“Cleaning-up legacy pollution from industry: A template for marginal brownfield remediation”
Project supervisors: Dr. Liz Hamilton (UOB); Dr. Lesley Batty (UOB); with project partners Grand Union, the Wildlife Trust, and the Canal and River Trust
Common Field site, 2022.
The pressure to create greenspace within urban environments has prompted renewed interest in bringing contaminated land back into beneficial use for public amenity (Williams et al., 2010). Canals, which were once a vital artery for the transport of goods and materials during the Industrial Revolution, are increasingly valued as an important green space providing much-needed recreational and ecological benefits to urban areas.
However, the industrial activities that once lined their banks have left a legacy of heavily polluted soils and sediments with associated poor water quality. As a result, there are large sections of the UK’s canals that require significant remediation of heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and asbestos in order to be suitable for public use. The principal method recommended for the clean-up of contaminated canal banks requires the removal of heavy metal-contaminated sediments and ex-situ remediation (Bromhead et al., 1994). This is often too costly for marginal land such as canal banks and therefore an alternative, in-situ, low-cost method is needed to bring these areas back into beneficial use. Recent advances in composting technology together with a move to a more sustainable circular economy offer an opportunity to assess the efficacy of these new in-situ bioremediation techniques (Zhou et al., 2022).
This project will involve working with Grand Union, the Wildlife Trust and the Canal and River Trust to develop and assess bio- and phyto-remediation works along the Grand Union Canal in central Birmingham (Grand Union). The project would involve working with a range of local and national partners and collaborators to develop potential links for remediation of similar contaminated sites across the UK and further afield. The project will assess the efficacy of different in-situ remediation techniques and ultimately create a template for remediation of similarly contaminated sites. The template will include recommendations for a new substrate to reduce the toxicity of in-soil contaminants without the need for more costly interventions. The ultimate aim of the work is to bring these marginal areas of land back into public amenity use.
In our partnership with Aakash Basi and the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Science we’re looking to continue exploring phytoremediation and phytoextraction alongside dilution as potential community-led solutions to re-publicising post-industrial urban green/brown space. However, through this work Aakash will also be looking at the role of companion planting to better aid the functionality of key extractive/remediative species, using biodiversity as a tool for land care.
We’re hoping that this work will create a framework for the future, to garner financial investment in community-led solutions to how to live with the inherited toxicities of the past.
Aakash Basi, 2024.