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ARS Home » Midwest Area » West Lafayette, Indiana » National Soil Erosion Research Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #86183
Title: CO-UTILIZATION OF BY-PRODUCTS FOR SOIL IMPROVEMENT AND EROSION CONTROL

Author
item Norton, Lloyd
item ALTIERI, ROBERTO - PURDUE UNIV., WLAF, IN
item JOHNSTON, CLIFF - PURDUE UNIV., WLAF, IN

Submitted to: Beneficial Co Utilization of Agricultural Municipal & Industrial Byproducts
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/13/1998
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Waste materials pose potentially hazardous and expensive problems for disposal. We studied the mixing of two problematic wastes in order to produce a material with more desirable properties. By combining an organic waste material and an ash from coal burning we produced a material that had many properties similar to soil. The mixture had favorable handling properties and had less unfavorable properties than either starting material separately. The impact of this research is that the co-blending strategy developed will eliminate the need for disposal of two major waste streams and provide a valuable resource for improving agricultural soils and provide an economic incentive to do so.

Technical Abstract: Agriculture has been practiced in the USA for hundreds of years. The general trend has been to produce foodstuffs and send them to towns and villages where most of the population lives. As a largely agrarian society, concentration of wastes was not a big problem because much of the wastes produced were applied back to the land where it came. With the population shift from farms to large cities the waste streams became larger and more concentrated. Disposal of these wastes was generally in landfills. Today with the increased cost of landfilling, less landfill space and regulations restricting what can be filled, land application of many waste streams is becoming more economically desirable. Also given the fact that many of these waste streams contain beneficial organic materials and nutrients that came from the soil to begin with, it may be beneficial to amend the soil with them to improve soil organic carbon content, nutrient status and control erosion. We studied two waste streams from a coal-fired power plant and a pharmaceutical operation in order to develop a co-blending technology. By combining the organic rich industrial sludge (ORIS) with fly and bottom ash from a fluidized bed combustion we were able to reduce adverse properties of both materials and create a soil like material with favorable properties. The impact of this research is that two waste materials with adverse properties can be combined such that they form a beneficial material with better properties than each individually with potential for erosion control.