Building Contractor New York Ny

Fish Bones to the Rescue

The over-the-transom response to my article in Thursday’s paper on the use of fish bones to neutralize toxic lead in residential yards was swift, and worthy of response here.

To recap the article, Environmental Protection Agency officials and contractors, working with community leaders in Oakland, Calif., have started to reduce lead contamination in backyards in the city’s South Prescott neighborhood by roto-tilling the soil with a paste of fishbone meal. The idea is to make dissolved lead molecules bond with another chemical, producing a substance that cannot be absorbed by the human body.

Lead is one of the most prevalent contaminants in the country, particularly in urban areas where car traffic was heavy in the days of leaded gasoline and there are lots of older houses with flaking lead-based paint. Exposure to lead contamination can have severe consequences, like impairing the learning ability of small children.

This roto-tilling method, which costs a little more than half as much as removing and replacing contaminated soil, has been used at military bases and to control acid drainage from mines. But it has not been deployed in residential neighborhoods until now. One reader pointed out that the concept of using chemical bonding to make dissolved lead molecules bond with another chemical goes back decades. The correspondent, a metallurgist from New Mexico, wrote that in working in gold mines, he had observed an assaying process that included introducing bone ash, which removes the lead from the gold.

Another reader wanted more information about research on lead neutralization over the past 15 years. Studies of phosphate bonding with lead include this 2001-2002 one in The Toxicologist, a scientific journal, by Columbia University researchers led by J.G. Graziano.

Research by Judith Wright and her husband, James Conca, of the Richland, Wash., company PIMS NW, which provides fish bones from Alaska, has also shown that fishbone treatment is effective in removing lead, cadmium and zinc from contaminated soils.

Sally Brown, a soil scientist at the University of Washington, is high on the concept of mixing lead-laced soil with some constituent that would neutralize the lead, but she reports that her additive of choice is a mixture of iron-rich biosolids from wastewater treatment plants. Tests in yards in Baltimore showed that the amount of lead available to be absorbed by humans was reduced by 20 to 38 percent after the biosolids were added to the soil.

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