for disposal in landfill. Indeed, many countries in Europe now ban topsoils going to landfill, and progress is being made on our own soils strategy with Defra publishing some positive aims and targets in its Environmental Improvement Plan (2023). The plan states, “Soils should be considered a resource not a waste”, and alongside developing better practice for agricultural soils using tools like Environmental Land Management schemes, it also aims to set up pilot studies for long-term soils repositories, Earthbanks if you will. Developers will be able to make deposits and withdrawals of these valuable resource hubs, whether that is subsoil, topsoil, clay engineering materials, or general engineering fills.
This could be vital for ready resources for the capital works required to address many of our future flood defence projects, as well as facilitating key infrastructure projects. Clearly the beneficial use of soils can also include soil manufacturing and soil treatment hubs and these too will potentially play a greater role in the future. Some already do, with permitted sites undertaking these types of activity. The key issue will be quality assurance on fit for purpose outputs. CL:AIRE’s Definition of Waste Code of Practice (DoW CoP) can play a role there too.
Soils matters, and we are beginning to address the issues. But how does soil matter to you? CL:AIRE has been involved in trying to revitalise and refresh the DoW CoP with other players and we expect progress on that this year. However, we have been involved in other soil matters too. The ReCon Soil project has recently finished its exciting work on developing effective growing matrix soil recipes through trials in Cornwall and France (ReCon Soil webpage).
Of course, CL:AIRE continues to provide high quality training, and enable other initiatives such as the National Quality Mark Scheme, to support the development industry. We are developing a new Sustainable Ground Material Management training module for launch in 2024. We will also be launching the DoW CoP Insight service to allow others to use the scheme we have used with HS2, enabling engagement from CL:AIRE on large projects. We are also looking at how the DoWCoP scheme could be used for international projects in the near future, enabling overseas projects to follow our good practice materials management scheme to create better sustainable developments.
So, if soil matters to your organisation, join CL:AIRE as members and help us move soil up the agenda. If we support effective soil management systems, like the DoW CoP, we can all gain in sustainable development terms and look after our soil resources. It is after all literally the grounding for all our development settings, food production, nature and recreation. Soil Matters!
If you’d like to find out more, please come along to the Contamination & Land Remediation Theatre at 2pm on 13 September to hear Jonathan Atkinson, Technical Director, CL:AIRE speak. Find out more here.