The administration and industry are working in Spain to prevent land degradation and recover the affected land.
An FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report denounces that one third of the world’s soils are degraded and warns of the lack of awareness of soil contamination, despite its direct relationship with human food and health.
“Soil contamination affects the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the health of our ecosystems,” said FAO Assistant Director-General Maria Helena Semedo at the start of the symposium, held this May, where the study was presented. “The potential of soils to cope with pollution is limited, and that is why preventing soil pollution should be a priority worldwide,” she added.
The report, under the title “Soil contamination: a hidden reality”, points out that there are inadequate agricultural practices that degrade soils, such as the abusive use of pesticides and agrochemicals, uncontrolled dumping of waste, fertilizers or wastewater, poor waste treatment practices…
The UN study warns that, although agricultural intensification, industrial production and urbanization continue at a rapid pace, no systematic assessment of the state of soil contamination worldwide has been carried out so far. The analyses that have been carried out have mostly been limited to developed economies, where there is more control and awareness, and the data produced are worrying. For example, in China, 19% of arable land is contaminated with substances such as cadmium, nickel or arsenic, in the European Economic Area and the Western Balkans there are 3 million contaminated sites, and in the United States, 1,300 localities suffer from a high level of pollution.
In a recent article in the newspaper El País, the Spanish Society of Soil Science believes that in Europe there are acceptable advances, but regrets that a directive to protect soils has been discarded, as was done to take care of water, along the lines of forgetting about the land. He also considers that there are various international treaties and conventions, although their effectiveness is limited. In many cases, because the countries do not even have the data or the effective capacity to enforce the regulations in this respect or to treat waste and spills correctly.
Good prospects
In view of this situation, LITOCLEAN, an expert consultancy in soil decontamination, notes that fortunately things have changed and that people are acting more responsibly.
LITOCLEAN’s project manager, Carlos Herrarte, affirms that “things are being done well in this area, although it is clear that everything can be improved”. For Herrarte, although there is no specific European directive on soils, when water pollution is controlled, the soil is automatically being taken care of as well, since if one is altered it affects the other. In addition, Herrarte points out that Spanish legislation has a specific section dedicated to soils and that the Environmental Liability Law covers any damage to the natural environment, which includes soil. In short, according to Herrarte, “actions are being taken to protect and restore soils by the administration and industries in Spain, although it is a topic unknown to most of the public”. LITOCLEAN’s project manager believes that the complexity of both identifying contaminated soil and repairing it makes it difficult to address this issue, so “experts are needed to carry out good control and proper management of soil and water”.
Herrarte recalls that until relatively recently, in the 1950s, soil was used as a landfill and it was considered good environmental practice to bury flammable substances in the ground. Since 2005, with the approval of Royal Decree 9/2005 establishing the list of potentially soil-polluting activities, Spain has made significant progress in this area. So “we are a young industry”, says the project manager of the environmental consultancy expert in soil decontamination, who wants to highlight the progress made in just a few years.
