American Soil® - Composting

Sustainable Urban Environments.

Have 2-cubic yards of American Soil® delivered throughout Philly for just $99.

American Soil® is a municipal scale composting process designed to produce soil amendments for a sustainable urban environment. The ingredients are derived from materials that otherwise would have been destined for landfills, such as wood pallets, green waste, organic wastes, clean fill, etc. The product, American Soil®, is sold throughout the United States for use in urban parks, golf courses, office and industrial parks and along highways, as well as for individual residential properties. The product may also be used as intermediate and final cover for surrounding municipal landfills.

On site equipment requirements consist of collection vehicles, a front-end loader, screening plant, watering system and a mechanical bagging system.

Today, American Soil® has the potential to change long abadoned industrial urban landscapes from Brownfields into Greenfields while diverting a significant volume of solid waste from surrounding landfills. Long rows of frequently turned compost take up a significant portion of the site but there is much more to this facility than just composting.

For more information or to order a delivery of American Soil®, call (215) 236-6677.

Community garden at the Mitchell School

The community garden at the Mitchell School employs American Soil compost.

Terra Preta

Mann's fascinating book 1491 about human settlements in the pre-Columbian Americas discusses the Amazonian rain forest where archaeologists and soil scientists found pockets of exceptionally fertile soils that supported large human populations before European diseases wiped out most of the natives. These soils have a high content of charcoal, introduced by the natives to dramatically increase the capacity of the soil to support cultivation. Natives added bio-wastes to the soil and the charcoal adsorbed their nutrients, slowly releasing them for plant growth.

Now soil scientists in the US and other countries are looking into this ancient farming practice and getting dramatic results.

An article in this week's Lancaster Farming, about a presentation by Delaware State University scientists (Mingxin Guo et al.) at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in New Orleans. Claim is that "charcoal derived from heated biomass has an unprecedented ability to improve the fertility of soil, one that surpasses compost, animal manure, and other well-known soil conditioners." The article mentions the finding by archaeologists studying agriculture and soils in the Amazon. The scientists hope that further studies with "bio-char" as they call the materials they used in their experiments will revolutionize farming techniques, world-wide. Another fact mentioned in the article is that the sequestration of CO2 by organic farming is only temporary since the organic matter in organically farmed soils eventually is converted to CO2 by soil microrganisms - compared to the very-long term sequestration of carbon in bio-char.

Click here for more information on the benefits of charcoal-rich soil.