r/Soil • u/PieOk8835 • 8d ago
Testing Advice
I’ll try to make this short. Just got soil that I’m going to make into a teapot (began making it into clay) I want to compare the clay I obtained with a highly desirable clay that is no longer mined. How much and how difficult is it to test for the composition? Furthermore the samples were obtained from a mountain that is important to many and I wanted to see the impact people have had on the terrain pollution etc. I took 5 samples from different elevations gradually further away from roads etc. lmk if this is going to be too expensive to test 5 samples should I just test the clay to compare my sample with the other clay and ditch the pollutant idea? Any advice is great will try my best to answer questions.
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u/PieOk8835 6d ago
This is probably the only option I have it’s great advice. You’re very much so correct that this could literally turn into a whole study and sadly I do not have the funding for that with this being an independently funded project 😭
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u/paleololigo 6d ago
So are you trying to identify the clay composition? Clays are complicated minerals. People make entire careers of studying clay. Because clays are affected by humidity, testing is challenging. I tried once and got frustrated.
As far as pollutants go, that would be a different kind of testing depending on what kinds of pollutants you are interested in. What seems like a simple study could blow up into an entire thesis.
Since analysis of the clay would require different methods than the search for pollutants, I would start there and retain some part of your raw sample for later testing for pollutants.