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Worms help remediate soils

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Earthworms can eat thirty times their body weight of soil each day. Metals in the soil are taken in and change in form, often becoming inert. Mark Hodson is investigating the use of earthworms to help remediate sites degraded by metal contamination.

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Robyn Williams:Worms; pink ones, brown ones, and most not lowly at all. This lot are moving into toxic zones to gobble up heavy metals. Mark Hodson from the University of Reading.

Mark Hodson: The soils that we want to do something about are fairly degraded, not much grows there, usually former industry sites. And the contaminants could be a whole host of things, things like arsenic, lead, zinc, copper, left over either from the actual processing and industry that was going on or even things like lead paint can end up contaminating soils.

Robyn Williams: And I suppose that makes the soils pretty well unusable indefinitely.

Mark Hodson: Yes, not indefinitely because it's always possible to clean these things up but in the first instance, yes, they're pretty grim places, there's not much growing there and there's not much life in the soil.

Robyn Williams: Not much growing there, but before you talk about worms, it has been a suggestion to put plants in to help clean things up. Has that been effective? How long does it take?

Worms help remediate soils - Science Show - 15 November 2008