Un-development 1 is a former tow yard on the bank of the Los Angeles River and when Metabolic Studio acquired it a decade ago, it was heavily polluted with lead and other petrochemicals. Bio-remediation—using plants to pull up heavy metals and toxins—is the process we used to clean the soil and revitalized the landscape.
We designated a “sacrificial compost” for the contaminated plants, so we weren’t discarding toxins into the waste stream and passing the problem on to someone else. We recently did some testing, and the sacrificial compost area had the lowest lead concentration on the property! We figure out why and explain our results here.
This video is from tours of our Moving Mountains project, a city-scale initiative diverting clean soil away from our waste streams and into powerful remediation practices that challenge our legacy of industrial devastation.
Find out what we learned about lead capture, post any questions in the comments!
